Poetry review – A DISTANT ENGLISHNESS: Michael Bartholomew-Biggs examines a challenging but rewarding collection by John Whitehouse
A Distant Englishness
John Whitehouse
Clayhanger Press
ISBN 9781917017022
44pp £8
Expectations are likely to be raised when a debut collection has a foreword by Tamar Yoseloff and a back cover endorsement by Glyn Maxwell. Readers may then find further encouragement in the author’s own introduction which helpfully and eloquently explains the physical landscape in which the poems are set and also gives an account of the particular mental landscape in which they have been composed.
Whitehouse explains that he grew up in a place where there were ‘two kinds of Englishness in plain sight of one another.’ The pretty village of Norton Canes is only half a mile from the coalfields of Cannock Chase where railway lines and slag heaps were once the main visible features and there was also a pervading ‘sulphurous stink’. The landscape around the mines has changed considerably since the pit closures of the 1980s. Developers have ‘sewed up the gaping holes of the coal mines … [and] replaced them with a spurious newness’ in the form of modern housing. Whitehouse’s poems wander freely across time and space, sometimes remembering former days, sometimes looking at traces of the past that still exist in the present and sometimes occupying an imaginative period alternating between the two.
The opening poem “In the Boat House” seems to be a straightforward childhood memory. The poet, as a boy, sits ‘in the burden / of the boat, gripping the gunwale’ and watches
my father’s strong back, cotton motes
falling from his white shirt, coal dust floating
in the air, as he reaches out for something.
Is that ‘reaching out’ simply the stretching forward to pull on the oars? Or is the poem already talking about an attempt to grasp meaning when a community’s way of life is about to be disrupted?
In the next poem “Daisy’s dock” we are again in the past, either when the mines were operating or soon after they closed. The railway lines still exist and the poet is ‘nightwalking on the tracks’. Much more surprisingly
A Ford Anglia is dangling from the railway bridge
…
The independent suspension is showing coquettishly,
like the ankles of country girls. Coal black rain flooding
the underpass, two fathoms deep,
ready for a stealthy drowning.
These lines include a sudden switch from one intriguing image to another without explanation. Such shifts occur quite frequently within the poems; but at the same time there are often subtle and pleasing connections between one poem and the next. Thus “Daisy’s dock” ends with the poet approaching a canoe which might ‘give us passage / to the other side’ and which provides a link with the preceding Boat House poem. Furthermore there is also a faint watery echo in the subsequent poem “Creosote”, which is set in the post-coalmining years and concludes with ‘a wharf with sour grass,/ sunken canal barges.’
Whitehouse’s father appears in several of the poems but there are other characters who aren’t clearly identified. For instance, in “Ball bearings” we are introduced very abruptly to one female protagonist
Words fall from her mouth
on a glass topped table.
She holds one up to the light
…
He hears it, slung into a threat
Are the She and He the poet’s mother and father? They do seem to be a couple because he at least fears a broken relationship and is ‘panicking at goodbye, recasting / love into nodding acquaintance.’ And is it the same She who appears a few pages later ‘scrubbing floorboards /with softwood lye’? This person evidently has artistic ambitions because ‘oil paint gets in the stir fry’ and
Paintings hang on our conflicted walls. A ritual
to remove turpentine, quelling hands with cream.
Her fists sprout anarchic fingers.
That ‘our’ does suggest we are in the poet’s family home. There is another pleasing link between this poem and the next one, “Dead bait”, which begins ‘She dips her fingers into a bowl of plain water / making marks on whitewashed walls, languidly / imagining a man’s face …’ We are told that ‘The painted man isn’t her lover’ but he may or may not be the man in the closing stanza who ‘casts a lure into the lake’ and reintroduces the theme of dark waters where pike are ‘moving in for the kill, trained assassins’
The bleakness of the coalfields, whether working or abandoned, appears much more frequently than the prettier and more comfortable kind of Englishness exemplified by unspoiled fields and villages. Both landscapes, however, can be found in the title poem where the poet recalls being sent to buy beer and traverses ‘green baize swards / of Eden’ before finding ‘white porticoes, lawns sewn with magic / seeds …’ and even ‘a DS Citroen … / a goddess in blue delphinium, / her empty steering wheel.’ (One can enjoy the bilingual pun DS / déesse / goddess and appreciate the knowing reference to the famous single-spoke steering wheel and still wonder why a French car figures in a poem about Englishness.) A later poem, “The divided self”, also mentions ‘white colonnades, night scents, soft lawns’ in explaining why ‘the garden party reminds me / of the differences in our childhoods’. Alongside this, it is perhaps odd to find what seems to be a genuine anger towards the speculative builders who have remade the pit villages and, in some sense, rendered them prettier. Even though the homes that were replaced could be described as slums, Whitehouse laments
After swindling the riff-raff, the slick
racketeers built houses in three colours:
magical, maniacal, nonsensical.
Having examined a number of poems quite closely in order to highlight some characteristic features, I want now to speak more broadly and to remark on the variety of styles within the book. Most of the poems discussed so far have a recognizable narrative thread, but include some enigmatic or surreal diversions. These poems could fairly be likened to impressionist pictures. But there are others – notably “The Name of the World” and “An uncommon language” – which bear more resemblance to abstract paintings with words and phrases boldly applied to the page like shapes and blocks of colour:
I use a hammer to smash the glass of language, leading
dried-up letters to water, shouting their names. A psalm
to the blue ocean, the half-hung moon. Worn-out copper
for burnished gold.
This is indeed rather wonderful; and it is in marked contrast to yet a third kind of poem which is quite plain and direct. For instance “A Psalm for the Pithead” begins
Shut the winding gear, empty the locks
let barges rot in their folk-art colours.
Free the pit ponies from their stocks
Let them canter on the yellow strand.
I sense a wry smile behind that echo of Auden in the first line. There is also, I think, a rare flash of humour in another of these seemingly uncomplicated poems, “He done me wrong”, which has the first line ‘but I’d like to dress him for the funeral.’
Whitehouse several times repeats the trick he pulls with Auden-like line above and employs engaging half-familiar phrases to describe one thing while also reminding us of something else. ‘The owner preached hellfire in a hot tin chapel’ surely is meant to evoke Tennessee Williams; and ‘a clock in a painting / melting like camembert’ must borrow from Dali’s Persistence of Memory.
A Distant Englishness is an impressive first collection of (mostly) sombre and enigmatic poems which deserve and repay several readings. It has been a pleasure to explore them and to discover new small details like the poet’s skilful planting of assertions which inhabit a twilight zone between the trite and the absurd. These statements are plausible but far from self-evident and they stimulate and engage the brain’s curiosity and eagerness to see how the thesis is developed or defended. One good example is ‘Carpenters make the best slaughterers’. If memory serves, I have elsewhere complimented Denis Nurkse and Robert Bringhurst on their use of similarly challenging lines to begin a poetic argument; so Whitehouse is in very good company.
Sep 28 2024
London Grip Poetry Review – John Whitehouse
Poetry review – A DISTANT ENGLISHNESS: Michael Bartholomew-Biggs examines a challenging but rewarding collection by John Whitehouse
Expectations are likely to be raised when a debut collection has a foreword by Tamar Yoseloff and a back cover endorsement by Glyn Maxwell. Readers may then find further encouragement in the author’s own introduction which helpfully and eloquently explains the physical landscape in which the poems are set and also gives an account of the particular mental landscape in which they have been composed.
Whitehouse explains that he grew up in a place where there were ‘two kinds of Englishness in plain sight of one another.’ The pretty village of Norton Canes is only half a mile from the coalfields of Cannock Chase where railway lines and slag heaps were once the main visible features and there was also a pervading ‘sulphurous stink’. The landscape around the mines has changed considerably since the pit closures of the 1980s. Developers have ‘sewed up the gaping holes of the coal mines … [and] replaced them with a spurious newness’ in the form of modern housing. Whitehouse’s poems wander freely across time and space, sometimes remembering former days, sometimes looking at traces of the past that still exist in the present and sometimes occupying an imaginative period alternating between the two.
The opening poem “In the Boat House” seems to be a straightforward childhood memory. The poet, as a boy, sits ‘in the burden / of the boat, gripping the gunwale’ and watches
Is that ‘reaching out’ simply the stretching forward to pull on the oars? Or is the poem already talking about an attempt to grasp meaning when a community’s way of life is about to be disrupted?
In the next poem “Daisy’s dock” we are again in the past, either when the mines were operating or soon after they closed. The railway lines still exist and the poet is ‘nightwalking on the tracks’. Much more surprisingly
These lines include a sudden switch from one intriguing image to another without explanation. Such shifts occur quite frequently within the poems; but at the same time there are often subtle and pleasing connections between one poem and the next. Thus “Daisy’s dock” ends with the poet approaching a canoe which might ‘give us passage / to the other side’ and which provides a link with the preceding Boat House poem. Furthermore there is also a faint watery echo in the subsequent poem “Creosote”, which is set in the post-coalmining years and concludes with ‘a wharf with sour grass,/ sunken canal barges.’
Whitehouse’s father appears in several of the poems but there are other characters who aren’t clearly identified. For instance, in “Ball bearings” we are introduced very abruptly to one female protagonist
Are the She and He the poet’s mother and father? They do seem to be a couple because he at least fears a broken relationship and is ‘panicking at goodbye, recasting / love into nodding acquaintance.’ And is it the same She who appears a few pages later ‘scrubbing floorboards /with softwood lye’? This person evidently has artistic ambitions because ‘oil paint gets in the stir fry’ and
That ‘our’ does suggest we are in the poet’s family home. There is another pleasing link between this poem and the next one, “Dead bait”, which begins ‘She dips her fingers into a bowl of plain water / making marks on whitewashed walls, languidly / imagining a man’s face …’ We are told that ‘The painted man isn’t her lover’ but he may or may not be the man in the closing stanza who ‘casts a lure into the lake’ and reintroduces the theme of dark waters where pike are ‘moving in for the kill, trained assassins’
The bleakness of the coalfields, whether working or abandoned, appears much more frequently than the prettier and more comfortable kind of Englishness exemplified by unspoiled fields and villages. Both landscapes, however, can be found in the title poem where the poet recalls being sent to buy beer and traverses ‘green baize swards / of Eden’ before finding ‘white porticoes, lawns sewn with magic / seeds …’ and even ‘a DS Citroen … / a goddess in blue delphinium, / her empty steering wheel.’ (One can enjoy the bilingual pun DS / déesse / goddess and appreciate the knowing reference to the famous single-spoke steering wheel and still wonder why a French car figures in a poem about Englishness.) A later poem, “The divided self”, also mentions ‘white colonnades, night scents, soft lawns’ in explaining why ‘the garden party reminds me / of the differences in our childhoods’. Alongside this, it is perhaps odd to find what seems to be a genuine anger towards the speculative builders who have remade the pit villages and, in some sense, rendered them prettier. Even though the homes that were replaced could be described as slums, Whitehouse laments
Having examined a number of poems quite closely in order to highlight some characteristic features, I want now to speak more broadly and to remark on the variety of styles within the book. Most of the poems discussed so far have a recognizable narrative thread, but include some enigmatic or surreal diversions. These poems could fairly be likened to impressionist pictures. But there are others – notably “The Name of the World” and “An uncommon language” – which bear more resemblance to abstract paintings with words and phrases boldly applied to the page like shapes and blocks of colour:
This is indeed rather wonderful; and it is in marked contrast to yet a third kind of poem which is quite plain and direct. For instance “A Psalm for the Pithead” begins
I sense a wry smile behind that echo of Auden in the first line. There is also, I think, a rare flash of humour in another of these seemingly uncomplicated poems, “He done me wrong”, which has the first line ‘but I’d like to dress him for the funeral.’
Whitehouse several times repeats the trick he pulls with Auden-like line above and employs engaging half-familiar phrases to describe one thing while also reminding us of something else. ‘The owner preached hellfire in a hot tin chapel’ surely is meant to evoke Tennessee Williams; and ‘a clock in a painting / melting like camembert’ must borrow from Dali’s Persistence of Memory.
A Distant Englishness is an impressive first collection of (mostly) sombre and enigmatic poems which deserve and repay several readings. It has been a pleasure to explore them and to discover new small details like the poet’s skilful planting of assertions which inhabit a twilight zone between the trite and the absurd. These statements are plausible but far from self-evident and they stimulate and engage the brain’s curiosity and eagerness to see how the thesis is developed or defended. One good example is ‘Carpenters make the best slaughterers’. If memory serves, I have elsewhere complimented Denis Nurkse and Robert Bringhurst on their use of similarly challenging lines to begin a poetic argument; so Whitehouse is in very good company.