Poetry review – VANISHING POINT: Pat Edwards sees Colin Bancroft’s poems as a travel guide and the poet himself as a travelling companion
Vanishing Point
Colin Bancroft
Broken Sleep Books
ISBN 978-1-916938-76-2
£11.99
This small collection feels like a map of places and situations, some familiar, others less so. It is as if the reader is taken on a bus tour and is able to explore, stopping here and there to take in the location and to think about the impact each place has had on their life.
The poet opens by reflecting upon the resilience of plants, of nature – maybe of us all – and the ability to put ‘down roots in the most unlikely place’. But , by contrast, his next poem reminds us everything is transient and that even nature cannot always hold back human activity like housing development. He also talks of the way the infamous HS2 rail workings have already devastated great chunks of the countryside, comparing the line to the zip on a jacket, ‘a train track running past my heart’. More of HS2 later.
Some sites Bancroft takes us to on his tour are places of historic interest such as where great battles were fought. At these the landscape has changed little – fields are still bound by hedges, farmers use them for livestock, birds circle overhead and boulders emerge then return to the earth.
In the poem “Lumb” I think the poet is referencing the Lancashire village which, he tells us, remains wonderfully green to this day and is surrounded by trees. Clearly, the poet feels great affinity with wild places and recognises that others before him have been similarly moved. But perhaps as the collection title implies, these views and extraordinary landscapes hold echoes of our industrial past, strewn as they are with evidence of mining and the like. The poet also muses on what lies deep underground, using the idea of hidden secrets, ‘the unseen world’ as being a little like our thought processes and how ideas and fears can grow beneath the surface.
Up in the North Pennines Bancroft encounters Little and Great Dun Fell, taking us back two centuries to the days of textile mills where work was arduous and the walk home not a pleasant leisure pursuit but a necessity. In the next poem he hints that he is not just a fair-weather walker. He tells us of an epic hike in a storm where he is reminded of seeing a painting that depicts a similar scene. Clearly invigorated, even scared, by the energy of dramatic landscape and ‘the waterfall in spate’, Bancroft uses this imagery to think of those ‘teetering on the brink…not even trying to swim’. There is definitely something other-worldly about the force of nature and the poet captures this well
The bracken blown flat
by the wind, the sky a blackening bruise
In “Gauging the Flood” the poet continues his exploration of the power of wild water. People are helpless ‘as the flood swallows streets, houses, shops’; and yet, in its own time, it subsides ‘unspools its anger’ as if nothing ever happened. “Raspberry Picking at High Force” ‘borrows’ somewhat from “Blackberry-Picking” by Seamus Heaney, with its use of ‘tiny blood clots’ and ‘bracken rots in the understorey’. However, we can forgive the poet because his perspective is more uplifting than Heaney’s,
The birds will sing again,
transfusing summer into their songs
Bancroft brings a very different mood to his writing when he invites us to join him by night in his chosen places. To be driving along and to suddenly come upon ‘five horses stood in the road/solid and heavy in their own air’ is to share in his ‘sense of wonder’. Likewise in “Capacity for Joy”, the poet writes of unspecified animals, ‘I cannot see them but they are there’. They could be the horses of the previous poem because ‘they crop grass, drink from the reed/tassled pool’ and the poet comes ‘as close to understanding as we will ever be’.
Moving further north to Northumberland, we visit Etal Castle, somewhere that fills our poet with nostalgia for his younger days. Soon we are in Scotland, in Braemar, and something has been lost and there is weeping. Instead of a remembered storm that ‘bent the tent poles’ we are observing a personal crisis of some sort where someone is holding onto his shirt in their ‘stooped sadness’. The poet is supporting this person
As though without a firm
Grip you might take off and end up somewhere
Beyond that valley, that field and these stairs
The memory of windswept camping feels very much like a metaphor for whatever current situation is unfolding, maybe a parent with dementia or another loved one who is profoundly ill.
Continuing the theme of recalling the past, Bancroft gives us thoughts on looking through library collections and on John Clare’s ’green coat’. Of course, John Clare would be horrified to think of the way modern technology has rampaged across the British countryside, so I was particularly drawn to the poem “HS2” for its clever use of alternating words beginning with H and S. Bancroft lists flora and fauna such as ‘Honeysuckle. Squirrels. Hawthorn. Sedge’ and inserts in italics ‘Harmed. Suffered’ before concluding ‘High/Speed.Homogenised Society. Happening Soon.’
Bancroft writes beautifully of natural wonders and clearly delights in describing them but I think he has a particular knack for the darker side, be it a frozen pool or finding a doe and her fawn dead in some long grass, ‘thoughts of which of the two/I hoped had gone first.’
Fallen trees, a disused tractor, people we lose, rusting posts, dangerous rocks close to the sea are all there to bring us into contact with the brutal reality of life. Bancroft seems to really feel these broken, fading, decrepit facets of our co-existence with nature. They resonate for me too and I think they will for many other readers because these are our real experiences.
Vanishing Point is a compact book, but it packs a poetic punch. Like all good journeys, often the joy is in the route planning, the twists and turns. Then once on the move, the trip is enhanced by the folk we meet along the way, checking the map, doing some research, looking back to where we’ve been, seeing how far we’ve come. And finally there is the remembering of it all, even the uncomfortable episodes.
Jun 2 2025
London Grip Poetry Review – Colin Bancroft
Poetry review – VANISHING POINT: Pat Edwards sees Colin Bancroft’s poems as a travel guide and the poet himself as a travelling companion
This small collection feels like a map of places and situations, some familiar, others less so. It is as if the reader is taken on a bus tour and is able to explore, stopping here and there to take in the location and to think about the impact each place has had on their life.
The poet opens by reflecting upon the resilience of plants, of nature – maybe of us all – and the ability to put ‘down roots in the most unlikely place’. But , by contrast, his next poem reminds us everything is transient and that even nature cannot always hold back human activity like housing development. He also talks of the way the infamous HS2 rail workings have already devastated great chunks of the countryside, comparing the line to the zip on a jacket, ‘a train track running past my heart’. More of HS2 later.
Some sites Bancroft takes us to on his tour are places of historic interest such as where great battles were fought. At these the landscape has changed little – fields are still bound by hedges, farmers use them for livestock, birds circle overhead and boulders emerge then return to the earth.
In the poem “Lumb” I think the poet is referencing the Lancashire village which, he tells us, remains wonderfully green to this day and is surrounded by trees. Clearly, the poet feels great affinity with wild places and recognises that others before him have been similarly moved. But perhaps as the collection title implies, these views and extraordinary landscapes hold echoes of our industrial past, strewn as they are with evidence of mining and the like. The poet also muses on what lies deep underground, using the idea of hidden secrets, ‘the unseen world’ as being a little like our thought processes and how ideas and fears can grow beneath the surface.
Up in the North Pennines Bancroft encounters Little and Great Dun Fell, taking us back two centuries to the days of textile mills where work was arduous and the walk home not a pleasant leisure pursuit but a necessity. In the next poem he hints that he is not just a fair-weather walker. He tells us of an epic hike in a storm where he is reminded of seeing a painting that depicts a similar scene. Clearly invigorated, even scared, by the energy of dramatic landscape and ‘the waterfall in spate’, Bancroft uses this imagery to think of those ‘teetering on the brink…not even trying to swim’. There is definitely something other-worldly about the force of nature and the poet captures this well
In “Gauging the Flood” the poet continues his exploration of the power of wild water. People are helpless ‘as the flood swallows streets, houses, shops’; and yet, in its own time, it subsides ‘unspools its anger’ as if nothing ever happened. “Raspberry Picking at High Force” ‘borrows’ somewhat from “Blackberry-Picking” by Seamus Heaney, with its use of ‘tiny blood clots’ and ‘bracken rots in the understorey’. However, we can forgive the poet because his perspective is more uplifting than Heaney’s,
Bancroft brings a very different mood to his writing when he invites us to join him by night in his chosen places. To be driving along and to suddenly come upon ‘five horses stood in the road/solid and heavy in their own air’ is to share in his ‘sense of wonder’. Likewise in “Capacity for Joy”, the poet writes of unspecified animals, ‘I cannot see them but they are there’. They could be the horses of the previous poem because ‘they crop grass, drink from the reed/tassled pool’ and the poet comes ‘as close to understanding as we will ever be’.
Moving further north to Northumberland, we visit Etal Castle, somewhere that fills our poet with nostalgia for his younger days. Soon we are in Scotland, in Braemar, and something has been lost and there is weeping. Instead of a remembered storm that ‘bent the tent poles’ we are observing a personal crisis of some sort where someone is holding onto his shirt in their ‘stooped sadness’. The poet is supporting this person
The memory of windswept camping feels very much like a metaphor for whatever current situation is unfolding, maybe a parent with dementia or another loved one who is profoundly ill.
Continuing the theme of recalling the past, Bancroft gives us thoughts on looking through library collections and on John Clare’s ’green coat’. Of course, John Clare would be horrified to think of the way modern technology has rampaged across the British countryside, so I was particularly drawn to the poem “HS2” for its clever use of alternating words beginning with H and S. Bancroft lists flora and fauna such as ‘Honeysuckle. Squirrels. Hawthorn. Sedge’ and inserts in italics ‘Harmed. Suffered’ before concluding ‘High/Speed.Homogenised Society. Happening Soon.’
Bancroft writes beautifully of natural wonders and clearly delights in describing them but I think he has a particular knack for the darker side, be it a frozen pool or finding a doe and her fawn dead in some long grass, ‘thoughts of which of the two/I hoped had gone first.’
Fallen trees, a disused tractor, people we lose, rusting posts, dangerous rocks close to the sea are all there to bring us into contact with the brutal reality of life. Bancroft seems to really feel these broken, fading, decrepit facets of our co-existence with nature. They resonate for me too and I think they will for many other readers because these are our real experiences.
Vanishing Point is a compact book, but it packs a poetic punch. Like all good journeys, often the joy is in the route planning, the twists and turns. Then once on the move, the trip is enhanced by the folk we meet along the way, checking the map, doing some research, looking back to where we’ve been, seeing how far we’ve come. And finally there is the remembering of it all, even the uncomfortable episodes.