Roger Caldwell discerns a remarkable felicity of phrasing in Matthew Bartonās third collection.
Family Tree
Matthew Barton
Shoestring Press
ISBN 033 022 300 39
62 pp. £10.00
In many of the poems in this his third collection Matthew Barton displays a honed-down art that makes each word count. This is a style thatās plain but with a firm control of rhythm and a supple syntax that enables his poems to wind their sometimes intricate way to a seemingly inevitable closure. Such a poem is āMotherā in which the speaker, seeing her give way to tears, records this moment when sheās broken open, after which
youāre seeing frighteningly so far in
to the pulse of pain that from now on
if you didnāt know before youāll always
know is there, and always
keep connecting with again.
The poem is an intimate one, and yet by virtue of the distancing effect achieved by a diction almost clinically precise and by the use here of the second person instead of the expected first, it doesnāt fall into sentimentality. Like a number of poems in this volume it concentrates on a moment of sudden awareness that becomes a sort of revelation or epiphany ā sometimes in the most unexpected, even humdrum, circumstances. A poem entitled āVegetable Plotā and which opens The pumpkin we planted . . . would normally not bode well: Do I want to know about his pumpkins? the reader might well ask. But, of course, the poem is not about horticulture but about joy: his sonās face is one globe of delight as he leads his father to a place deep in the growth / that Iād simply not seenĀ and where, in a glorious epiphany is revealed,
swelling
from darkness the glorious blinking
great sun of a pumpkin.
In āBetterā, another poem about his young son, the sick child falls asleep lying on top of his fatherās body. I was your ship, he is told:
We drifted the breathing deep.
You steadied my hold. And both of us
were better when you woke up.
The diction is simple, but every word is loaded; this is poetry without frills. There is a sort of freshness and honesty about Bartonās work that comes from looking afresh at the world and describing meticulously what he sees. His concern for wildlife, for ecology, and for indigenous peoples is reflected in several of the poems, as if his preference for rural rather than urban life, but he never confuses poetry with propaganda. In āJanuary Walkā he invokes Edward Thomas striding towards / a thrush-songās last, bright certainty. This, I thought, is too close to pastiche for comfort: surely Robert Frost would have provided him with a better model. I need not have worried: the poem immediately following, āSleeperās Blockā, in fact ends with cadences that uncannily recall those of Frost: the art of giving up the self, the lift / you canāt compel except by being it. Another poet he has clearly learned from is Philip Larkin: the life of the man in āOutside the Care Homeā, like that of āMr Bleaneyā is in conditional mode: in this case he walks round and round as if going the other way // might give some sense that he / had turned his life around. Larkinesque too is the extended syntax of the question which brings āThe Architectā to its eloquent close:
Or is it we who cannot hear you
shouting silently
to let you stay here in our lives
for what theyāre worth
and trying to ask us (as you never did)
if you will take
the offered hand you cannot give?
But the distinctive voicing, the sense of paradox, the narrative craft that offers onlyĀ what we need to know and not a jot more, and the determination to let no nuanceĀ escape are Bartonās alone. True, there are some misfires. In āBurial Chamberā theĀ alliterative effects are intrusive: whumped like a heart / as if wombed here I heard // the pulse of a mother sounds like Ted Hughes on auto-pilot. He is not at his best in the dramatic monologue form: when he writes en travesti as Mrs Coleridge one feels he is not fully engaged with his character. Yet, all in all, this is a highly impressive collection, often marked by a remarkable felicity of phrasing that takes one by surprise, as in a poem that begins with a childās loss of a tooth and ends with ruminations on those frozen gestures of clinging on. Often too there is a thoughtful, somewhat rueful, tone: much harm, he tells us, Iāve done / by skirting / round myself. Ā But the poem nonetheless ends on a defiant note:
Iām standing in the cold, the emptiness
But inside finally. Yes.
And taking off my gloves.
by Michael Bartholomew-Biggs • books, poetry reviews, year 2016 • Tags: books, poetry, Roger Caldwell • 0 Comments
Roger Caldwell discerns a remarkable felicity of phrasing in Matthew Bartonās third collection.
In many of the poems in this his third collection Matthew Barton displays a honed-down art that makes each word count. This is a style thatās plain but with a firm control of rhythm and a supple syntax that enables his poems to wind their sometimes intricate way to a seemingly inevitable closure. Such a poem is āMotherā in which the speaker, seeing her give way to tears, records this moment when sheās broken open, after which
The poem is an intimate one, and yet by virtue of the distancing effect achieved by a diction almost clinically precise and by the use here of the second person instead of the expected first, it doesnāt fall into sentimentality. Like a number of poems in this volume it concentrates on a moment of sudden awareness that becomes a sort of revelation or epiphany ā sometimes in the most unexpected, even humdrum, circumstances. A poem entitled āVegetable Plotā and which opens The pumpkin we planted . . . would normally not bode well: Do I want to know about his pumpkins? the reader might well ask. But, of course, the poem is not about horticulture but about joy: his sonās face is one globe of delight as he leads his father to a place deep in the growth / that Iād simply not seenĀ and where, in a glorious epiphany is revealed,
In āBetterā, another poem about his young son, the sick child falls asleep lying on top of his fatherās body. I was your ship, he is told:
The diction is simple, but every word is loaded; this is poetry without frills. There is a sort of freshness and honesty about Bartonās work that comes from looking afresh at the world and describing meticulously what he sees. His concern for wildlife, for ecology, and for indigenous peoples is reflected in several of the poems, as if his preference for rural rather than urban life, but he never confuses poetry with propaganda. In āJanuary Walkā he invokes Edward Thomas striding towards / a thrush-songās last, bright certainty. This, I thought, is too close to pastiche for comfort: surely Robert Frost would have provided him with a better model. I need not have worried: the poem immediately following, āSleeperās Blockā, in fact ends with cadences that uncannily recall those of Frost: the art of giving up the self, the lift / you canāt compel except by being it. Another poet he has clearly learned from is Philip Larkin: the life of the man in āOutside the Care Homeā, like that of āMr Bleaneyā is in conditional mode: in this case he walks round and round as if going the other way // might give some sense that he / had turned his life around. Larkinesque too is the extended syntax of the question which brings āThe Architectā to its eloquent close:
But the distinctive voicing, the sense of paradox, the narrative craft that offers onlyĀ what we need to know and not a jot more, and the determination to let no nuanceĀ escape are Bartonās alone. True, there are some misfires. In āBurial Chamberā theĀ alliterative effects are intrusive: whumped like a heart / as if wombed here I heard // the pulse of a mother sounds like Ted Hughes on auto-pilot. He is not at his best in the dramatic monologue form: when he writes en travesti as Mrs Coleridge one feels he is not fully engaged with his character. Yet, all in all, this is a highly impressive collection, often marked by a remarkable felicity of phrasing that takes one by surprise, as in a poem that begins with a childās loss of a tooth and ends with ruminations on those frozen gestures of clinging on. Often too there is a thoughtful, somewhat rueful, tone: much harm, he tells us, Iāve done / by skirting / round myself. Ā But the poem nonetheless ends on a defiant note: