Poetry review: Merryn Williams looks at recent collections by Paul Binding, Rennie Parker and Andrew Sant
The Cloud Messenger, Paul Binding
Shoestring Press, ISBN: 9781915553294, £8
balloons and stripey trousers, Rennie Parker,
Shoestring Press, ISBN: 9781915553423, £10.
Natural Wonders, Andrew Sant
Shoestring Press, ISBN 978-1915553553, £11.
Shoestring Press was founded in Nottingham, by John Lucas as long ago as 1994. It’s still here, taking on what it describes as ‘established but unfashionable poets’ (and sometimes compiling intriguing anthologies – Nottingham poets, Covid poets, admirers of Jeremy Corbyn, Georgian poets of the last century). Here we consider three of its recent single-author collections from 2023/4.
Paul Binding’s The Cloud Messenger is based in the lovely Shropshire countryside and brings together two men from two centuries – Gustav Holst, who composed a work of the same name and who wrote some fascinating letters on a hill-walking trip in April 1928 – and Pete, an imaginary character from Binding’s novel After Brock (which I must confess I haven’t read). Pete has personal problems, and has moved out of London to Shropshire, where he keeps a shop called High Flyers which sells kites. Drinking at the Sun pub in Clun in April 1924 he meets an elderly man who loves music and hill-walking and we realize – even if he doesn’t – that this is the ghost of the composer.
It’s an interesting idea; I liked reading Holst’s letters to Adeline Vaughan Williams, and Paul Binding is a fine poet. The descriptions of hills, clouds and kites are lovely. But I’m not sure that the two halves of this book fit together, because Holst is so obviously a more interesting person than Pete and, unless we have read more, we don’t know enough about the latter’s history.
Rennie Parker’s balloons and stripey trousers takes is into ‘the toxic workplace’. The exact function of that workplace hardly matters; the point is that workers, especially women, are not valued. An interview, in “not suitable for the post”, leads nowhere, (‘the girlfriend or the daughter of the chairman will get the job’). We are in a world of polite rejection letters, lives packed in cardboard boxes, single women lying about their age and office parties where you drink warm champagne from plastic cups. Few of these workers do anything useful, except in one poem, “eleven teaching assistants descending a staircase”, which is about adults who try to benefit disadvantaged children, but can’t. Or consider “the desperate life of Monica Jones”, Larkin’s significant other, an Oxford graduate and lecturer at a provincial university. A high-achieving woman, but she is remembered only for her connection with the great man:
If anyone asks me what I did with my wonderful life
I will say I was an actress, because
you cannot be the midwife unto genius
while being an actual wife, you know
Parker describes Monica as ‘the one aquamarine in a whole desert of pebbles’, never allowed into literary charmed circles. A lovely metaphor.
Andrew Sant, a widely-travelled poet based in Australia, has brought out a substantial collection, Natural Wonders, much of which is about the animals of the world. He calls himself a herpetologist (lover of frogs) and is delighted by the creatures’ infinite variety. Wasps, spiders, sea urchins and turtles all appear, and can even join an argument about religion, as in the poem “Metaphysical”:
Where there’s not a whisker
of evidence, there’s faith in the existence
of a preposterous, personal God,
yet when I spotted
the astonishing presence in our house
of a long-tailed, brown, hopping
marsupial mouse – soon caught
by my hand for swift release –
and then later recounted this,
there was universal doubt.
I especially liked “Deep Days of a Dendrochronologist”, where the poet studies a tree’s rings, an ‘unopened book’ recording ‘evidence of more than two thousand summers’ which included climate disasters, and reflects that a ‘catastrophic climate hit’ may happen one day. There are also darker poems about child abuse, suicide and a long stay in hospital. “A Short History of civility” and “Hostility Lessons” look at violence between men or by humans to animals, and query whether it’s inevitable. Such questioning is highly relevant in the year 2025.
The world would be poorer without good unfashionable poetry books such as these.
Feb 28 2025
London Grip Poetry Reviews – Paul Binding, Rennie Parker, Andrew Sant
Poetry review: Merryn Williams looks at recent collections by Paul Binding, Rennie Parker and Andrew Sant
Shoestring Press was founded in Nottingham, by John Lucas as long ago as 1994. It’s still here, taking on what it describes as ‘established but unfashionable poets’ (and sometimes compiling intriguing anthologies – Nottingham poets, Covid poets, admirers of Jeremy Corbyn, Georgian poets of the last century). Here we consider three of its recent single-author collections from 2023/4.
Paul Binding’s The Cloud Messenger is based in the lovely Shropshire countryside and brings together two men from two centuries – Gustav Holst, who composed a work of the same name and who wrote some fascinating letters on a hill-walking trip in April 1928 – and Pete, an imaginary character from Binding’s novel After Brock (which I must confess I haven’t read). Pete has personal problems, and has moved out of London to Shropshire, where he keeps a shop called High Flyers which sells kites. Drinking at the Sun pub in Clun in April 1924 he meets an elderly man who loves music and hill-walking and we realize – even if he doesn’t – that this is the ghost of the composer.
It’s an interesting idea; I liked reading Holst’s letters to Adeline Vaughan Williams, and Paul Binding is a fine poet. The descriptions of hills, clouds and kites are lovely. But I’m not sure that the two halves of this book fit together, because Holst is so obviously a more interesting person than Pete and, unless we have read more, we don’t know enough about the latter’s history.
Rennie Parker’s balloons and stripey trousers takes is into ‘the toxic workplace’. The exact function of that workplace hardly matters; the point is that workers, especially women, are not valued. An interview, in “not suitable for the post”, leads nowhere, (‘the girlfriend or the daughter of the chairman will get the job’). We are in a world of polite rejection letters, lives packed in cardboard boxes, single women lying about their age and office parties where you drink warm champagne from plastic cups. Few of these workers do anything useful, except in one poem, “eleven teaching assistants descending a staircase”, which is about adults who try to benefit disadvantaged children, but can’t. Or consider “the desperate life of Monica Jones”, Larkin’s significant other, an Oxford graduate and lecturer at a provincial university. A high-achieving woman, but she is remembered only for her connection with the great man:
Parker describes Monica as ‘the one aquamarine in a whole desert of pebbles’, never allowed into literary charmed circles. A lovely metaphor.
Andrew Sant, a widely-travelled poet based in Australia, has brought out a substantial collection, Natural Wonders, much of which is about the animals of the world. He calls himself a herpetologist (lover of frogs) and is delighted by the creatures’ infinite variety. Wasps, spiders, sea urchins and turtles all appear, and can even join an argument about religion, as in the poem “Metaphysical”:
I especially liked “Deep Days of a Dendrochronologist”, where the poet studies a tree’s rings, an ‘unopened book’ recording ‘evidence of more than two thousand summers’ which included climate disasters, and reflects that a ‘catastrophic climate hit’ may happen one day. There are also darker poems about child abuse, suicide and a long stay in hospital. “A Short History of civility” and “Hostility Lessons” look at violence between men or by humans to animals, and query whether it’s inevitable. Such questioning is highly relevant in the year 2025.
The world would be poorer without good unfashionable poetry books such as these.