"Old men" by Peter Daniels (Salt, 2024)

Poems from "High Window", "Ink, Sweat & Tears", "London Grip", etc.

There's rhyme (e.g. "Two Uncles"), there are poems where the approach seems to be "When in doubt spell it out" (his most common mode), and poems which leave much to the imagination: I wouldn't call them difficult or obscure - for a start, there's always a surface clarity - but it's unclear what the pieces are "about". There are prose interludes, some as long as a poem -

• In "A Map", sitting at the piano, he most likes looking at the music. There's a plan to go fishing with a friend, but he has no idea about fishing. At 7 he was interested in men but unsure why. Then there's "How what you like moves you into being/ who you've become: he has no idea what/ you might need to do to make it happen.// In the long days before growing up, he can/ spend the whole time drawing a map/ of an elaborate city that will never exist." (p.9)
• "I used to take evening primrose oil, which I thought was good for/ depression till I found it was St John's wort for that,/ and evening primrose is meant for pre-menstrual tension" (p.16)
• "In the shower" is the clearest example of prose set-up and poetic pay-off - the persona has set up their phone so that they can see some one else showering and vice versa. "I've propped it by its leather case, book-like, angled perfectly to open my own body like a book ... while you in your bathroom, somewhere I've never been, open your body ... and we watch each other shower down whatever held us back, and the water takes it away" (p.24)

Also,

• "A Metaphor" begins with "If old men are trees". It reminded me of James Lasdun's "The Locals" though they share no phrases - Lasdun's has "They peopled landscapes casually like trees, ... and their fate, like trees, was seldom in their hands."
• "Empty Boxes" begins the way I often begin poems - "A seashell has been emptied of its owner, but/ a box begins as itself, with a need to enclose". I'd suffocate the poem with o'erleaping imagery about Self. He calmly concludes with "The shoes and sweets/ are elsewhere now, but Pandora's things/ will still be jostling us, they mock our boxes"
• I like "The Laundry" - 16 "abab" stanzas starting with "As I was walking down Higgledy-Piggledy Lane/ I thought I smelt the truth,/ that beauty is the answer,/ and the rest is all uncouth." Shades of James Fenton.
• On p.55 there's "As the earth heaves, the clatter of syllogisms/ where it opens up, logic falls and consequences slide" which is a bit of a surprise because his symbolism is usually much more concrete than this.

In the 4th section of the book is a 13 page poem that I've written about elsewhere - see Happy and Fortunate

"My Tin Watermelon" by Peter Daniels (Salt, 2019)

The language is relaxed.

• "Now the woman downstairs with the dog/ is no longer resident downstairs with her dog,/ there's no longer a dog to own the garden the way dogs do" (start of "Garden Incident")
• "But several years ago, the fig in the garden/ was chopped down to a stump with one side branch/ turned up at ninety degrees by the wall, looking/ like a stovepipe - until today: the tidy (not to say/ obsessive) gardener downstairs has cut off/ that absurdity" (from "The Figs")
• "The other side/ couldn't take trees (phone cables following the kerb), so/ they planted a new row of moderately elegant lamp posts/ along the cable duct, plain and urban" (from "Street Trees")
• "On the thirty-first of October two thousand and eight/ I planted grape hyacinths under the trees" (from "Street Trees")
• "and it isn't/ The London Nobody Knows, there's/ nothing nobody knows, it's always// somebody's secret, but people/ who have discovered places/ suppose them entirely their own" (from "Bunhill Fields Quaker Burial Ground")

Quite often an innocuous start lulls you into a sense of prose until you look up and find yourself in poetry.

Just occasionally there's rhyme - "Winchmore Hill" has aBaCC stanzas, the final line always ending with "can I get back to Winchmore Hill?". The idea of ending each stanza the same way appears in several pieces. Poems like "Bottom drawer" consciously repeat phrases too, less regularly.

Sometimes a poem hits the ground running. "Find me" begins with "'Find me like a banknote in the street,/ a sudden thought,/ find me/ in the spare bedroom: now/ I'm this butterfly,/ red carpet-patterned".

"Zsa Zsa's House" is maybe my favourite. Her mid-century Palm Springs house, well-appointed, is up for sale (with a 'nine-hundred-&-sixty-nine-thousand-dollar' price tag quoted from the Daily Mail. Not $969,000? Maybe). The narrator's mid-Victorian house is near Stoke Newington, and costs more. When the narrator moved from the Midlands, London felt unreal. It ends with "I'm not the Zsa Zsa Gabor of Stoke Newington ... Write your own beautiful house, your own longing, your own anger, what's real to you. Write a part for you, a part for me, a part for Zsa Zsa Gabor".

I like "Roses" too, which is set out as prose.

Other reviews

• Brian Docherty

"A Season in Eden" by Peter Daniels (Gatehouse Press, 2017)

Poems from Ambit, The Interpreter's House, Magma, Poetry London, several of his earlier pamphlets, etc., amongst which are two 1st prizewinners. So it's no surprise that there are many good poems. Those familiar with his readings might expect approachable, conversational poems starting in ordinary surroundings, leading readers along until they realise that they've ended up in a different world. A landscape can become metaphor with a final line. Perhaps "Walk" does this most explicitly here. That's only part of his output though - there are several pieces to tax studious readers - "Seminar for Nomads"? "Finishing touches"? "The Bishop's Move"?

Some passages, if not obscure, take some unwrapping -

• Late April and the trees are opening up where such/ transparent air comes across new greenery to hide in ("Being Cute")
• People sealed their opinions in registered envelopes/ posted to themselves for future quarrels with the past ("The Mediators")
• [the devil]'s bartered your soul for a trinket you'll wear boldly where the philanthropists find their good intentions ("Shrinking Violet")

Identity

"Being English" and "Being Queer" are the most direct treatments of identity, though they come to no tidy conclusion. In the latter there's a hint of identity-nostalgia - "Give us back that word ... our own furtive ways of being something else". "Twilight men of Southend" and "Assessment" consider identity in conditions where the people don't (or feel they don't) belong.

A theme threading through several of the poems is how your choice of self-image affects what others (and hence you) think about yourself, and how the people around you at the time influence the outcome. When it's difficult to express your self authentically (perhaps because you've suppressed such expression for too long), one approach is to change your appearance, hoping that you'll "grown into it". In "Pirate Hat" "I'm off to impersonate myself tonight at the masquerade … Not as anything other than how it is the muses like to dress me up … I show them the dirty old man that I am … in this indoor pleasure garden set up with trees and a classical gazebo, where I ponce about while woman, at the mention of buggery, fondle their boyfriends' buttocks".

A self-image that doesn't reflect your current self may nevertheless be useful. Compare "Being drawn" ("It's hard ... inside this tough new shape ... for my self-desire to look at what I'm like ... I'm the real me ... But I need a frame I don't walk away from") with "Painting the House" ("Making do with the life you have").

More generally, there's a theme of seeking a sense of belonging - a place maybe (a house), or a group of people. If you want to change, then new places, languages and friends help. There's an awareness of the contrast between one person's world - their social group ("Faces") and landscape ("All you need") - and yours. Some poems can easily be read as metaphors for "Life" or Identity. In "The Crater" the persona knows a special place in the landscape that they identify with. They're thinking of inviting someone there. "The Causeway" spatialises the quest for identity, looking for a cause, a way - "limestone from the floor of ages, lifted,/ shaped from the losses that have washed away". Why walk along it? Existentially - because it's there.

God

God seems rather entangled with notions of Identity. I re-read "God's Power" a few times. The poem begins with "Do I have God in mind? Am I talking to him?/ Is he listening? Is that an easy pronoun or a long way round?" I think it is an easy pronoun, and is the long way round - isn't "I" communicating with "I"? I view with suspicion personae who think they're talking to imaginary beings. It gets worse -

God could perhaps part the waves because the waves are part of him, like the ones      Jesus defied with his feet.

Later it's almost as if the "I" identifies with God.

I part the sea a little. I stop to warn myself I could be drowning. There is a life to keep      moving along with.

I like the final image, that life (consciousness?) is like a wave passing though matter (the extra boat confuses me though, as does the extra wave) -

Life a wave met by a passing boat, and like the wave the boat makes as it passes through,      the water continues.

In "God's way" we read that "God creates his worlds/ unalike in circumstance/ but equal, it seems". I don't know what "equal" means here - all multiverses are equally meaningless? I think the poem's saying that the needs which drive some people to believe in God lead others to "fortune-tellers' wigwams, the stock-exchanges, the cathedrals", which seems fair enough.

"Peter" begins with "'Oh Peter, you're so in denial,' says Jesus,/ 'And you with the keys to the kingdom/ clipped to your belt". It's tempting to read "Peter" as the poet, and the keys as gay code (along with the keys in "Painting the house"?). Having re-read Matthew 26:34 though, I still don't know what the "it" in the poem's final line refers to.

What are we supposed to make of the persona in "Painting the house" when they think "But where's my reward, and where's my soul,/ and where's the reason for living,/ and I'd like to know how they value me/ and what will they say in heaven?". Naive? I guess the same applies for "God has something special in mind for me, he has a plan, my own special destiny" in the title poem, and "God might grieve when I die - how I would like to think so" in "God's power". What is this God? Well, at the very least it's "all that exists" (p.28), a definition exploited elsewhere -

Each clod. Each continent. Each planet. Elements of our own, but scattered - siblings, lovers - hands unable to combine, until they find their moment to respond across the distances, across the closeness. Like us, mushrooms have raised their heads out of the breeding earth (p.5)

"God's Promises" doesn't help.

The Rest

There's little Formalist poetry - "Painting the house" has an xaxaxa rhyme scheme. "A Season in Eden" is aaa, the first lines of the stanzas in "Prisoner" have mid-line rhymes with the end-rhymes, and "Being English" uses regular repetition.

He can be glass-half-empty - remorselessly so in "Half Year" where "the summer's already weary at the first of July … pretty scarlet poppies give an edge of blood to the dull fields. … Anyone got some shears for a wreath? The privet is gathering over us".

"Hat and Pan" and "A Clockwork Uncle" are my favourites, both intersplicing ideas. The former includes circus acts, cooking, hats and being restricted by a job. It shouldn't work, but it does for me. The latter (whose title is beyond me) juggles thoughts about happy families, families in fairy tales, the persona's own family in the past, and walking the dog. I like "Pirate Hat", "Walk", "Out There", "Aviation Fuel". I'm less keen on "Regulars" and "Painting the House". "2nd October" and "Being English" feel like fillers, and I don't get any of the "I" to "V" sequence of epigrams that are scattered through the book.

Other reviews

• Brian Docherty (As the title implies, the book moves through seasons, literal, personal, and emotional, covering a notional year)

"Counting Eggs" by Peter Daniels (Mulfran Press, 2012)

Well, I know I go on about poets publishing books before they have enough material, but this, Peter Daniel's first book, has taken over 20 years to assemble. Not that he's been silent all that while - 5 pamphlets (he's won the Poetry Business competition twice) and a TLS competition winner attest to that. The blurbs are from Carol Rumens, Philip Gross and Moniza Alvi.

The poetry is unostentatious, personal without being intimate. It's never pretentious - equally it's often not about the immediate subject matter, nor do the endings always provide the key. It's easy to believe that all the poems contain something he's observed though the observations don't inevitably lead to some insight about love or death; they're allowed to developed their own extra meanings. There's little form (except in the translations). "Therese" and "Family" are in xaxa quadrains. "Flying" and "The Experts" are in couplets whose second-line endings have something in common. Some poems (e.g. "Housework") are lighter than others but they're no less well written.

There are many links between successive poems, and some themed sequences. The first few poems are about death.

• "The Pump" begins "After piped water, the pump becomes redundant,/ the handle chained down at the side: at rest, if you like", ending with "and at last/ she could find time to become somebody's grandmother./ Somebody look at the pump and think of her."
• In "The Jar", the persona opens a new jar of jam and a creature crawls out. The persona traps the creature back in so that he can return the jar and get a refund, but in doing so kills the creature.
• In "Mice" the persona clears 2 buckets that have dead mice in them - one bucket dry, one under a hand-pump, containing water. The persona's dreams involved drowned mice, so he remembers to cover up the water bucket but not the dry one, even though he thinks the mice in it might have started eating each other.
• "Insects" begins with "Insects, you know, have no/ genuine existence"

For a few poems there's a Flying theme, then Mountains, then America. I like "Mall of Mammoths" - "his body is now a dark brown leather/ like my second-hand flying jacket/ with several additional sleeves". Then Italy and London feature (I like "Shoreditch Orchid") , then there are poems about changes triggered by war or the seasons (I like "Mr Luczinski Takes a Tram"), then Trains feature (I like "The Special"). A few poems about Preservation/Containment follow (I like "The Monkey of Forgetting") which segues into a phase where religious terms are used ("Natural History Museum" keeps us on our toes - another Mammoth poem). In "At the Forest Pool" there's a speaking pool in a wood. There are lots of buses too. "In the Deep" becomes more serious - "My element chooses me./ I let the bucket lift me up/ and out from the deep watery murk, my hemlock".

Towards the end of the book there's a "Roots" section. I like "St Katherine's Dock" which ends "Refugees from pogroms, eight to a room./ Little black fishes gathering round the piers". In "Tchotches" household objects can only partly evoke a past - a Russian nesting doll "opens up for two generations,/ then one more, blank and unforthcoming". "Liverpool St" is neat, one of a few poems about couples, or complimentary parts of an individual ("Splendour" is wild).

Other reviews

• Carol Rumen's poem of the week (Guardian)
• Phoebe Powers
• David Cooke (Ink, Sweat & Tears)
• Kim Morrissey (London grip)
• James Sutherland-Smith (Bow-Wow Shop)

"Mr Luczinski Makes a Move" by Peter Daniels (HappenStance, 2011)

A 24-page pamphlet with winning poems from TLS, Ledbury and Ver Poets competitions as well as poems from "The Rialto", "Thumbscrew", etc - another pamphlet whose density and variety of goodies puts some bloated books to shame. "The Pump" is only the second poem but reading it I already felt in safe hands. It begins

After the piped water, the pump becomes redundant, the handle chained down at the side - at rest, if you like. The pump turns into 'what we used to have'

The pump may be at rest, but it doesn't die - from being functional, it becomes a back-up, then historical, ornamental, then a garden feature painted green, then white with black text. "Pump"="Art"? At the end though, "the pump can stand for ... the kitchen girl" who cranked until the water appeared

and at last she could find time to become somebody's grandmother. Somebody look at the pump and think of her.

The next 2 poems, "Windfalls" and "At the forest pool" (deep image?!), are in different styles, and similarly successful. This is the kind of non-trivial variety I welcome - short or long sentences; deep image or social observation; traditional or invented symbols. There's always a persona or 2 though (the power of witness), few artifices, and a tendency towards the urban. There's lots of rust, buses and streets, candles, forests, dust and water, wind and thunder, spiders and anger - one can nearly daisy-chain the poems using these symbols as links.

"Policeman, Stoke Newington", "River", "All you need" and "Hat and Pan" are amongst the poems involving 2 personae interacting, sometimes mediated by a third object. "The naked city" and "The retreat" involve a persona trying to engage with a wider context (retreating into the open) but never a life-less one. "Out there" combines these themes - a persona on the retreat meets another (itself?) on the way back. Seems like they both feel they're on the same journey.

There's a "tell it slant" approach to some of the central images, with riddling, "What am I?" titles.

• "River" begins

  My nerves have decided it was your fault. It's dark, and I resent that, but I'll be the moon, you be the pull of the current.

  With the title in mind, a reader might think that the early "your" refers to the river, or that it's the river that's dark. Soon though "The river looks cold but alive", making "you" into an Other. At the end the persona's on the bank at night - "I'm alone with this mess in the mud ... The water is always moving downwards and now/ I have as long as I want to settle my fear of the river". The river seems to have taken on its traditional time/fate role, the earlier "current" becomes more temporal as does the persona's need to "settle". The "The houses/are darkened for their generous wet dreams" phrase puzzles me though. And why is the "dark" resented? Another symbol of passing time?
• "The naked city" begins "Open your heart and harden your ego to disillusion". Again, if one pre-emptively tries to decode the title, "your" might refer to the city, but the poem continues "pose in the nude on the height of the doric frontage" - it's "the city of naked souls", an attempt to influence the city/society.
• "The monkey of forgetting" is about a monkey rummaging though the past. What does the monkey represent? Another person? An aspect of the persona? A mischevious minor god? Or maybe reviewers. The final stanza is

  Hard to tell how much he means to it to hurt. Blame it on the monkey's own sense of loss, the babyhood of clinging to the hard wire breast

  I presume the allusion's to the behavioural experiments on baby chimps where their mother was replaced by a bottle strapped in a flannel, but what/who is forgetting? Or is all the forgetting in the past?

Other reviews

• Sphinx
• Donald Gardner (Horizon Review)