Poetry review – CHOSEN GROUND: Colin Pink admires the witty and wise explorations of life’s puzzles in this new collection by Christopher M James
Chosen Ground
Christopher M James
Mosaique Press, 2025
ISBN 978-1-906852-72-6
£9.99
Chistopher M James’s collection Chosen Ground explores, through a wide and inventive series of poetic forms, what a ‘chosen ground’ might mean to us. What choices do we make in life? How is it that we discover ourselves in a particular place at a particular time? This contemplative yet dynamic collection investigates the kind of existential choices we make and their consequences, whether that is travelling and living abroad, responding to our family background or whom we choose to love.
The choices we make are always set against our childhood background and the first section of the book “Coming in to land” focuses on childhood experiences of growing up in London. It begins (“Old Shots”) with a leaf through some family photos kept in an old shoe box:
Some are stuck together
as families were entreated to do,
most curled with years, like
the bleached handwriting behind.
There’s a man whose hair is blown to one side ‘like a strong blown flame / of a hand-held torch’, there’ are two sisters in flapper dresses ‘bordering on drag /from Some Like It Hot’. The final photo is of a woman ‘confiscated by motherhood, / who looks pretty / in the right play of light’. In this poem the quick succession of pictorial images creates a vivid sense of the aspirations and disappointments of everyday life.
James has an acute eye for the irksome obstacles in life, such as those revealed in “Reception” in which the family grapples with an old-fashioned TV aerial to try and get that elusive clear picture that seemed:
somehow beyond our reach
on obscure wavelengths. Once
we three managed to position it:
unsure of how, we stood there
barely daring to move.
This demonstrates James’s ability to create witty poems about singular situations that immediately resonate as true but carry far wider implications the more one ponders them.
Minor tragedies give way to a major tragedy in “Aberfan” about the landslide disaster in Wales, with ‘Cliff Michelmore, in stark black and white, / his words threading, stitching, // beside himself with grief. / My mother never cried so much.’
In “Round” the poet recalls doing his boyhood paper-round in ‘Those days before child abuse / I was let out early // to deliver thousands and read none’. In many of these poems sudden aperçus leap out at the reader, such as in the prose poem “Cranford Park” where childhood memories are left behind on going off to college, but: ‘Suburbs are like purgatory that you never leave’.
This section of the book concludes with poems of mourning for his parents, “Villain Knell”, with a nod to Dylan Thomas, is a villanelle on the death of his father. “Carrying You” is a very poignant poem describing the journey in a hearse:
Cars champing to overtake –
our driver knows the crematorium’s
just-in-time – we arrive with you
at the last moment
and carrying the coffin:
a cold handle, a wedged shoulder,
that moment of touching
we never did before.
The next section of the book, “Oncoming Faces”, consists of poems written when the author lived in Thailand. “Sea-horses” is a tender love poem, told slant, inspired by seeing sea-horses on sale at the Chinese market, their ‘tiny swollen bellies of famine babies / minus the imploring eyes’. We then learn of the mating and parenting behaviour of the sea-horse:
It’s courtly love too: chessboard knights
on Poisidonia bedding. A
gallant male makes his opening gambit,
carries the embryos …
The final stanza shifts focus to the human companion who has imparted all this fascinating knowledge about sea-horses:
And what do I know of you?
I watch you twirling your hair
a single lock between your fingers,
wonder how to win such things.
The prose poem “We’re all in someone else’s story” is a masterpiece of miniature storytelling about moving into Chiang Mai where reality merges into fantasy.
When we moved in, our German neighbour was already dying. He
watched us arriving from a window. Got up from his bed once to visit.
Told us we were paying too much rent … Told us he was the surviving,
secret grandson of Hitler … I listened, pocketed his narrative like an
expired membership card. At his cremation, his tattooed biker friend
helped to bear the coffin. But the usual firecrackers seemed oddly
inappropriate.
“Strays, Hua Hin” is a richly associative poem inspired by seeing stray dogs: ‘They cross-cross, regroup, / trot suddenly lock-eyed’ and later ‘Monks alone / trail a hand as they pass, / for them to whiff’ which leads into a Buddhist meditation on the consequences of our actions and reincarnation ‘I lean forward / in our car’s solipsism, / wary of harm I could do to them, / or by ricochet you say / what might befall me.’
“Yi Peng” beautifully evokes the festival of lanterns where a multitude of flaming lanterns are released into the sky like miniature hot-air balloons. The poem effortlessly shifts from practical particulars to metaphysical speculation:
… light the wick, and the trick
is to hold it so low and firm by its thin edge
that the stored heat hoists it up like it means it,
releasing the past inside you.
Silent couples drink in the beautiful pearled sky,
each tracking far away their own single lantern,
wavering or headstrong like offspring
until lost to others or out of sight.
The third and final section of the book, titled “Vanishing Points” takes us to other places, such as Iceland, Ireland and France, but with an underlying appreciation of the quiddity of life and an acknowledgement of the finitude of existence. The section’s title poem observes that ‘somehow – they shall meet up / bags in hand, at the buffer of infinity’.
James’s wry take on everyday life is to the fore in “Back in my village”, a witty account of shopping in a French village where ‘they talk a lot in shops, fill in the gaps, / say what they know to catch // what they don’t…’ Likewise, in “All clear” James captures perfectly the experience of waiting for tests at a hospital where ‘No-one talks except the staff, / trained to overcompensate’. With the bare bones of a life noted on a form ‘minus all the blazing dawns and dusks’ the patients:
then sit among zipped faces
in the small, resonant silence
they’ve wrapped in coats. Where are we
when we are not yet called?
“Breakfast protocol”, with its allusion to Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, uses an egg-timer as a metaphor for not just the passage of time but the interlinked chain of generations:
progeny from a long lineage,
raised as cliffs,
educated as shingle, grown up refined.
Now, in single file they fall,
fall apart –
that is not what I meant, at all –
The collection concludes with a very fine sequence of poems, that are both funny and poignant, about visiting places in Ireland, recording the bleak landscape and the holy places and an encounter with a group of men swimming in cold weather in Loch Owel: ‘I asked the temperature. Noine degrees! / … / It’s good for you, you should try it’. “Confirm Humanity” records a visit to the Maumturk Mountains where:
mist has so clouded the land
sheep barely stain into it,
mountains are rubbed out, like
elementary school mistakes.
In the final poem, “Coda”, James reflects on tidying up that people often do towards the end of their lives:
sifting photos, papers, memorabilia,
traces of relationships, all that
the children should or needn’t see
But, at the end of the day:
… no-one fathoms them really,
those deckhands looking on
as they scuttle their ships.
The ultimate, unfathomable, quiddity of existence remains a mystery. In this review I’ve only been able to hint at the rich variety of poetic insight, the surprising narrative twists and turns, the refreshing wit and wisdom contain in this collection. If life is a mystery (and surely it is and becomes more so the longer one lives) few have succeeded in exploring this mystery in such a tender, profound and humorous way, as Christopher M James.
Aug 16 2025
London Grip Poetry Review – Christopher M James
Poetry review – CHOSEN GROUND: Colin Pink admires the witty and wise explorations of life’s puzzles in this new collection by Christopher M James
Chistopher M James’s collection Chosen Ground explores, through a wide and inventive series of poetic forms, what a ‘chosen ground’ might mean to us. What choices do we make in life? How is it that we discover ourselves in a particular place at a particular time? This contemplative yet dynamic collection investigates the kind of existential choices we make and their consequences, whether that is travelling and living abroad, responding to our family background or whom we choose to love.
The choices we make are always set against our childhood background and the first section of the book “Coming in to land” focuses on childhood experiences of growing up in London. It begins (“Old Shots”) with a leaf through some family photos kept in an old shoe box:
There’s a man whose hair is blown to one side ‘like a strong blown flame / of a hand-held torch’, there’ are two sisters in flapper dresses ‘bordering on drag /from Some Like It Hot’. The final photo is of a woman ‘confiscated by motherhood, / who looks pretty / in the right play of light’. In this poem the quick succession of pictorial images creates a vivid sense of the aspirations and disappointments of everyday life.
James has an acute eye for the irksome obstacles in life, such as those revealed in “Reception” in which the family grapples with an old-fashioned TV aerial to try and get that elusive clear picture that seemed:
This demonstrates James’s ability to create witty poems about singular situations that immediately resonate as true but carry far wider implications the more one ponders them.
Minor tragedies give way to a major tragedy in “Aberfan” about the landslide disaster in Wales, with ‘Cliff Michelmore, in stark black and white, / his words threading, stitching, // beside himself with grief. / My mother never cried so much.’
In “Round” the poet recalls doing his boyhood paper-round in ‘Those days before child abuse / I was let out early // to deliver thousands and read none’. In many of these poems sudden aperçus leap out at the reader, such as in the prose poem “Cranford Park” where childhood memories are left behind on going off to college, but: ‘Suburbs are like purgatory that you never leave’.
This section of the book concludes with poems of mourning for his parents, “Villain Knell”, with a nod to Dylan Thomas, is a villanelle on the death of his father. “Carrying You” is a very poignant poem describing the journey in a hearse:
and carrying the coffin:
The next section of the book, “Oncoming Faces”, consists of poems written when the author lived in Thailand. “Sea-horses” is a tender love poem, told slant, inspired by seeing sea-horses on sale at the Chinese market, their ‘tiny swollen bellies of famine babies / minus the imploring eyes’. We then learn of the mating and parenting behaviour of the sea-horse:
The final stanza shifts focus to the human companion who has imparted all this fascinating knowledge about sea-horses:
The prose poem “We’re all in someone else’s story” is a masterpiece of miniature storytelling about moving into Chiang Mai where reality merges into fantasy.
“Strays, Hua Hin” is a richly associative poem inspired by seeing stray dogs: ‘They cross-cross, regroup, / trot suddenly lock-eyed’ and later ‘Monks alone / trail a hand as they pass, / for them to whiff’ which leads into a Buddhist meditation on the consequences of our actions and reincarnation ‘I lean forward / in our car’s solipsism, / wary of harm I could do to them, / or by ricochet you say / what might befall me.’
“Yi Peng” beautifully evokes the festival of lanterns where a multitude of flaming lanterns are released into the sky like miniature hot-air balloons. The poem effortlessly shifts from practical particulars to metaphysical speculation:
The third and final section of the book, titled “Vanishing Points” takes us to other places, such as Iceland, Ireland and France, but with an underlying appreciation of the quiddity of life and an acknowledgement of the finitude of existence. The section’s title poem observes that ‘somehow – they shall meet up / bags in hand, at the buffer of infinity’.
James’s wry take on everyday life is to the fore in “Back in my village”, a witty account of shopping in a French village where ‘they talk a lot in shops, fill in the gaps, / say what they know to catch // what they don’t…’ Likewise, in “All clear” James captures perfectly the experience of waiting for tests at a hospital where ‘No-one talks except the staff, / trained to overcompensate’. With the bare bones of a life noted on a form ‘minus all the blazing dawns and dusks’ the patients:
“Breakfast protocol”, with its allusion to Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, uses an egg-timer as a metaphor for not just the passage of time but the interlinked chain of generations:
The collection concludes with a very fine sequence of poems, that are both funny and poignant, about visiting places in Ireland, recording the bleak landscape and the holy places and an encounter with a group of men swimming in cold weather in Loch Owel: ‘I asked the temperature. Noine degrees! / … / It’s good for you, you should try it’. “Confirm Humanity” records a visit to the Maumturk Mountains where:
In the final poem, “Coda”, James reflects on tidying up that people often do towards the end of their lives:
But, at the end of the day:
The ultimate, unfathomable, quiddity of existence remains a mystery. In this review I’ve only been able to hint at the rich variety of poetic insight, the surprising narrative twists and turns, the refreshing wit and wisdom contain in this collection. If life is a mystery (and surely it is and becomes more so the longer one lives) few have succeeded in exploring this mystery in such a tender, profound and humorous way, as Christopher M James.