River Wolton

Leap

64 pp., Smith/Doorstop, £9.95

The Anglo-French littérateur, Denis Saurat, once wrote that ‘life is that which leaps’, and it was this phrase one that recurred in my mind throughout reading River Wolton’s spirited first collection Leap. Wolton’s is a poetry deeply attuned to social awareness and vigilantly aware of injustice wherever it might manifest itself, making her work both inclusive and incisive – words always teeming on the page, as if the poem has a sentience all its own.

There seem to be two major strands weaving these poems into a journey not only of selfhood, but also of nationhood set against and disrupted by global conflict. Here we see poems of grief for the poet’s parents, such as ‘Ashes’, which conjures up other poems of mourning such as Thom Gunn’s ‘Ash’ and Andrew Young’s ‘Passing the Graveyard’. Its stanzas are elegiac:

We launched him in a cardboard boat, without permission,

headlong into choppy waves. March gusts whirled

the fine grit under my collar, up my nose. I sneezed

and brushed my coat. Too close, as when, adrift and frail

he thought I was my mother, pulling back the sheet

aren’t you coming to bed now? Aren’t you getting in?

Such tender poems are set against poems with a broader focus,  from those dealing with the plight of refugees from war-torn countries (‘Everything I Know about War’ and ‘Witness’), to a sequence set in Israel and the West Bank. This sequence is fraught with racial tension. Beyond the horror of still-born babies at Israeli army checkpoints (in ‘Statistics’) and the hopelessness of ambulances trying to save the dying  (in ‘Etiquette’), we see the whole rancour of the situation reduced to a subtle but profoundly resonant final image of a West Bank donkey ‘tied to a fence’ (in ‘The Visit’), reducing years of war and bloodshed to the sight of something stubborn in fetters.

The late, great Adrian Mitchell has praised Wolton’s work for its twin love of people and the English language. For Wolton, these two concerns are meshed together in her poetry, and are a fact of life for a percipient ‘witness’ – or poet – living in the UK. These poems seem to be expounding a different, newer sense of Englishness set against a time when the Union Jack has made an awkward return and when the local MP urges asylum-seekers (who are soon to be deported) to ‘Go quietly’ in ‘Witness’. ‘Sabir’ brings to our attention a young refugee who has risked his life to get to the UK and in the process seen his identity in flames –  only to be turned away:

As I walk up the path, into the English

autumn light and the warning glare

of a search-vessel out on the water.

Wolton re-defines the role and purpose of the poet in the UK in this last sequence of poems, especially when she becomes the immigrant in the West Bank, giving us a palpable sense of what people like Sabir are trying desperately to escape from. In ‘Departures 4:30 A.M.’ Wolton becomes the alien, under scrutiny and endless questioning as she must justify her reason for visiting:

What was the purpose of your visit to Israel?

Where did you stay? Did you stay there all the time?

Do you have any friends or family here? Did you come alone?

Did you visit any private houses? What is your profession?

As a poet, Wolton has asked herself similar questions all her life, albeit in a different and less draconian way. The first half of the collection is centred on personal loss of family, but it is also an exploration of her own belonging within the UK. Many of these poems show a keen interest in how exact map co-ordinates and the precise names of roads can show both geographical and ontological movement. In ‘You Are Here’, the speaker states that:

Despite my well-worn maps

we’re here, wherever that may be

and here is moving with us as we go.

Wolton’s sense of place and belonging is a fluid one, but these early poems follow her growing up: from school memories and the travails of adolescence to moving vignettes of relationships and domestic life, as in ‘Summer ‘76’ and ‘Architecture’, where the speaker remembers how her mother rubbed ‘my back in small firm circles like a child’. These first poems carry with them a poignant sense of ease and erstwhile happiness, and the sun seems to drench some of these passages – before shifting key into the more dirge-like centre of the book where, in ‘The Underground Orchestra’, the speaker must select CDs to be played at the funeral of a parent, concluding that ‘we’re parentless, empty of reference points’. In the title poem ‘Leap’, the poet evokes the image of her father in old age watching squirrels in his garden and here we see the slow rise of the red squirrel against its adversary, the grey. A key poem is the neologistically titled ‘Misanthrophile’ which juggles a sense of frustration with humans and their habits against a deep-seated love for people, because ‘their bottom-line / is wanting light and fuel’.

The life-blood of this collection is a love of life in all forms, and of people and their movements within time, space and place – from the territorial war-fare of red and grey squirrels to the life-threatening journeys refugees are forced to take. Wolton begins with the springboard of her own life and background and shows us – as the book unfolds like a spiritual and physical quest – her own sense of belonging, history and ultimately bereavement. In the final poems of the book, she highlights the plight of those who have all of these things, even their identities, denied, destroyed or oppressed. She begins as a traditional elegist and a voice of home, and becomes a celebrant of life, a campaigner for those to whom loss, bereavement, displacement and going unheard are daily realities. Moniza Alvi is entirely right to say these are ‘necessary’ poems, to which should be added that they are also finely crafted and controlled, as well as deftly and memorably written.  

Richie McCaffery, born in Newcastle in 1986, is a Carnegie scholar at the University of Glasgow researching the Scottish poets of World War Two towards a PhD in Scottish Literature. His first collection of poetry was recently published by HappenStance Press, entitled Spinning Plates. He has been both a recipient of an Edwin Morgan Travel Bursary and a Hawthornden Fellowship, and in August 2012 will take up a writer's retreat at Brownsbank Cottage in Biggar. His poems have appeared in magazines such as The Rialto, Stand and The Reader as well as the anthologies Lung Jazz and The Best British Poetry 2012. He has reviewed for The Edinburgh Review.

Eds. Martha Sprackland and Andrew McMillan

Cake 3: Key Lime

58 pp., £5.00

The third issue of Cake, 'Key Lime', is a take-no-prisoners affair. It comes in at fewer than sixty pages – but among the short poems packing out most of the issue, some punch above their weight, while the critical content at the end ranges from the thoughtful to the enjoyably catty (Wes Brown flattening The Slap: “Other paradoxes are not drawn with great nuance. Or any nuance”). Guest editor, Mandy Coe, and Martha Sprackland, the poetry editor, open the issue in a spirit of critical urgency, exploring the place of poetry – and by extension of the magazine – in austere times. Sprackland argues in her editorial that “The micropoem is a form of concision, of self-control, and yet of ambiguity”, and this is certainly true of poems like Abegail Morley's 'Too Warm', which converts the sheer strangeness in learning of a death into this elegant and half-surreal image:

It's not your words, not what your hands say,

but how you stare as if you see him ascending,

his arms upturned, surprise on his face.

Morley's lines give a concrete visual shape to the reconfiguration of the known world that death demands, and the poem in full feels 'bigger' than its twelve lines. Simon Barraclough's two contributions are also accomplished: 'Roman Heart' and 'Tapestry Heart' are both just a few lines long, and share a single page in the magazine, but Barraclough – whose first collection, like Morley's, got a nod from the Forward Prize – does well what a lot of people do badly. Both poems turn on wordplay and are rather more than the bagatelles they appear to be at first glance. 'Roman Heart' is wry, humorous and self-consuming:

Don't play with your words.

Don't speak with your heart full.

I found her weeping beneath tartarughe.

Her heart was artichoked.

She didn't know how to prepare,

so would pare and pare and pare

until the artichoke wasn't there.

To enjoy the complete scope of Barraclough's 'Roman' game, the poem needs to be read in full, and the same is true of 'Tapestry Heart', which in its floating, moth-eaten form mimics the tapestry in question to good effect.

Helen Ivory’s poems, accompanied by an authorial commentary, constitute the issue's central feature. Ivory's discussion of her work explores the influence of altered states, both natural and sought-out (such as dreaming or the use of Ouija board), on the poetic consciousness. A visual artist by training, she also considers the ways in which her two disciplines intertwine in practice, a reading which helps to bring out the visuality of the three poems included here. She cannot, she says, write from her own sculptures, though others can, “because it feels to me that I have already made the poem”. The object-focused poems showcased here in Cake ('Jumble Sale', 'What the Bed Said' and 'My Grandmother's Ghost') are eerie affairs animated by suppressed currents of feeling and violence. The end of 'My Grandmother's Ghost' offers an especially unsettling moment in its portrait of a half-freed, half-fractured ghost agoraphobic:

My grandmother's ghost

plays boogie-woogie

on an out of tune piano in the yard.

Without gloves,

her hands are shelled crabs

scuttling up and then down the keys.

Some of the stronger poems in Cake come, unsurprisingly, from established voices, but the editors are committed to new writing, and the youngest contributors are at times very promising. Joe Dresner's 'God' ends in a tiny, wonderfully aural and rhythmic moment of threat against the snail which is the poem's subject:

It's the undeniable violence which

underpins everything,

the chilling thresh

of the thrush's neck.

I'm in half a mind, snail. Half a mind.

Sarah Jayne Kipling's 'Growing Pains' funnels the inarticulate sorrows of growth into an exchange of too-small shoes for larger ones, concluding on an effective, faux-naïf note with this address to the outgrown: “I keep your laces in an angler's knot / Around my bedpost to catch the too-big dreams”. The piquant touch of those “too-big dreams” retrospectively glosses some of the poem's melancholy, hinting at ineluctable disappointments, but avoiding melodrama. The poem that follows, Jo Brandon's “It's like”, is an extravagant piece, with something of the image-driven energy found in Sylvia Plath's 'Cut', here played out in a more cheerful and contemporary tone: “blob of hair mousse / spilt milk on black tiles”.

One of the pleasures of this issue of Cake is the jostling together of very different poems like these. Andrew McMillan, the features editor, describes the magazine's contents “rub[bing] up against each other”, and this relaxed, curiosity-shop approach creates a reading experience that entails frequent readjustments of expectation. After Jo Brandon's effervescent poem are two slow-paced, lyrical contributions from Ron Scowcroft (the most beautiful lines coming in 'Dolphin Watch': “the curve and the curve and the curve / of dolphins hefting the arc of the bay”), while elsewhere in the issue, short reviews come in highly varied guises. McMillan's reflective reading of Orchids, by J. T. Walsh, certainly made me want to buy the pamphlet in question, and Joe Dresner is having unmistakable fun in his review of Muldoon's Maggot, a collection which, he suggests, makes something of a speciality of “drawing out the rot in erotic”. This review is accompanied by Naomi Smith’s enjoyably horrible illustration – the maggots convincing enough to render these pages unsuitable for reading at meal-times.

A short but engaging piece by Helen Mort, 'Linger', concludes the issue. This brief personal essay exemplifies the art of writing accessibly and thoughtfully about creative praxis: Mort reflects on the functions of negation in poetry, both as a categorical mode and as a technique with specific appeal to her as a writer. “The difficulty of saying everything I want to say is almost oppressive,” she observes, “I think that's why it's sometimes easier to allude to the negative world”. Although this is not a new theme – in Burnt Norton, for instance, words “slip, slide, perish, / Decay with imprecision”, and in doing so prompt a recourse to negation – Mort enlivens the topic with well-chosen quotations from a variety of poems, and expresses herself with brevity and real vividness. This skill reflects Mort's strengths as a poet, which Mark Burns Cassell pins down, earlier in this issue of Cake, in his review of A Pint for the Ghost: “[Mort] writes with a real gift for distilling whole moods and images into the fewest words”. The critical writing in Cake is as a rule perceptive and discriminating, but it is Mort's piece that seems to me particularly memorable, while several strong poems – and many with good moments – also make this a magazine worth buying.

Chloe Stopa-Hunt is poetry reviews editor of The Cadaverine and a senior editor at The Oxonian Review. She has contributed reviews and review-articles to Poetry Matters, Asymptote, Mslexia, and Poetry Review, and her poems have appeared in magazines, pamphlets and anthologies.