London Grip Poetry Review – Mary Gilonne

Poetry review – SUBLIMITY: as a son of Norfolk, Mat Riches responds positively to Mary Gilonne’s poetic appreciation of the county

Sublimity: Norfolk
Mary Gilonne
Sublime Norfolk Publications
ISBN: 9781399956802
96pp  

First things first, I have to declare I am a son of the Norfolk soil. I’m Norfolk and good as the saying goes (Keep saying it, it will land eventually). So, with that in mind I felt duty bound to review this collection of poems by Mary Gilonne. It’s called Sublimity, but is subtitled “Norfolk Poems” just to make sure it lands. As we all know, sublimity is “the quality of being extremely good, beautiful, or enjoyable”. I’m contractually obliged to say this is true of the motherland, but is it true of these poems? Does that act as a fair review? Let’s press on and find out.

The first thing to note about this book is that while it’s subtitled “Norfolk Poems”, it’s mainly about the coastal part of that magical county. (Look, I’m not getting paid for this, so may as well use words like ‘magical’ to do some work for the Norfolk Tourist Board)…And that’s largely fine, it is a glorious and beautiful part of the world. As Gilonne says herself in the foreword to the collection,

  When you walk these sublime expanses of coastal light, Holkham, Cley, Salthouse,

  the 'everyday' is reduced to insignificance.

I can’t argue with that. But what of the poems, Gilonne has chosen to represent this?

The collection opens with a powerful statement of intent, and certainly not one that lacks in significance. In the opening poem, “Thomas Paine and Our Age of Unreason” Gilonne quotes Paine, ‘I cannot accumulate when others have nothing’ at the start of the poem, before going on to note

Now houses echo hollow in closed-door-village
winters, lightless windows, a let of second home
silence, rental high-water, never-ending moneyed
off-shore swells.

As we all know, Paine is a son of Norfolk soil, and the poem is interlaced with quotations from Paine’s work, The Age of Reason & The Rights of Man, and while the Paine references are pertinent to his own time, they are still highly relevant. Those “sublime expanses of coastal light” have started to become more like Chelsea-On-Sea in certain parts, and Gilonne rightfully addresses this. Those ‘closed-door-village/ winters, lightless windows’ speak of a change in the area. It doesn’t read as a harking back to ye olde days where you could leave your doors open and the neighbours would pop in and do your ironing, but rather addresses the absence at certain times of the year when the weather and conditions are harder out there. North Norfolk is beautiful in the sunlight of summer, it is beautiful in other ways in the mid-winter’s darkness and when the sea is taking it out on the coast, but there are fewer people there to see that part.

In between what I presume are the poet’s own recollections of growing up in Norfolk, we see references to local workers. In “Day Job. (Bridge Street,Stiffkey)”, she talks about a local roofer working with the local red tiles, pondering a lost love (??) as he works.

 […]He hits the Hammer,
twists shanks, slots old tingles. Climbing limb-feathered,
knuckle-bone pieces, red stacked counters, a pantile gamble.
How his drifting could be an easy fall of land. He’s clay-glazed,
face to wind, it blows the lie of her.

I hope the clay-glazed is a reference to dust from the tiles, the ‘red stacked counters’ in the sentence before, but even if it’s not, it’s a beautiful image.

Elsewhere we see another fine ‘ole (keep up, we’re going pure Norfolk here) local job being talked about in “The Sedge Cutter”. Sedge and reed cutting is an essential job in Norfolk to provide the materials used in thatching, and maintaining th supply of sedge and reeds is essential to this. The poem describes the aforementioned sedge cutter out in his ‘reedlighter’ ( a shallow draft open boat used to transport the reeds), ‘his boat so heady / with marsh litter musk’. He sees a doe on the bank, ‘flecks of pale along/ her rump like a wake of stars’ and he passes the slow journey talking to her until

 […] The doe slipped quiet, water curdled
him home with his shoofs of reeds,
and in the pub that night he never told a soul

That last line is perfect, the sort of thing I can 100% imagine the taciturn Norfolk man doing. Is it because they don’t talk, or because it’s so common, I can’t say, but it fits and it works.

And while there are these examples of paid work, the collection also speaks to other unpaid jobs. An example of this can be found in “Gansey” where a woman waits at home for her sea fisherman man to return safe.

Oh I’m casting my man out of water and wind,
purling dark sea from a worsted of blue, through a
needling and sailing of skeins 'cross my lap
as the crabbers dawn out in patterns of sky

Past shuttering channels to shanks of corked pots,
he’s out weaving the sea in his gansey and slops,
and i nimble my waiting, splice out my yarn, praying
for landing, full crannies and calm.

I’m especially pleased to see references to ‘worsted’ throughout the collection. It’s the type of wool yarn and fabric that originates in my home village of Worstead. I do have to raise issue with/question a reference to ‘Worsted Fair’ in “Dew Pond. Remembering a Forgotten Landscape” as I think it may be a reference to what has now become the Worstead Festival , and as such needs the a to make it the place name, but it’s a small point. Regardless of this, it’s worth noting that the village of Worstead was made rich by an influx of Flemish weavers in the 12th century, and this leads me to another theme in the collection, that of addressing the supposed insularity of Norfolk. It’s said (mainly by me, to be fair) that while all roads lead to Norfolk, wild horses wouldn’t drag most people there, and that’s fine with the people of Norfolk.

However, there are several instances in Sublimity where we see the county sheltering people. In “Stranger” we hear a tale similar to the weavers mentioned above. The poem has notes at the bottom that state:

   In 1565, 30 Dutchmen and their households, Protestant refugees seeking asylum from

   persecution in the Catholic Low Countries, found sanctuary in Norwich encouraged by

   Elizabeth 1st. 

The poem describes the attacks on them at home, the ‘burning religie and flesh, / laments of wrested books and hopeloos souls.’ Before going on to reach safety they find

Then this long cantering coast bright as belief,
and now I’m here, wife and kinderen. Protectie, protectie
within Norwich’s fainted walls. Dank u wel for the sanctuary
of otherness, for your pale delft washed skies that weft godshuis
with wavering light

Assuming that you’re still reading and haven’t gone off to book a trip on the Broads (at the very least), there’s two more things I’d like to bring to your attention before you order your own copy of this book.

The first is personal, but please indulge me. In “Mundesley. A Passing”, Gilonne talks of being near water in Mundesley. I’d love to quote the poem in full, but it opens with ‘This is where the living wait. / forget the city’s distant cubes and soarings’ before moving on to say

We’re asked from the morning’s scattering, 
empty of sea. Talk circles your leaving
like a buoy.

Sixteen years ago (at the time of writing) my family scattered my father’s ashes on the broads in bright sunshine, and so the final sentence of the poem seems to catch me with dust in my eye.

How to explain that hush of listening glass,
a rush of greening light, as if somewhere
the very water of you turns to leaves.

Excuse me, I’ll be back in a minute….Right, where were we? Ah yes, one last thing. The book closes with what I think is a lovely act of mirroring. Where the book opens with a ‘closed-door village’ and references to Thomas Paine, in “Thresholds” it closes with a tale of the infamous Kett’s Rebellion in 1549, an uprising in response to land being taken from the local population. However, it’s the final line that makes it so perfect.

 […] Whether to stay or leave depends on this desperate theft
of pasture, halted plough, on the hanging weight of our raging open doors. 

While Gilonne talks of the ‘everyday’ being reduced to ‘insignificance’, I’d argue differently. Yes, the place and these poems take you out of everyday concerns, the light can be distracting, but I think by the end of this collection I was more aware of the everyday and of how important it can be.

Postscript: how to say Norfolk place-names if you want to fit in with the locals
Cley is pronounced Cl-eye
Stiffkey is pronounced Stu -key
Mundesley is ponounced Munds-leigh