Shanta Acharya takes an in-depth look at a new collection by R V Bailey
A Scrappy Little Harvest
R. V. Bailey
Indigo Dreams Publishing, UK. 2016
ISBN: 978-1-910834-28-2 (pbk)
80 pages ÂŁ8.99
The title of R. V. Baileyâs fifth collection, A Scrappy Little Harvest, can be misleading as her poems explore her preoccupations with large themes â language and meaning, faith and truth, illness and death, love and loss, music and life in the countryside and more. Her themes are universal, but typically presented in a style that is characterised by her insight, wit, humour and understatement. Her tone is considered and quiet, and as we immerse ourselves in her poems, they build slowly but surely a world that enriches us. As Carol Anne Duffy points out, âR.V. Baileyâs poems brim with warmth, decency, humour and intelligence â documents from an England we would all love to live in if we could only find it.â It is a joy to discover such a world in Baileyâs poems, testifying to the generosity of her imagination, the persistence of her struggle to be true to herself and her calling: âSeduced by poetry and people / And the fragile vigorous pastâ (âA poem for Peter Scuphamâ â words for her friend that also reflect her own preferences).
Bailey was born and brought up in Whitley Bay, Northumberland, educated at Cambridge and Oxford; she lives in Gloucestershire. For most of her life she has been an academic, ending her professional career as Deputy Dean of Humanities at the University of the West of England. She has co-edited two major poetry anthologies â A Speaking Silence: Contemporary Quaker Poetry (with Stevie Krayer) and The Book of Love & Loss (with June Hall). With U. A. Fanthorpe she wrote From Me To You, and was the extra voice in Fanthorpeâs poetry readings. Together they read throughout the UK and overseas, jointly led poetry courses and adjudicated poetry competitions.
Her academic rigour honed her appreciation of the written word. In âArchiveâ Bailey speaks of:
The angels of resurrection, who will call
These boxed and dusty back to life and breath,
Finding in letters, in other menâsâ trivia,
The ligaments of everyday love that glows
Lively and bright as ever, and world without end;
That speaks the truth of yesterday and tomorrow;
That will outlast us all.
Love, truth and the power of words are themes that run like underground streams in A Scrappy Little Harvest. The title, provided by Fanthorpe who died in 2009, is a good example of Baileyâs own understated, self-deprecatory style, which is honest, direct and compassionate. Some of the most moving poems in the collection are ones that refer to their relationship. These poems are celebrations, memories of times spent together. What Bailey does not say is as relevant as what she does. In âAfter the partyâ, for example, she captures the moment of realisation that âlike truth / or love it wonât be caught, slips / through the fingers like soap in a bathtub (âConfused.comâ):
A hot night, like this one. A sudden impulse, obeyed.
And half-an-hourâs silence in a car, on top of a hill.
I suppose we felt the need for air, after the party â
To get up high on a hill, from the stifling bowl of the town.
âŚ.
After sitting in silence one of us must have said
I suppose we ought to be getting back, and I drove you home.
Months later, I suppose it dawned on us together
Why weâd gone up the hill that night, and all that we didnât say.
Bailey conjures an accurate image of her world with great perception and delicacy. It is not a world that no longer exists: on the contrary it is utterly real and present. In âBirthday poem for 22 Julyâ she writes:
No gift, however treasure-trove,
Could represent my love;
A makeshift thing it was, although
You did not think so.
Like everything you held
You turned it into gold â
Such alchemy that even I
Was made anew thereby.
We are once again drawn into an intensely private view of love with its magical ability to transform. Her clear-eyed visions of grief equally lead us to re-discover certainties. Experiencing the old afresh is what draws us to her poems. In âDarkâ, for example, Bailey reminds us about the nature of faith, which we have experienced in our own lives:
It is out in the gale,
and alone, and nothing about it is safe.
The poem ends with the reassurance of the redemptive nature of faith and love, and the image used is startling: âLove can find the cracks.â It reminds me of Leonard Cohenâs âThere is a crack in everything. / Thatâs how the light gets in.â
Reading âFlowers in the cemeteryâ is like trespassing on a private conversation between the poet and her beloved:
Ahead of me as always, you were first
To die. But what possessed you, love,
Trusting a feckless gardener like me
To plant the flowers on your grave?
In âPianoâ she tells us how âLike having a piano in the house / We all need someone on whom to practise / Love.â She urges us to âpractise, practise. Thatâs the thing:â
In âMorning prayer C21â the interweaving of a phone call with prayer is very effective indeed. One needs to read the poem in full to appreciate its effect. In âSeven years on: 28.04.16â she writes without any self-pity:
Hearts are breaking all the time;
Thereâs nothing very special about mine.
Grief cries uncomforted, and armies mass
World-wide. And centuries pass.
In âTerminal Wardâ she looks death in the face, the envoy âWho knows you well / is by your side, is / Eager to advise. His name is Death. / He holds your breath.â
Bailey pays rich tributes to her friends and family, providing glimpses into her life and relationships with parents, brother, sister-in-law Joan, her poet-friends Peter Scupham and Fleur Adcock, her publisher Harry Chambers, and her extraordinary boss who tried to teach her how to swim, but despite his best efforts, she never learns. What she does learn is far more valuable and enduring:
I never forgot the Library. Nothing
In the dry years that followed ever matched
Such a lofty and disinterested view of learning.
(Learning in the Library)
A poem about her mother, âMy mother deals with a case of Vestibule Paralysisâ, is very moving indeed, particularly the stanza:
Yet this is how, if we ever do,
We come across God: in his lookalike people,
Casual in high street or hospital, who have
Perfect pitch in the art of being human.
Baileyâs understatement and wit often results in phrases or lines that are intense, charged with the power
of aphorisms:
âOnly the truth-teller sun, / Honest as fire, sets light / To the spidersâ lairsâ (âA song for the sunâ)
âThe goingâs not so easy, but the views are good.â (âCautiousâ)
âWide as a smile, warm as teacake, white as a cloud, / Crammed with stories and puzzles and dreams.
â (âCistern songâ)
âIt is the nature of faith to be / darkâŚ.â (âDarkâ)
âWhen the gods take over / It is best to obeyâ (âFallingâ)
â⌠difference can be dear.â (âHaroldâ)
âWe werenât there to be taught, but / To learn. We worked; or slacked. Perhaps / We tried. I hope at
least we learnt their tact.â (âNotes from the old donsâ)
âIn the little wood you learn the cost, / And why youâre there. And who/ You are.â (âThe little woodâ)
âTime to move on to God.â (âTidyingâ)
âThe inner eye is not amenable / To dissectionâ ("Whoâs Fleur, then?")
Bailey writes with an ironic precision that allows the subject to come through in fragments of human reality. Her clarity and passion, for example, about life in the countryside lingers in the readerâs mind:
Listen to the blackbird:
What he says is urgent. It has to do with food,
And love.
(âElocution lessons from Madame St Johnâ)
Or, her poem âDisquiet in the countrysideâ where â
In the bush, a wren disguised as a leaf;
By the stream, a heron. In the lane
A rabbit washing whiskers. In the field a cow,
Fast asleep, indecorous legs all anyhow,
Innocent, vulnerable, dreamily lost.
âŚ.
The hedgerows observe, invigilate:
Belladonna-the-deadly, dispassionate,
And that triffid of the towpath,
Giant hogweed. Implacable, alert.
In âSong at harvest timeâ, the poem begins and ends with the haunting truth about â
Man, mad for mastery,
Splitting the bone from the blood,
The flower from the field,
The tree from the wood.
The poem âThe readiness is allâ reminds me of Shakespeareâs âripeness is allâ (King Lear, Act 5, Scene 2, âMen must endure / Their going hence even as their coming hither. / Ripeness is all.â).
The last poem in this collection, âWords, words, wordsâ, brings together many of her themes â the inadequacy of language, the redeeming power of love, nature and life in the country. âWords have lost their piquancy, / Theyâre treacherous as weatherâŚâ One is left in no doubt of her vocation.
.
Shanta Acharya, born and educated in Cuttack, Odisha, won a scholarship to Oxford, where she was among the first batch of women admitted to Worcester College in 1979. A recipient of the Violet Vaughan Morgan Fellowship, she was awarded the Doctor of Philosophy for her work on Ralph Waldo Emerson. She was a visiting scholar in the Department of English and American Literature and Languages at Harvard University before working in the asset management industry in London, and has written extensively on the subject. An internationally published poet, critic, reviewer, she is the author of eleven books; her latest is Imagine: New and Selected Poems (HarperCollins, India; 2017). Founder of Poetry in the House, Shanta hosted a series of monthly poetry readings at Lauderdale House in London from 1996 to 2015. She served twice on the board of trustees of the Poetry Society in the UK. www.shantaacharya.com
January 1, 2018 by Michael Bartholomew-Biggs • books, poetry reviews, year 2018 • Tags: books, poetry, Shanta Acharya • 0 Comments
Shanta Acharya takes an in-depth look at a new collection by R V Bailey
The title of R. V. Baileyâs fifth collection, A Scrappy Little Harvest, can be misleading as her poems explore her preoccupations with large themes â language and meaning, faith and truth, illness and death, love and loss, music and life in the countryside and more. Her themes are universal, but typically presented in a style that is characterised by her insight, wit, humour and understatement. Her tone is considered and quiet, and as we immerse ourselves in her poems, they build slowly but surely a world that enriches us. As Carol Anne Duffy points out, âR.V. Baileyâs poems brim with warmth, decency, humour and intelligence â documents from an England we would all love to live in if we could only find it.â It is a joy to discover such a world in Baileyâs poems, testifying to the generosity of her imagination, the persistence of her struggle to be true to herself and her calling: âSeduced by poetry and people / And the fragile vigorous pastâ (âA poem for Peter Scuphamâ â words for her friend that also reflect her own preferences).
Bailey was born and brought up in Whitley Bay, Northumberland, educated at Cambridge and Oxford; she lives in Gloucestershire. For most of her life she has been an academic, ending her professional career as Deputy Dean of Humanities at the University of the West of England. She has co-edited two major poetry anthologies â A Speaking Silence: Contemporary Quaker Poetry (with Stevie Krayer) and The Book of Love & Loss (with June Hall). With U. A. Fanthorpe she wrote From Me To You, and was the extra voice in Fanthorpeâs poetry readings. Together they read throughout the UK and overseas, jointly led poetry courses and adjudicated poetry competitions.
Her academic rigour honed her appreciation of the written word. In âArchiveâ Bailey speaks of:
Love, truth and the power of words are themes that run like underground streams in A Scrappy Little Harvest. The title, provided by Fanthorpe who died in 2009, is a good example of Baileyâs own understated, self-deprecatory style, which is honest, direct and compassionate. Some of the most moving poems in the collection are ones that refer to their relationship. These poems are celebrations, memories of times spent together. What Bailey does not say is as relevant as what she does. In âAfter the partyâ, for example, she captures the moment of realisation that âlike truth / or love it wonât be caught, slips / through the fingers like soap in a bathtub (âConfused.comâ):
Bailey conjures an accurate image of her world with great perception and delicacy. It is not a world that no longer exists: on the contrary it is utterly real and present. In âBirthday poem for 22 Julyâ she writes:
We are once again drawn into an intensely private view of love with its magical ability to transform. Her clear-eyed visions of grief equally lead us to re-discover certainties. Experiencing the old afresh is what draws us to her poems. In âDarkâ, for example, Bailey reminds us about the nature of faith, which we have experienced in our own lives:
The poem ends with the reassurance of the redemptive nature of faith and love, and the image used is startling: âLove can find the cracks.â It reminds me of Leonard Cohenâs âThere is a crack in everything. / Thatâs how the light gets in.â
Reading âFlowers in the cemeteryâ is like trespassing on a private conversation between the poet and her beloved:
In âPianoâ she tells us how âLike having a piano in the house / We all need someone on whom to practise / Love.â She urges us to âpractise, practise. Thatâs the thing:â
In âMorning prayer C21â the interweaving of a phone call with prayer is very effective indeed. One needs to read the poem in full to appreciate its effect. In âSeven years on: 28.04.16â she writes without any self-pity:
In âTerminal Wardâ she looks death in the face, the envoy âWho knows you well / is by your side, is / Eager to advise. His name is Death. / He holds your breath.â
Bailey pays rich tributes to her friends and family, providing glimpses into her life and relationships with parents, brother, sister-in-law Joan, her poet-friends Peter Scupham and Fleur Adcock, her publisher Harry Chambers, and her extraordinary boss who tried to teach her how to swim, but despite his best efforts, she never learns. What she does learn is far more valuable and enduring:
A poem about her mother, âMy mother deals with a case of Vestibule Paralysisâ, is very moving indeed, particularly the stanza:
Bailey writes with an ironic precision that allows the subject to come through in fragments of human reality. Her clarity and passion, for example, about life in the countryside lingers in the readerâs mind:
Or, her poem âDisquiet in the countrysideâ where â
In âSong at harvest timeâ, the poem begins and ends with the haunting truth about â
The poem âThe readiness is allâ reminds me of Shakespeareâs âripeness is allâ (King Lear, Act 5, Scene 2, âMen must endure / Their going hence even as their coming hither. / Ripeness is all.â).
The last poem in this collection, âWords, words, wordsâ, brings together many of her themes â the inadequacy of language, the redeeming power of love, nature and life in the country. âWords have lost their piquancy, / Theyâre treacherous as weatherâŚâ One is left in no doubt of her vocation.
.
Shanta Acharya, born and educated in Cuttack, Odisha, won a scholarship to Oxford, where she was among the first batch of women admitted to Worcester College in 1979. A recipient of the Violet Vaughan Morgan Fellowship, she was awarded the Doctor of Philosophy for her work on Ralph Waldo Emerson. She was a visiting scholar in the Department of English and American Literature and Languages at Harvard University before working in the asset management industry in London, and has written extensively on the subject. An internationally published poet, critic, reviewer, she is the author of eleven books; her latest is Imagine: New and Selected Poems (HarperCollins, India; 2017). Founder of Poetry in the House, Shanta hosted a series of monthly poetry readings at Lauderdale House in London from 1996 to 2015. She served twice on the board of trustees of the Poetry Society in the UK. www.shantaacharya.com