"Spillway" by Ian Pople (Carcanet, 2022)

A "New and Selected" with poems from Antagonish Review, Manchester Review, The North, PN Review, Poetry, Stand, etc. There are about 60 pages of new material - about a third of the book.

It's not my type of poetry. These are parts of a thoughtful piece which goes on for many pages - way beyond my attention span.

• "In the photograph,// she neither looks/ nor does not/ at the camera./ She went away/ and there was nothing" (p.51)
• "Without the doll's house/ which her father made,/ which was her house/ and beyond it, is/ the darkness, unreturned" (p.59)
• "Samuel Palmer knew/ how each leaf lies/ clear of the next/ in wind-held sun/ where hover flies float,// the stark implications/ of trees at hand, their/ canopy's calm belief/ in time - this week/ and the week after next" (p.62)

Quite often he follows up a simile I like with one that's baffling. Here are more things I don't get -

• The 10-lined "Owl" begins with "Stubby Venus on stubby-fingered wind,/ that flapped above a childhood park,/ a rail to somersault on over gravel." Eh? "In memoriam Dupree Bolton" also mentions owls - "sluggish/ as if not confident, an aphorist// of predation. Its flat wide face/ divided about the beak" which makes more sense.
• One of "Three Bagatelles" is "She grabbed my hand as we headed/ off on the path above the sea, by the/ commemoration bench for one whose/ favourite place it was to sit and watch"
• "Our book" begins with "Your shadow moving on in front/ as if upon a lead, the lights quietly// going down, with the drip of reason/ onto ritual"
• "Breathing is often outside the face,/ just out of reach of the mouth;// like gaze which is, itself, memory,/ like a shadow which falls across/ a darkened doorway" (p.140)
• "Continuation is both waiting/ and surprise, as if he stood to see// both beermats and moorland heather/ in the wall mirror of the pub" (p.140)
• "And when the map chest// was tidy and relocked, and when/ the church was spilled as if its flesh// were sand, the rain came over the hill, like water blown over the heel// of my hand, the hand that was no good/ there, and no good anywhere else." (p.144)
• "like/ the words you walked among,// one foot stopping, then the/ other foot stopping, like// the rain that later runs down/ windows of an accelerating train" (p.181)
• "Certainly a wheel may need centering,// so brake lights shine at the cross roads." (p.186)

I like "The same condemnation".

Other reviews

• Jonathan Timbers (Pople is a Christian existential poet ... In his philosophy, God is transcendant rather than imminent. There is no way to Him other than through acceptance. This creates a dilemma for a Christian poet like Pople whose subjects are meticulously observed. Throughout Pople’s work there is a tension between the seen and the unseen.)