Poetry review – IN THE HERE AND NOW: D A Prince commends the craft and wide range displayed in Janet Montefiore’s selected poems
In the Here and Now: Selected Poems 1975-2023
Janet Montefiore
Shoestring Press, 2024
ISBN 978-1-915553-54-6
£10.00
A Selected allows more leeway than a tidily-mapped collection. Instead of poems relating conscientiously to each other, perhaps even to a theme, the poet can roam around, choosing poems that stand out for all sorts of different reasons. In the Here and Now shows Janet Montefiore drawing on the range of her poetry, bringing poems from a long writing life into the present. She has also dared to include pastiche and formal light verse, those neglected and demanding genres that require an ear perfectly tuned to metre and diction. Perhaps that’s why we don’t see much of it (in public) these days: it’s just too difficult, too time-consuming. It’s also a challenge to integrate ‘lighter’ poems with others which deal with the larger themes expected in poetry — love, death, grief to name a few — yet she’s achieved this. The result is a collection reflecting the fullness of her life.
It works, I think, because she prepares the reader, beginning with poems of childhood and family life: these are familiar ground in terms of subject as well as establishing her voice and command of technique. In “What I told the dead man”, her opening poem, she is writing from ‘my stitched leaking body’ after childbirth. In the hazy drugged sleep of dream and physical pain, she meets a dead man and tells her story —
So I told the dead man
how his grandson was born, pouring out language not blood,
and I saw it meant nothing though he listened patiently, with a decent pretence
of interest. Dear ghost, his mind was elsewhere,
on his own dissolution, as the deep river ran into darkness.
The long lines and free form suit the mix of family and near-dream: only as the poem ends is this man’s identity revealed. “Disposing of the clothes” — which is also the title of a pamphlet (Shoestring Press, 2019) — uses the sonnet form to describe her father’s clothes after his death. The octet deals with the public man: ‘His mitres, stoles and cope we gave away,/ the cloth of gold, lawn sleeves […]/ some other bishop will be glad to wear it’ before the sestet turns to the private, family man —
but not his baggy blue sweater and trousers,
not even Oxfam would have wanted those.
And when his house was stripped, I asked the movers
who’d cleared the rooms of sofas, books and sermons
to leave Pa’s anorak hanging by the stairs
ready for one more walk on Wandsworth Common.
The movement of subtle half-rhymes through this sonnet — and elsewhere in Montefiore’s poems — is handled lightly, like echoes from memory. She writes, too, of her mother’s slower death as her memory deteriorates.
Words are gone,
vanished in the dark of her skull, as if they never were.
There remain only fragments.
Can you tell me? followed
by a jumble of syllables. We can tell her nothing.
Her eyes, sunk in their pits, see us without knowledge
and without love. ("Another Time: for E.M.M.")
That painful ‘without love’ is clarified in adjacent poems: it’s dementia that has severed the connections, and Montefiore shows how her mother had shaped her knowledge of the natural world, languages, books, the psalms, poetry. ‘Feeling and intelligence were dead’ she writes poignantly in “Last Words”. She has inherited her mother’s emotional colour: in “What Mothers do: Canterbury and Baghdad 1991” she works with longer lines — and how initially these suggest mere anecdote — to take the reader close into her own family.
As the TV winks and chatters, our son who should be asleep
is playing with Lego, not knowing yet that his journalist father
has gone back to the war zone, which is partly why I’m watching.
I have to tell him, tomorrow, though I dread his fearful question
What if they bomb Daddy’s hotel in Baghdad?
It’s a heart-stopping moment in the poem, this contrast between Lego and the Iraq war. (Montefiore’s husband was the journalist Patrick Cockburn and this collection is dedicated to him.) The TV camera continues its news story, searching for a focus, finding it in an Iraqi woman, sitting beside the body of her son.
Her face stares out of the screen
in our bright untidy room, the face of someone trapped
in a bad dream, her son broken past help or comfort,
and still she stays by his side, doing what mothers do.
But there’s more. The camera pulls back and Montefiore sees her husband (‘his face twisted in pity’) among the newsmen and fears her son will recognise him, and subsequently the horror of the scene. The contrast between her own safety and the ‘… Iraqi pietá’ is sharply defined by the repetition of the one phrase —
I put the boy to bed, tuck him in safe and warm,
wait for his breathing to quieten, doing what mothers do.
Dreams and nightmares appear frequently in these poems. “Feathered the bed of nightmare” uses the form, often found in poems for children, where one detail leads to the next until the whole edifice of the poem is complete. Here it’s something as small as a single feather in an eiderdown, each stanza beginning with the repeated ‘Feathered the …’. The effect is cumulative: it makes visual the bird’s death, the marksman, the cold, the blood through the lengthening stanzas.
Feathered the sky with icy down
as light as mist as cold as stone
that fills the air when the bird has gone
the fluttering bird whose death is guilt
whose feathers are plucked to stuff the quilt
that covers the bed of nightmare
Relentless, rhymed to emphasise the inescapable death, and no full stops to bring the stanzas, or the poem, to a close: this is a nightmare that goes on, and on.
So let’s turn to her light verse and how Montefiore has prepared the reader for a change of tone. References to books and literary quotations have been part of earlier poems, naturally: they appeared organically. Montefiore is Professor Emerita of the University of Kent, where she taught English and American Literature, Women’s Studies and Creative Writing, with publication of her own poetry running in parallel. In the Here and Now has fifty-two pages of poetry and ten pages are given over to a single poem. “The Lecturer’s Dream” is a literature-packed tour de force in ottava rima. A nod to Don Juan? Of course! A nod, too, to W.H.Auden — although he opted for rhyme royal for his “Letter to Lord Byron”. The first stanza takes the reader straight in —
“Thus author, metaphorically, is father
The Book, his heir. As every reader knows ….”
I simply couldn’t read it any farther,
My horn-rimmed spectacles slid down my nose.
A slumber did my spirit seal — or rather,
A numbing torpor did my eyelids close.
Upon the text my weary forehead slumped,
And sleepy images within it bumped.
There’s a long tradition of guiding spirits in epic poetry and the lecturer encounters one: she hails him as Stetson, only to be told that’s the wrong poem. Instead he’s a ‘Mythological Entity’ —
This Being was unusually designed:
It wore a wreath of Laurel on Its head;
Its right hand clasped a golden bough, with nine
Dependent silver apples, and there led
A cord from this whose coiling knots entwined
A white hound with (you’ve guessed it) ears of red.
The lecturer is guided — not to the underworld but to the British Museum Reading Room — to meet the familiar figures from her teaching: novelists, poets, the writers ‘Who normally stayed quietly on the shelves’, relaxing in a bad-tempered game of ‘Literary Happy Families’. Like Byron and Auden, Montefiore leans out of her own poem to comment on the strain of keeping up a tightly-structured form —
(The strain of keeping up ottava rima
Has tempted me to slack half-rhyming ways:
Apologies from your distracted dreamer.)
Jane Austen’s turn, and as you’d guess, she plays
A wily game, getting a Moral Theme, a
Symbolic Paradox (a card that pays
Double) and Biting Irony from Dickens,
At which a vein upon his temple thickens.
The references come fast, rolling over each other, racing on, strong on humour. I hope this is enough to tempt you to track down the whole poem, along with the concluding Occasional Poems, rhymed of course. Such poems are often down-played as too slight to feature in a collection. The skill required, control of sustained humour, and wit in the rhymes shown here bring a lively conclusion to this strong Selected. To give so much space to what is often dismissed — and ‘light’ verse is often written off — challenges received opinion that it’s less worthy of a reader’s attention. In the Here and Now shows by the arrangement of poems that the tradition of light verse can co-exist alongside ‘weightier’ poems: it takes a lifetime of writing to achieve this.
Apr 30 2025
London Grip Poetry Review – Janet Montefiore
Poetry review – IN THE HERE AND NOW: D A Prince commends the craft and wide range displayed in Janet Montefiore’s selected poems
A Selected allows more leeway than a tidily-mapped collection. Instead of poems relating conscientiously to each other, perhaps even to a theme, the poet can roam around, choosing poems that stand out for all sorts of different reasons. In the Here and Now shows Janet Montefiore drawing on the range of her poetry, bringing poems from a long writing life into the present. She has also dared to include pastiche and formal light verse, those neglected and demanding genres that require an ear perfectly tuned to metre and diction. Perhaps that’s why we don’t see much of it (in public) these days: it’s just too difficult, too time-consuming. It’s also a challenge to integrate ‘lighter’ poems with others which deal with the larger themes expected in poetry — love, death, grief to name a few — yet she’s achieved this. The result is a collection reflecting the fullness of her life.
It works, I think, because she prepares the reader, beginning with poems of childhood and family life: these are familiar ground in terms of subject as well as establishing her voice and command of technique. In “What I told the dead man”, her opening poem, she is writing from ‘my stitched leaking body’ after childbirth. In the hazy drugged sleep of dream and physical pain, she meets a dead man and tells her story —
The long lines and free form suit the mix of family and near-dream: only as the poem ends is this man’s identity revealed. “Disposing of the clothes” — which is also the title of a pamphlet (Shoestring Press, 2019) — uses the sonnet form to describe her father’s clothes after his death. The octet deals with the public man: ‘His mitres, stoles and cope we gave away,/ the cloth of gold, lawn sleeves […]/ some other bishop will be glad to wear it’ before the sestet turns to the private, family man —
The movement of subtle half-rhymes through this sonnet — and elsewhere in Montefiore’s poems — is handled lightly, like echoes from memory. She writes, too, of her mother’s slower death as her memory deteriorates.
Words are gone, vanished in the dark of her skull, as if they never were. There remain only fragments. Can you tell me? followed by a jumble of syllables. We can tell her nothing. Her eyes, sunk in their pits, see us without knowledge and without love. ("Another Time: for E.M.M.")That painful ‘without love’ is clarified in adjacent poems: it’s dementia that has severed the connections, and Montefiore shows how her mother had shaped her knowledge of the natural world, languages, books, the psalms, poetry. ‘Feeling and intelligence were dead’ she writes poignantly in “Last Words”. She has inherited her mother’s emotional colour: in “What Mothers do: Canterbury and Baghdad 1991” she works with longer lines — and how initially these suggest mere anecdote — to take the reader close into her own family.
It’s a heart-stopping moment in the poem, this contrast between Lego and the Iraq war. (Montefiore’s husband was the journalist Patrick Cockburn and this collection is dedicated to him.) The TV camera continues its news story, searching for a focus, finding it in an Iraqi woman, sitting beside the body of her son.
But there’s more. The camera pulls back and Montefiore sees her husband (‘his face twisted in pity’) among the newsmen and fears her son will recognise him, and subsequently the horror of the scene. The contrast between her own safety and the ‘… Iraqi pietá’ is sharply defined by the repetition of the one phrase —
Dreams and nightmares appear frequently in these poems. “Feathered the bed of nightmare” uses the form, often found in poems for children, where one detail leads to the next until the whole edifice of the poem is complete. Here it’s something as small as a single feather in an eiderdown, each stanza beginning with the repeated ‘Feathered the …’. The effect is cumulative: it makes visual the bird’s death, the marksman, the cold, the blood through the lengthening stanzas.
Relentless, rhymed to emphasise the inescapable death, and no full stops to bring the stanzas, or the poem, to a close: this is a nightmare that goes on, and on.
So let’s turn to her light verse and how Montefiore has prepared the reader for a change of tone. References to books and literary quotations have been part of earlier poems, naturally: they appeared organically. Montefiore is Professor Emerita of the University of Kent, where she taught English and American Literature, Women’s Studies and Creative Writing, with publication of her own poetry running in parallel. In the Here and Now has fifty-two pages of poetry and ten pages are given over to a single poem. “The Lecturer’s Dream” is a literature-packed tour de force in ottava rima. A nod to Don Juan? Of course! A nod, too, to W.H.Auden — although he opted for rhyme royal for his “Letter to Lord Byron”. The first stanza takes the reader straight in —
There’s a long tradition of guiding spirits in epic poetry and the lecturer encounters one: she hails him as Stetson, only to be told that’s the wrong poem. Instead he’s a ‘Mythological Entity’ —
The lecturer is guided — not to the underworld but to the British Museum Reading Room — to meet the familiar figures from her teaching: novelists, poets, the writers ‘Who normally stayed quietly on the shelves’, relaxing in a bad-tempered game of ‘Literary Happy Families’. Like Byron and Auden, Montefiore leans out of her own poem to comment on the strain of keeping up a tightly-structured form —
The references come fast, rolling over each other, racing on, strong on humour. I hope this is enough to tempt you to track down the whole poem, along with the concluding Occasional Poems, rhymed of course. Such poems are often down-played as too slight to feature in a collection. The skill required, control of sustained humour, and wit in the rhymes shown here bring a lively conclusion to this strong Selected. To give so much space to what is often dismissed — and ‘light’ verse is often written off — challenges received opinion that it’s less worthy of a reader’s attention. In the Here and Now shows by the arrangement of poems that the tradition of light verse can co-exist alongside ‘weightier’ poems: it takes a lifetime of writing to achieve this.