Literary reviews by Tim Love.
Warning: Rather than reviews, these are often notes in preparation for reviews that were never finished, or pleas for help with understanding pieces. See Litref Reviews - a rationale for details.

Saturday, 31 August 2024

"The field in winter" by David Clarke (Nine Arches Press, 2023)

Poems from Fenland Reed, Atrium, Under the Radar, etc

Over half the poems have a Shakespearian sonnet structure, both visually - 3 quatrains and a couplet - and conceptually. Imagery and pensées abound -

  • A stork's "Flight is an unfurling -/ the body's grubby parasol/ flung into the heavens" (p.15). I think I've seen this comparison before.
  • When the persona doesn't want to kill a spider, "What is this wish// for riddance without harm?/That feeling finally needs a name" (p.17)
  • Flies - "All summer they'd filled this room, summoned from nothing like nasty thoughts" (p.18) - too abstract, too irrelevant
  • A dead, taut-skinned mouse, fly-infested "birthed these other furious lives -/ it grimaced from the effort" (p.18)
  • "A great yew bucks and thrashes like a bear/ in chains. Cudgelled by blasts of grey air,/ it flashes grim and powerless paws" (p.19)
  • "Hills swell, shift their sodden/ coats about old shoulders, sigh" (p.20)
  • "Now the twilight is made of birds./ They hoard the shadow in these crowns/ and call down night with urgency" (p.22)
  • Because of fog, "This morning there is no world/ beyond the end of our street/ Each house is a model of itself,/ too precise to be believed ... a flock of doves careens - // a whiteness made from whiteness ... a conjuror who shows us/ the nothing in his hand" (p.24
  • More fog - "The road has unlearned the shape I knew" (p.28)
  • "White blades divide the air ... They have the drone of prayer-wheels// which we may hope to turn/ in absence of final answer" (p.32)
  • "An A-road roars beneath,// a hissing flow of metal -/ the movement we have invented/ to not be still with our selves" (p.32)
  • "How we long for labour like this -/ to lose your days in the making of life,/ to honey the air with our joy" re bees, sounds rather twee
  • "Against the mind's hard no, a surge of now" (p.54)
  • "That stump is buried half inside/ a bank ... like an ancient flint harpoon scarred into a whale's thick hide ...it juts -/ a last grey tooth inside a sinner's head " - I don't get the "sinner" idea

No fireworks. Likeable. I like "The Field in Spring" and "Before the Plum Harvest". "The Word box" has the feel of Heaney's "Digging" - a son's words vs a father's tools. It ends with "His tools are idle in the dark. I make/ no sense, but take the measure of grief/ and find my work is always out of true"

Other reviews

  • Jean Atkin (Often in David Clarke’s poems, we are at the edge of being lost, ... where lives (animal and human) are lived on the brink. There is a lot of weather)

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