James Roderick Burns enjoys Judi Sutherlandâs disciplined and penetrating poems
The Ship Ownerâs House
Judi Sutherland
Vane Women Press
ISBN 9781904409199
ÂŁ6.00
At just over thirty five pages, and 29 poems, The Ship Ownerâs House has the feel and heft of a full collection rather than a pamphlet â the work is dense, focused (almost relentlessly so) and tightly arranged, with few soft passages and no poems making up the numbers; everything earns its place. The book is also beautifully produced. Using a clean colour scheme, and pleasing endpapers, it is complemented by a striking cover unusually relevant to the theme of the work: a splendidly rickety house, perched on a thin spar of land and festooned with a roofâs worth of seabirds, lists to an unlikely angle moments before sliding into the Chesapeake Bay.
If this fleeting image of fragility and dislocation wasnât enough, the designer cheekily adds a Renaissance woodcut of a sea monster disappearing past the barcode on the back cover. Not quite Here Be Monsters, but certainly a reminder of the menace and instability lurking in everyday life. In this vein, and a short space, Sutherland achieves a remarkable meditation on the elusive, troubling nature of home.
It begins with a pair of resonant images â âI was neither church nor chapel ⊠I had become workâs gypsy,/ like a wind-blown leafâ (âWhen I was a strangerâ) â and spreads out into almost every poem: the titular ship-ownerâs house is âa galleon on an inland seaâ, â a foreign England; the stormfront edge / of nowhereâ; the narrator of âRelocationâ laments âthe place I thought was home turns out to be / somewhere we were passing throughâ; and almost the only image of surety â âThe Coal-Jewelâ, its âpent / primaeval energy, a trapped flame/left unburned, in a safe placeâ â is only safe because the poet has lifted it up for examination. Like everything else, it will soon be swallowed up, consumed or blown away.
These are not sad poems, or despairing in any way. They simply note the small accretions of feeling with each new location (or perhaps dislocation) that takes place in the poetâs life â the north east, her Scottish roots, the Pennines, London. Images of rootedness lost, the struggle to identify with a new place or circumstance, and inevitable departure pile up page after page, lending the whole volume a rich, melancholy air. It is captured best in a long central poem on perhaps the ultimate human displacement, figured in a drop from the surface down to the underground and what remains unseen, now brought back to life:
At night âŠ
near Stockwell, where an engineer
holds a Tilley lamp â he died in 1950 â
and cowed monks prowl the Jubilee.
The old lady at Monument & Bank
vanishes through padlocked lattice gates.
Thereâs a faceless blonde at Beacontree;
and in Kennington Loop, the clunk of doors
being slammed along an empty train.
(âUnderworldâ)
The poem ranges from the present, âthe night shiftâ keeping âits silent hoursâ, back into the past and returns by way of shared trauma (the Kingâs Cross fire, terrorists with backpacks descending into the tunnels) to a different and contemporary ghost, âthe shade of a young girl, seventeen / just arrived from Eustonâ. It revels in meticulous detail â heat lingering from the Kingâs Cross âflashover, fuelled by sweet wrappers / grease, dust, wooden escalators,/ rat â and human â hairâ â as if to suggest we can best comprehend decades of jarring experience by bringing them close for inspection, but then turns in an unexpected direction. Our modern spectre, âswinging her weekend bag,/ running through Victoriaâ, is perhaps experiencing over and again the loss of a relationship, one whose other half has yet to fall:
Sometimes I see her saying goodbye
to a young man in a winter coat
as he exchanges all his gold for darkness.
It is an image both haunting and reassuring â exchanging gold for darkness cannot be good, but is also completely in tune with the movement of the rest of the book, which welcomes both light and dark as essential components of existence, and does its best to celebrate their interplay before the inevitable shift.
Sutherlandâs use of telling detail is key to this cumulative effect. Sheep with âclean backs narrowed from shearingâ crop, gambol and explore the fields before âthat terrible night in Augustâ when the lambs are âborne away, stumbling, to marketâ (âSheep in Midsummerâ); in âFor Jo Coxâ the MPâs murder is captured with chilling precision â âa death / that someone chooses for you / without permission, while all your future selves collapse / into a bullet holeâ. The details are not always unsettling â Iâm thinking of the delightful canal-side scene in âMilepost on the Trent & Merseyâ, with its âdeep wild green, this gloomy unflow / between square banks of ragged-robin fret/ox-eye and white willowâ â but do insist on the here-and-now particularity of experience, which the larger tide of the book suggests might be all that is afforded us.
Overall, while there is the occasional off-note (unpaired poems on red kites, bells or Newcastle jammed too closely together), The Ship Ownerâs House is a disciplined, penetrating study of what it means to be caught up in the slipstream of life. After every move, each new phase and dislocation, we return to the last line of the bookâs opening: âevery time / what was left behind was love and settlementâ.
What more could we want from a tumbling, uncertain world than that?
London Grip Poetry Review – Judi Sutherland
August 9, 2018 by Michael Bartholomew-Biggs • books, poetry reviews, year 2018 • Tags: books, James Roderick Burns, poetry • 0 Comments
James Roderick Burns enjoys Judi Sutherlandâs disciplined and penetrating poems
At just over thirty five pages, and 29 poems, The Ship Ownerâs House has the feel and heft of a full collection rather than a pamphlet â the work is dense, focused (almost relentlessly so) and tightly arranged, with few soft passages and no poems making up the numbers; everything earns its place. The book is also beautifully produced. Using a clean colour scheme, and pleasing endpapers, it is complemented by a striking cover unusually relevant to the theme of the work: a splendidly rickety house, perched on a thin spar of land and festooned with a roofâs worth of seabirds, lists to an unlikely angle moments before sliding into the Chesapeake Bay.
If this fleeting image of fragility and dislocation wasnât enough, the designer cheekily adds a Renaissance woodcut of a sea monster disappearing past the barcode on the back cover. Not quite Here Be Monsters, but certainly a reminder of the menace and instability lurking in everyday life. In this vein, and a short space, Sutherland achieves a remarkable meditation on the elusive, troubling nature of home.
It begins with a pair of resonant images â âI was neither church nor chapel ⊠I had become workâs gypsy,/ like a wind-blown leafâ (âWhen I was a strangerâ) â and spreads out into almost every poem: the titular ship-ownerâs house is âa galleon on an inland seaâ, â a foreign England; the stormfront edge / of nowhereâ; the narrator of âRelocationâ laments âthe place I thought was home turns out to be / somewhere we were passing throughâ; and almost the only image of surety â âThe Coal-Jewelâ, its âpent / primaeval energy, a trapped flame/left unburned, in a safe placeâ â is only safe because the poet has lifted it up for examination. Like everything else, it will soon be swallowed up, consumed or blown away.
These are not sad poems, or despairing in any way. They simply note the small accretions of feeling with each new location (or perhaps dislocation) that takes place in the poetâs life â the north east, her Scottish roots, the Pennines, London. Images of rootedness lost, the struggle to identify with a new place or circumstance, and inevitable departure pile up page after page, lending the whole volume a rich, melancholy air. It is captured best in a long central poem on perhaps the ultimate human displacement, figured in a drop from the surface down to the underground and what remains unseen, now brought back to life:
The poem ranges from the present, âthe night shiftâ keeping âits silent hoursâ, back into the past and returns by way of shared trauma (the Kingâs Cross fire, terrorists with backpacks descending into the tunnels) to a different and contemporary ghost, âthe shade of a young girl, seventeen / just arrived from Eustonâ. It revels in meticulous detail â heat lingering from the Kingâs Cross âflashover, fuelled by sweet wrappers / grease, dust, wooden escalators,/ rat â and human â hairâ â as if to suggest we can best comprehend decades of jarring experience by bringing them close for inspection, but then turns in an unexpected direction. Our modern spectre, âswinging her weekend bag,/ running through Victoriaâ, is perhaps experiencing over and again the loss of a relationship, one whose other half has yet to fall:
It is an image both haunting and reassuring â exchanging gold for darkness cannot be good, but is also completely in tune with the movement of the rest of the book, which welcomes both light and dark as essential components of existence, and does its best to celebrate their interplay before the inevitable shift.
Sutherlandâs use of telling detail is key to this cumulative effect. Sheep with âclean backs narrowed from shearingâ crop, gambol and explore the fields before âthat terrible night in Augustâ when the lambs are âborne away, stumbling, to marketâ (âSheep in Midsummerâ); in âFor Jo Coxâ the MPâs murder is captured with chilling precision â âa death / that someone chooses for you / without permission, while all your future selves collapse / into a bullet holeâ. The details are not always unsettling â Iâm thinking of the delightful canal-side scene in âMilepost on the Trent & Merseyâ, with its âdeep wild green, this gloomy unflow / between square banks of ragged-robin fret/ox-eye and white willowâ â but do insist on the here-and-now particularity of experience, which the larger tide of the book suggests might be all that is afforded us.
Overall, while there is the occasional off-note (unpaired poems on red kites, bells or Newcastle jammed too closely together), The Ship Ownerâs House is a disciplined, penetrating study of what it means to be caught up in the slipstream of life. After every move, each new phase and dislocation, we return to the last line of the bookâs opening: âevery time / what was left behind was love and settlementâ.
What more could we want from a tumbling, uncertain world than that?