Emma Lee picks out some highlights from the new collection by Ian House
Nothing’s Lost
Ian House
Two Rivers Press
ISBN 9781090747005
48pp £8.95
Ian House has a clinical eye for detail combined with an ability to use language as a tool to draw a reader’s attention to the detail he is focusing on. In “Peregrine”
Not for her the hawk’s swerve
to the tossed gobbet. She’ll biff
a rook like a bullet, grab and rip
like a machine, strip life
to the bone, like poetry.
He thrills to that truthfulness,
its cold, transparent tarn; longs
for her life of pounce and gorge,
of lazing and killing; worships
one untrammelled by love or pity
The falconer’s awe of his bird’s ability to analyse her situation, filtering out extraneous detail and concentrate directly on her kill is likened to the level of determination needed to write a poem, paring language down to what matters and perhaps kill a favoured phrase that doesn’t fit. The resulting poem is taut and fully flexed. However, Ian House does retain empathy, in “Gaunt” (complete poem),
When I learnt the word, I’d known for years what it meant,
my dead, angular grandmother on the front-room wall,
a grey woman in a grey dress among grey hollyhocks,
grudging daylight. Was she throttling the cat?
Her right hand was a diagram in our Family Doctor,
her lips clenched like a mousetrap. This
was what mothers turned into. Sundays,
I imagined, she knelt in a cold church.
Mondays she scrubbed her men’s collars. Tuesdays
she made rissoles from gristle. Under that eye
balloons were foolishness, rummy a sin.
Greyness hung in the kitchen, flowed up the stairs.
I was told later what flowered in her
unknown, that she never complained,
that the word for her hair was ‘sparse.’
The repetition of “grey” seems obvious but combined with the “cold church” (probably hewn from grey stone) and the work of scrubbing and trying to make edible meals from leftovers combine to build a picture of a joyless life of work and routine. Then readers learn, as the poet did, that, towards the end, she’d lived a life in a struggle against cancer. Her earlier vigilance against foolishness and joy makes sense. An unsympathetic person is presented with compassion. A mix of nature and human mix in a poem based on a character from Anton Chekov’s “The Seagull”, in “Boris Aleksyeevich Trigorin”
His teeth gleam in the spotlight. He’s a pike
hovering in weeds for the hair-triggered dart
and strong-jawed snap. And the prey,
juggled and swivelled into the head-first,
mouth-splitting gulp isn’t cloud or girl.
He says he devours his life with his fictions.
He’s a killing machine that’s turned on itself.
Ian House shows how material from anywhere can be a potential poem, providing that material is moulded and crafted with exacting language, an ear for sound and rhythm and a sizeable drop of compassion.
.
Emma Lee’s poetry collection Yellow Torchlight and the Blues is available from Original Plus. She blogs at http://emmalee1.wordpress.com and also reviews for The Journal, Elsewhere and Sabotage Reviews.
Emma Lee picks out some highlights from the new collection by Ian House
Nothing’s Lost
Ian House
Two Rivers Press
ISBN 9781090747005
48pp £8.95
Ian House has a clinical eye for detail combined with an ability to use language as a tool to draw a reader’s attention to the detail he is focusing on. In “Peregrine”
Not for her the hawk’s swerve
to the tossed gobbet. She’ll biff
a rook like a bullet, grab and rip
like a machine, strip life
to the bone, like poetry.
He thrills to that truthfulness,
its cold, transparent tarn; longs
for her life of pounce and gorge,
of lazing and killing; worships
one untrammelled by love or pity
The falconer’s awe of his bird’s ability to analyse her situation, filtering out extraneous detail and concentrate directly on her kill is likened to the level of determination needed to write a poem, paring language down to what matters and perhaps kill a favoured phrase that doesn’t fit. The resulting poem is taut and fully flexed. However, Ian House does retain empathy, in “Gaunt” (complete poem),
When I learnt the word, I’d known for years what it meant,
my dead, angular grandmother on the front-room wall,
a grey woman in a grey dress among grey hollyhocks,
grudging daylight. Was she throttling the cat?
Her right hand was a diagram in our Family Doctor,
her lips clenched like a mousetrap. This
was what mothers turned into. Sundays,
I imagined, she knelt in a cold church.
Mondays she scrubbed her men’s collars. Tuesdays
she made rissoles from gristle. Under that eye
balloons were foolishness, rummy a sin.
Greyness hung in the kitchen, flowed up the stairs.
I was told later what flowered in her
unknown, that she never complained,
that the word for her hair was ‘sparse.’
The repetition of “grey” seems obvious but combined with the “cold church” (probably hewn from grey stone) and the work of scrubbing and trying to make edible meals from leftovers combine to build a picture of a joyless life of work and routine. Then readers learn, as the poet did, that, towards the end, she’d lived a life in a struggle against cancer. Her earlier vigilance against foolishness and joy makes sense. An unsympathetic person is presented with compassion. A mix of nature and human mix in a poem based on a character from Anton Chekov’s “The Seagull”, in “Boris Aleksyeevich Trigorin”
His teeth gleam in the spotlight. He’s a pike
hovering in weeds for the hair-triggered dart
and strong-jawed snap. And the prey,
juggled and swivelled into the head-first,
mouth-splitting gulp isn’t cloud or girl.
He says he devours his life with his fictions.
He’s a killing machine that’s turned on itself.
Ian House shows how material from anywhere can be a potential poem, providing that material is moulded and crafted with exacting language, an ear for sound and rhythm and a sizeable drop of compassion.
.
Emma Lee’s poetry collection Yellow Torchlight and the Blues is available from Original Plus. She blogs at http://emmalee1.wordpress.com and also reviews for The Journal, Elsewhere and Sabotage Reviews.
By Michael Bartholomew-Biggs • books, poetry reviews, Year 2014