Poetry review – BEYOND THE LAST HOUSE: John Forth suspects that readers will enjoy this collection because Robert Etty enjoyed writing it
Beyond the Last House
Robert Etty
Shoestring Press, 2024
ISBN 9781915 553515
94pp £10.00
I never look at the last page first, but this book seems primed to fall open on p.94 and it can’t be avoided. At 11 lines it is the shortest poem in the book:
It will end in the way a novel ends.
Not in completeness, as some novels do,
with success, an epiphany, thawing snow,
a locked front door and a ring twisted off,
or the words of a longed-for message,
but like a reader turning the page
and finding flyleaves, and then turning
back to read again the paragraph
that seems to be unaware of being the last,
and tells of a car in a lay-by near fields
on a road to a waking town.
(“Spoiler Alert”)
The poem immediately preceding this one acknowledges a debt to Robert Frost, but perhaps it is here that we most feel the similarity. Coming as it does at the end of a section pre-occupied with aging and technology (a lot of us have been there) it is a most haunting, ambivalent ending – and it is also a spoiler for what’s about to be discovered if we read the book front-to-back. Robert Etty often creates an effect similar to the well-meaning cop at a road-block (‘There’s nothing to see here’) before delving into the nothing in search of what he calls ‘the silence inside the noise’. His poems are loaded with immense charm and persuasiveness and sometimes risk springing a super-charged stripped-down ‘nothing’ upon us when we least expect it. As a result, his various takes on ‘nothing’ are unusually entertaining even when we know what’s coming:
After nothing noteworthy has happened
(which in itself isn’t worthy of note)
between the last house in town and here…
a squirrel appears…
The poem proceeds to describe how ‘Pimleys’ are destroying a hedge and some trees using a cherry-picker, bringing about a collision of past, present and future, before concluding:
The hedge measured two or three hundred yards
and possibly two or three hundred years.
Pimleys set up six months ago.
The squirrel emerges at the same hole,
unless, that is, it’s not the same squirrel.
(“It Takes a Worried Squirrel”)
Soon we’ll be advised to ‘stop and stand / in the gap while it’s open, since sometimes / between fields is better than in one’ (“A Gap in a Hedge Between Fields”). So there we have it. We’re three poems in and we can already see a travellers’ guide emerging, only to find we’re not in a place likely to make it into conventional travel guides:
...where the incomers find days slower
on these unkerbed roads than on those they left
until they adjust and reduce speed themselves
like the removal van on the long hill
whenever someone moves in, or moves out
if two weekly buses to town aren’t enough.
(”Moves Afoot”)
Some might say it’s risky writing in a leisurely way about excess leisure, but Etty has always managed it at his own pace and with a sprinkling of wit and curiosity. While we’re here, we contemplate the book’s opening quarter with a narrator who is occasionally the subject, the observed, doing some bird-watching and ruminating about a clutch of creatures (especially cows) and pairs or even murmurations of birds knocking about in a reluctant landscape with humans who have something in common with wombats (‘for which the collective noun is wisdom’):
when it comes to evolutionary mysteries,
wombats come into their own.
What a wombat’s own is is open to question,
but not one the wombat loses sleep over.
(“Like a Wombat”)
There is an empathy with wombat-like humans, some of whom have repetitive jobs (“Controlling Brambles in Holywell Wood”; “Sloe Gin” and “Bradley Woods the Tree-Feller”) together with a nice comic take on the composite “Man Who Was Walking His Dog” who throughout history will stumble upon pretty much everything. Local gossip can be interesting, if circular, in “The Bad Things” (probably the cutest account ever of life in supermarkets) and Etty is bold enough to dabble in topical scientific theories about ‘communication’ between trees:
Gigabit-capable broadband’s been
mentioned, but horse-chestnuts opt for a fungus-
and root interaction package (two or three centuries’
constant connection inclusive of line-rental)
out of historical custom and practice.
(“Information Superhighway to Peterborough”)
These poems have in common a relaxed sway in the branches of detail accompanied by a relatively inconspicuous loading of import and metaphor:
Somewhere before long you’ll need to turn back:
the footpath you chose isn’t circular
and all the diversions are overgrown,
which means every step you’re taking counts twice.
(“Starting Harvest”)
Towards the end of the first section and throughout the second we begin to hear more about people, their misfortunes and eventually their absence: Michael, who possibly never recovers from a rat bite, and a number of ‘Fellow Passengers’ of one kind or another:
Paul the churchyard man’s here with his strimmer,
clearing tall growth between the gravestones
to make them look cared-for, and make a change.
The marked uncared-for lie next to the unmarked,
the lastingly unmemorialised,
whose brown bones the gravedigger sometimes turns up…
(“Fellow Passengers”)
The poet himself begins to feature on the fringes, recalling childhood and schooling, and the last days of Grandad Bob’s long path are measured by pop songs that ‘brought him almost to “Can’t Buy Me Love”’. The young Robert is protected when he’s told after a day at school – and we then hear that,
Grandma avoided mentioning him
all the way through to ‘Let It Be’, which,
as it turned out, was her only option.
(“The Fab Time”)
I reckon this silence at about six years (I was there too!) and I think the chart-topper he cunningly avoids naming when the news broke was ‘Do You Want to Know a Secret’. The spoiler we were meant to avoid at the start / end is probably that,
...the chimney blew down, the Beatles broke up,
sameness continued for some of us,
and it may not be what you hold in your mind
that becomes what you don’t forget.
These concerns appear to be in sharp focus in “Grimes Green” and a couple of poems about a dying idiolect revealed in ‘mantling’ and ‘worriting’. In a way the method is similar to one described earlier, a concern for the ‘nothing to see’ becoming more of a ‘nothing to know’:
Who Mr Grimes had been, no one could say,
but when he was living (assuming he did),
he had a green, if not an apostrophe…
and a certain amount of worriting follows before the poem ends with:
...Grime himself had turned into something
(or she had, or they) that’s only recalled
in a name no one speaks unless they’re long-lived
and able to picture the ribbon of houses,
but not Grimes Green before, or before.
(“Grimes Green”)
In “Worriting” we’ll find that the word means exactly what we think it means (‘The old ones worrited much of the time’) and the poem ends with a final observation about the poet’s grandma:
The last place where grandmother found no rest
was the least level part of the cemetery,
as if they’d reserved it for her, or she had.
In Etty’s capable hands the language itself becomes a living (or dying) entity. “Mantle” is a hoot if you like this sort of thing:
Verb (intransitive) used by old people
when people who are now old were young
to indicate a manner of walking
below the walker’s average speed…
(“Mantle”)
It used to be said that when members of the cast start to enjoy themselves the audience stops, but this has never been true of Robert Etty in his number of roles and guises. Like his earlier books, this one manages to be funny, contemplative and sad, and it reads as if he had a lot of fun putting it together.
Aug 25 2024
London Grip Poetry Review – Robert Etty
Poetry review – BEYOND THE LAST HOUSE: John Forth suspects that readers will enjoy this collection because Robert Etty enjoyed writing it
I never look at the last page first, but this book seems primed to fall open on p.94 and it can’t be avoided. At 11 lines it is the shortest poem in the book:
It will end in the way a novel ends. Not in completeness, as some novels do, with success, an epiphany, thawing snow, a locked front door and a ring twisted off, or the words of a longed-for message, but like a reader turning the page and finding flyleaves, and then turning back to read again the paragraph that seems to be unaware of being the last, and tells of a car in a lay-by near fields on a road to a waking town. (“Spoiler Alert”)The poem immediately preceding this one acknowledges a debt to Robert Frost, but perhaps it is here that we most feel the similarity. Coming as it does at the end of a section pre-occupied with aging and technology (a lot of us have been there) it is a most haunting, ambivalent ending – and it is also a spoiler for what’s about to be discovered if we read the book front-to-back. Robert Etty often creates an effect similar to the well-meaning cop at a road-block (‘There’s nothing to see here’) before delving into the nothing in search of what he calls ‘the silence inside the noise’. His poems are loaded with immense charm and persuasiveness and sometimes risk springing a super-charged stripped-down ‘nothing’ upon us when we least expect it. As a result, his various takes on ‘nothing’ are unusually entertaining even when we know what’s coming:
The poem proceeds to describe how ‘Pimleys’ are destroying a hedge and some trees using a cherry-picker, bringing about a collision of past, present and future, before concluding:
The hedge measured two or three hundred yards and possibly two or three hundred years. Pimleys set up six months ago. The squirrel emerges at the same hole, unless, that is, it’s not the same squirrel. (“It Takes a Worried Squirrel”)Soon we’ll be advised to ‘stop and stand / in the gap while it’s open, since sometimes / between fields is better than in one’ (“A Gap in a Hedge Between Fields”). So there we have it. We’re three poems in and we can already see a travellers’ guide emerging, only to find we’re not in a place likely to make it into conventional travel guides:
...where the incomers find days slower on these unkerbed roads than on those they left until they adjust and reduce speed themselves like the removal van on the long hill whenever someone moves in, or moves out if two weekly buses to town aren’t enough. (”Moves Afoot”)Some might say it’s risky writing in a leisurely way about excess leisure, but Etty has always managed it at his own pace and with a sprinkling of wit and curiosity. While we’re here, we contemplate the book’s opening quarter with a narrator who is occasionally the subject, the observed, doing some bird-watching and ruminating about a clutch of creatures (especially cows) and pairs or even murmurations of birds knocking about in a reluctant landscape with humans who have something in common with wombats (‘for which the collective noun is wisdom’):
when it comes to evolutionary mysteries, wombats come into their own. What a wombat’s own is is open to question, but not one the wombat loses sleep over. (“Like a Wombat”)There is an empathy with wombat-like humans, some of whom have repetitive jobs (“Controlling Brambles in Holywell Wood”; “Sloe Gin” and “Bradley Woods the Tree-Feller”) together with a nice comic take on the composite “Man Who Was Walking His Dog” who throughout history will stumble upon pretty much everything. Local gossip can be interesting, if circular, in “The Bad Things” (probably the cutest account ever of life in supermarkets) and Etty is bold enough to dabble in topical scientific theories about ‘communication’ between trees:
Gigabit-capable broadband’s been mentioned, but horse-chestnuts opt for a fungus- and root interaction package (two or three centuries’ constant connection inclusive of line-rental) out of historical custom and practice. (“Information Superhighway to Peterborough”)These poems have in common a relaxed sway in the branches of detail accompanied by a relatively inconspicuous loading of import and metaphor:
Somewhere before long you’ll need to turn back: the footpath you chose isn’t circular and all the diversions are overgrown, which means every step you’re taking counts twice. (“Starting Harvest”)Towards the end of the first section and throughout the second we begin to hear more about people, their misfortunes and eventually their absence: Michael, who possibly never recovers from a rat bite, and a number of ‘Fellow Passengers’ of one kind or another:
Paul the churchyard man’s here with his strimmer, clearing tall growth between the gravestones to make them look cared-for, and make a change. The marked uncared-for lie next to the unmarked, the lastingly unmemorialised, whose brown bones the gravedigger sometimes turns up… (“Fellow Passengers”)The poet himself begins to feature on the fringes, recalling childhood and schooling, and the last days of Grandad Bob’s long path are measured by pop songs that ‘brought him almost to “Can’t Buy Me Love”’. The young Robert is protected when he’s told after a day at school – and we then hear that,
Grandma avoided mentioning him all the way through to ‘Let It Be’, which, as it turned out, was her only option. (“The Fab Time”)I reckon this silence at about six years (I was there too!) and I think the chart-topper he cunningly avoids naming when the news broke was ‘Do You Want to Know a Secret’. The spoiler we were meant to avoid at the start / end is probably that,
These concerns appear to be in sharp focus in “Grimes Green” and a couple of poems about a dying idiolect revealed in ‘mantling’ and ‘worriting’. In a way the method is similar to one described earlier, a concern for the ‘nothing to see’ becoming more of a ‘nothing to know’:
and a certain amount of worriting follows before the poem ends with:
...Grime himself had turned into something (or she had, or they) that’s only recalled in a name no one speaks unless they’re long-lived and able to picture the ribbon of houses, but not Grimes Green before, or before. (“Grimes Green”)In “Worriting” we’ll find that the word means exactly what we think it means (‘The old ones worrited much of the time’) and the poem ends with a final observation about the poet’s grandma:
In Etty’s capable hands the language itself becomes a living (or dying) entity. “Mantle” is a hoot if you like this sort of thing:
Verb (intransitive) used by old people when people who are now old were young to indicate a manner of walking below the walker’s average speed… (“Mantle”)It used to be said that when members of the cast start to enjoy themselves the audience stops, but this has never been true of Robert Etty in his number of roles and guises. Like his earlier books, this one manages to be funny, contemplative and sad, and it reads as if he had a lot of fun putting it together.