Poetry review – SMALL AND NECESSARY LIVES: Michael Bartholomew-Biggs admires Ron Scowcroft’s ability to capture moments that might easily be missed
Small and Necessary Lives
Ron Scowcroft
Wayleave Press
ISBN 978-1-8383378-7-2
£6
So much in life these days seems transactional; and perhaps that is why I tend to use the word ‘necessary’ to signify ‘required for some worthwhile purpose’ much more often than its other legitimate sense of ‘inevitable’. But in his new pamphlet Small and Necessary Lives, I think Ron Scowcroft may be laying more emphasis on that second meaning. Consider the poem “Loft Bats” for instance. To have bats in a building is often highly counterproductive if one’s purpose is to make structural alterations. But Scowcroft expresses a tolerant attitude to their tendency to ‘drop guano / like quotation marks / below the roost.’ Indeed, if one accepts their presence as a given, there is pleasure to be found in seeing them ‘loom and retreat as if on elastic / sign the sky in arabesques’.
There aren’t many wild animals that can be said to perform a useful function from a human point of view – except perhaps to be the substance of rumours and legends with which we seem to enjoy scaring ourselves. “After the Wolf” begins in traditionally ominous fashion
They said he liked the taste of children,
could eat the sun and moon,
had teeth like a gin trap
However efforts to catch the dreadful beast only yield ‘a corpse / shrunk to the size of a stray dog’. And after the fearfulness of the poem’s beginning it is the smallness of the creature’s life that emerges rather than its inexorability.
Another thing that might seem inessential to Western rationalism is the kind of intuition which survives among so-called ‘primitive’ cultures living closer to the natural world than we do. “A Prophecy of Fools” is based on accounts that inhabitants of small islands in the Indian Ocean predicted the tsunami of 2004 then retreated to safety away from the shoreline
and watched the great curve of water
gathering like hate on a darkening horizon.
Here we are reminded of the smallness and frailty of human life within wider creation. But the next poem ”Flatland” seems to show that mankind can also be threatened by landscapes of his own making. It is set in a place where ‘every narrow lane/ between the fields’ turns out to be ‘a right angle to nowhere’. There are relics of past activity: ‘a single storey grounded under corrugated zinc’; ‘sump oil in the soil’; and vehicles ‘buried in dead / snatches of garden.’ Is this a poisoned industrial complex? A military training area? There are still some inhabitants but ‘when I ask for directions / people strain at my intonation’ so the poet has only himself to rely on and must ‘resolve to walk my way out.’ This is a wonderfully menacing poem even if its setting remains ambiguous.
Further on in the book Scowcroft returns to the idea behind ‘people strain at my intonation’ – the way that accent and dialect can hinder communication – but does so in much lighter vein.
He peers over the allotment fence like Chad.
Trouble wi’ wicks, he observes
The poet does not understand what his neighbour means but
pretending that I know the word
[I] dangle definitions between finger and thumb:
plantain, ground elder, shepherd’s purse
hoping that he’ll pick one out.
Over the next couple of verses the poet begins to learn a little of the rural vocabulary; but in the final stanza the roles are reversed when the narrator finally has a chance to speak about his own job as a teacher and mentions ‘Ofsted routes through lesson plans’. Now it is the neighbour who ‘nods as if he understands.’
I see this collection as a celebration of everything inconsequential and eccentric that unavoidably surrounds us. And it is Scowcroft’s eye for detail – and his ability to describe it creatively – that enables him to achieve this. In “Dancing on the Parapet” a builder, for no apparent reason, decides to perform some fancy footwork ‘five floors up’. Even while alarmed at his recklessness, Scowcroft has time to notice ‘his untied shoelace hung like his undoing’ and ‘the unstuck sole of his left boot grinned like fate’. In “Night Flight” he perfectly sums up the unattractiveness of airline catering in economy class: ‘my plastic mess / of tumbled wine, of miniatures half drunk, of blunt kindergarten knives’. In “Geranium ICU (1967)” he captures and records the distinctive smells and sensations in a hospital ward
Odour of must and acetone,
anaesthesia, days and days,
clung like nausea.
These well crafted poems deal with everyday matters and so they will sometimes trigger a pleasurable sense of recognition. But they can also surprise us by presenting small experiences that are distinctly unfamiliar.
Sep 24 2024
London Grip Poetry Review – Ron Scowcroft
Poetry review – SMALL AND NECESSARY LIVES: Michael Bartholomew-Biggs admires Ron Scowcroft’s ability to capture moments that might easily be missed
So much in life these days seems transactional; and perhaps that is why I tend to use the word ‘necessary’ to signify ‘required for some worthwhile purpose’ much more often than its other legitimate sense of ‘inevitable’. But in his new pamphlet Small and Necessary Lives, I think Ron Scowcroft may be laying more emphasis on that second meaning. Consider the poem “Loft Bats” for instance. To have bats in a building is often highly counterproductive if one’s purpose is to make structural alterations. But Scowcroft expresses a tolerant attitude to their tendency to ‘drop guano / like quotation marks / below the roost.’ Indeed, if one accepts their presence as a given, there is pleasure to be found in seeing them ‘loom and retreat as if on elastic / sign the sky in arabesques’.
There aren’t many wild animals that can be said to perform a useful function from a human point of view – except perhaps to be the substance of rumours and legends with which we seem to enjoy scaring ourselves. “After the Wolf” begins in traditionally ominous fashion
However efforts to catch the dreadful beast only yield ‘a corpse / shrunk to the size of a stray dog’. And after the fearfulness of the poem’s beginning it is the smallness of the creature’s life that emerges rather than its inexorability.
Another thing that might seem inessential to Western rationalism is the kind of intuition which survives among so-called ‘primitive’ cultures living closer to the natural world than we do. “A Prophecy of Fools” is based on accounts that inhabitants of small islands in the Indian Ocean predicted the tsunami of 2004 then retreated to safety away from the shoreline
Here we are reminded of the smallness and frailty of human life within wider creation. But the next poem ”Flatland” seems to show that mankind can also be threatened by landscapes of his own making. It is set in a place where ‘every narrow lane/ between the fields’ turns out to be ‘a right angle to nowhere’. There are relics of past activity: ‘a single storey grounded under corrugated zinc’; ‘sump oil in the soil’; and vehicles ‘buried in dead / snatches of garden.’ Is this a poisoned industrial complex? A military training area? There are still some inhabitants but ‘when I ask for directions / people strain at my intonation’ so the poet has only himself to rely on and must ‘resolve to walk my way out.’ This is a wonderfully menacing poem even if its setting remains ambiguous.
Further on in the book Scowcroft returns to the idea behind ‘people strain at my intonation’ – the way that accent and dialect can hinder communication – but does so in much lighter vein.
The poet does not understand what his neighbour means but
Over the next couple of verses the poet begins to learn a little of the rural vocabulary; but in the final stanza the roles are reversed when the narrator finally has a chance to speak about his own job as a teacher and mentions ‘Ofsted routes through lesson plans’. Now it is the neighbour who ‘nods as if he understands.’
I see this collection as a celebration of everything inconsequential and eccentric that unavoidably surrounds us. And it is Scowcroft’s eye for detail – and his ability to describe it creatively – that enables him to achieve this. In “Dancing on the Parapet” a builder, for no apparent reason, decides to perform some fancy footwork ‘five floors up’. Even while alarmed at his recklessness, Scowcroft has time to notice ‘his untied shoelace hung like his undoing’ and ‘the unstuck sole of his left boot grinned like fate’. In “Night Flight” he perfectly sums up the unattractiveness of airline catering in economy class: ‘my plastic mess / of tumbled wine, of miniatures half drunk, of blunt kindergarten knives’. In “Geranium ICU (1967)” he captures and records the distinctive smells and sensations in a hospital ward
These well crafted poems deal with everyday matters and so they will sometimes trigger a pleasurable sense of recognition. But they can also surprise us by presenting small experiences that are distinctly unfamiliar.