POETRY

New Poetry – a discussion of The Brink by Jacob Polley

Meeting chaired by Janet Cunliffe-Jones

Led by David Skidmore

Poetry Book Society Member

26 January 2005

David Skidmore began by saying that he was interested in the discussion of contemporary poetry, and hoped to found a group that could meet regularly.

Jacob Polley was born in Carlisle, in 1975. David Skidmore met him on a creative writing course, where, as an invited reader, Polley read some of his then unpublished poems. Polley has already won a BBC/Arts Council award, and has been selected as one of twenty ‘New Generation Poets’ by the Poetry Book Society, which made The Brink its choice for winter 2003. It is quite an achievement to have a collection of poems published before you are thirty.

Skidmore described him as a talented young poet, who uses vivid imagery. His work is often concerned with everyday things, but shows an unexpected twist. It has a distinct regional feel, and a sense of place, without being narrowly provincial.

Five volunteers, besides Skidmore himself had selected and prepared a poem. Each would read the poem aloud, say a bit about it, and then read it again, before it was discussed by the audience. (Copies of all these poems were available for those who had not got books)

David Skidmore began by reading ‘Moving House’. He noted that the poem is phrased like a set of instructions – the sort that usually describe how something is put together. Here, however, a house is being taken apart, and the title is a play on words, as a phrase used when we move from one house to another here describes the house itself being moved. The unexpected language helps the reader to explore the sometimes difficult emotions of moving house. Skidmore drew attention to the imperative verbs at the beginning of the first three verses, ‘bubble-wrap’, ‘flat-pack’, familiar, contemporary words, but not gimmicky. He pointed out variations in tone, from the comic to the bleak or sinister, read the poem a second time, and then asked for audience comment.

There was general agreement as to the vividness of the imagery. One listener found the poem ‘more clever than poignant’ – saying she was blinded by the cleverness. Several preferred to call it witty. The words used were generally simple and familiar, yet could contain layers of meaning. It was noticed that the whole of the last 18 lines was a single sentence, requiring careful reading to find the main verb, although it was well phrased, and made perfect sense. Something topsy-turvey in the world was described in a deadpan tone.

Janet Cunliffe-Jones then read ‘Attic’. She chose this poem because it was not all on the surface, and she liked its vivid imagery – some comic, some not. It was a love poem – there was a ‘we’ who ‘lie a little longer, barefoot, loose-haired, unaware’. She was reminded of Donne’s ‘The Sunne Rising’, in which the poet says the world can get on with its business, as long as it leaves him and his lover alone together. Again, in the last stanza of ‘Attic’ Polley says, ‘Let the day go to waste in this little room... where we can look out from bed/at the roofs and the moon.’ Donne’s ‘The Good Morrow’ describes lovers who ‘make this little room an everywhere’. Janet said it took two readings before these parallels had struck her, but she felt Polley was consciously refashioning fairly well-known poems to express a common experience in more modern terms. She also liked the stanza form and noticed the amount of subtle rhyme, half rhyme and assonance, which made the poem pleasing to the ear. After a second reading, the group agreed that the poem had a gently humorous and lyrical quality. The reference to grocers and Quakers in verse two was questioned. They seem to represent the outside world (commercial and spiritual?) like Donne’s ‘late schoolboys and sour prentices’. Some one noted that the poem moves from dawn to dusk; and that ‘we’ is only used directly in the penultimate line. It was agreed that the poem repays being read several times.

Chris Sylvester then read ‘Room’, a shorter poem. She felt it had a distinctly northern tone, and looked perhaps two generations back when families were large, and food and clothes in short supply. She felt there was a tone of acceptance, of welcome, perhaps, of a new baby in a large family; she was puzzled by the word ‘but’ in the last line. Discussion focussed a good deal on the poem’s probably deliberate ambiguity. One listener found it bleak; Chris did not agree, but saw the implied repetition of the title word, ‘Room’ at the beginning of each verse as suggesting there will always be room for one more, though the soup gets thinner, the plate emptier. Some felt it a strange poem for a young man to write, but family memories of hard times do linger. Skidmore pointed out that the poem, in its terseness, is something of a riddle.

Pat Adleman read ‘The Boast’, a poem about snow on the northern fells. She chose this poem from several possibilities because it was challenging. Once again, there was ambiguity, and personification. ‘The fells dream ...’ The tone is conversational, musing. There is humour, verging on the surreal, as in stanzas three and four elderly people in bright anoraks are frozen into blocks of ice. Pat’s reading illustrated the need for careful attention to Polley’s grammar and punctuation, as meaning can be teased out. The question, ‘Life, death?’ hangs at the end of a stanza, and almost seems to imply that there is no firm boundary between the two. There are riveting visual images, snow in a graveyard, with only the trumpets of the angels to be seen, ‘a crow, spilling its wings/ from its own inkstand’, sheep, ‘dreadlocked with frost’. The last stanza, ‘Beyond the crisply folded hills ...’ was discussed, and once again the word ‘ambiguous’ was used. Is the ‘boast’ of the title that snow here is harder than anywhere else? Pat pointed out the subtle use of alliteration and assonance, with one full rhyme in the last stanza.

Judith Young then read her choice, ‘Salmonary’. She had chosen this because she hates cooking fish, and loves books, and was fascinated by the way the poet describes the cooking and eating of a salmon, using the vocabulary of an antiquarian bookseller. There was some discussion of the title, which perhaps has echoes of ‘breviary’, and ‘bestiary’. Judith pointed out that the turning point of the poem comes in stanza six, where the persona moves from cooking to sharing the salmon with another person, using for once a different image. The skill of the way the extended metaphor was worked out without being laboured was discussed and appreciated.

Finally, Sue Boyle read ‘The Kingdom of Sediment’, the last, and, just, the longest poem in the book. She said she had offered to talk about this poem because she found it problematical – and had then wondered what she had taken on, but found it a wonderful poem. She passed quickly over the vivid and visual imagery, as these features had been noted already. In this, however, there was a high level of horror. Sue felt that, as in some of the other poems we’d explored, there was a precise and pivotal point at which it changes direction and tone. In the first two stanzas we are in a familiar world of boys, playing in a northern landscape; they find an old door, and use it as a raft, but it becomes a door to an underworld, and ‘pitches’ the writer into the ‘kingdom of sediment’. This is a fantasy world, a topsy-turvey world, yet also a world of the dead. There are images, which balance the images of the ordinary world in the first half of the poem. The final stanza has an extraordinary image of a (dead?) kingfisher fledgling. The poem seems to wipe out or blur the boundary between life and death, as was noticed in ‘The Boast’. In discussion, the poem was very generally admired; it was found intriguing, magical, and sinister. Though at one point it says, ‘I was led and drowned’, it was not felt to be in any literal way about a drowned boy, but a boy who has become, in some mythic way, watery, or water itself, though he is still drawn to the world above. Parallels were seen to Alice in Wonderland, The Water Babies, and The Tempest.

The way this evening was structured seems to have been a very successful way of introducing an audience to a new poet, and, in this case, one who was very much appreciated and admired.

Jacob Polley. The Brink (Picador, 2003)