London Grip Poetry Review – Hilary Davies

 

Poetry review – COMPASS LIGHT: Stuart Henson suggests that the poetry of Hilary Davies might be seen as sacred music for a secular world

 

 

Compass Light
Hilary Davies
Renard Press
ISBN 978-1-80447-159-3
£10

‘SANS DIEU RIEN’ says the clock at Ingatestone Hall, the Tudor manor house in Essex: a motto that speaks not only for the Petre family, whose devise it was and is, but also for Hilary Davies’s new book, Compass Light. Time, and the immanence of God are its central themes, perhaps even more so than in her previous collections. As she observes in the second of the Octaves ‘for Our Lady of Time’:

Maybe callousness is in fact the first sin –
Lack of gratitude,
Lack of gratitude for everything.
Life discloses
The truth of the clocktower:
Sans Dieu Rien.

Compass Light goes a long way towards the expiation of that ‘sin’, because it’s shot-through with lovely things—awareness, insights, and gratitude for the mysterious understandings that life reveals. But therein lies the rub. How can a poet of faith speak to an age that has largely abandoned the forms and language of established religion? When Davies speaks of ‘grace’ or ‘the soul’ or the ‘gates of heaven’, she’s aware, I think, that not all her readership will share that register—or understand those words as she herself does. However, ‘The reader I have in mind’, she has said, ‘is anyone who loves how language structures itself into poetry, and who also believes that this can say something redemptive about the human condition.’ There’s no doubt in my mind that Davies succeeds in bridging that gap—by the commitment of her total attention to the interpenetration of the spiritual and the physical. The poetry comes in the fusion of the human and the divine, as in the celebratory “Kyparissía” which opens with

The tyres rubble over the rough road
We know every dip and catch now in our bodies…

It’s simple but so effective—the juddering alliteration, the substitution of that bricky word ‘rubble’ for the expected ‘rumble’ (you can hear the tyres and the jolting springs), and then the slightly off-beat choice of ‘catch’ that flings us back against the word ‘dip’ with a momentary lurch. The whole poem’s a loving celebration of a place where everything believes ‘In the touch of the personal’.

Kyparissía! Dusty eucalyptus and lemon blossom,
The little cement tiles of the pavements;
On the corner the ironmonger
Who stacks his hardware against three-litre amphorae of wine.
And the barrows of apricots, oranges, peaches!
There is the florist with her improbably large bouquets
Garnished round and round with squeaky cellophane protesting…

And all this might be no more than very fine travel-writing if we weren’t travelling toward something more significant born of that personal touch:

The hands pass hand to hand, back and forth,
On and across, in the setting down of coffee cups
In front of the customers, in the way-pointing
At corners, in the squaring of bricks.
Down by the quayside, a tiny chapel has grown overnight,
All globes and circles, limewash and snow-blue;
She lights the sea-goblets of the fishermen,
Who are never off guard, and the golden wine-drinkers,
Whose guard is elsewhere…

A very human communion becomes, by hints and the gentlest of way-pointing, a God-given thing. Light seems to reflect and glance around the almost-miraculous chapel until, in the transformational process of the poem’s attention, a simple white tablecloth can suggest an altar, and the sparkle off the sea can indicate the presence of the ineffable.

Fair are the seastars in Kyparissía,
And the bright bread.

Sometimes you hardly notice how it’s done. There’s a line in “The Gorge”, a poem that tells of a picnic with a friend and his children, which reads ‘For the sun is entering his ferocity’. It’s immediately followed by the quotidian ‘We have pulled our picnic in under the rock: / A ruffled rug, eggshells and crumbs of yolk…’ The focus has moved on before we’ve taken in that earlier line—almost Biblical in its gravity—but its effect lingers. When one of the girls in the party disappears ‘Into the kingdom of the olive groves’, you feel the gorge is becoming in some oblique and unexplained way a counterpart to the Valley of the Shadow of Death. There is

A rush of presence, a drumming  
Which spreads at noon.

The gorge held the sun fast,
While fear’s door stood open
And you went searching.

When the girl’s father brings her back, she is ‘immaculate’ and the speaker

…saw the fair limbs
Of your daughter and her friend
As the shade fell upon them,
And how their arms shivered.
There was a kind of roar, far off.
The gorge attended.

There are echoes of the picnic expedition in Forster’s A Passage to India—a cave, the scorching sun, the roar, the girl who goes off by herself… Something is going on that’s bigger and more terribly beautiful than the superficial events suggest. It may be, of course, only in the speaker’s apprehension. Would the girls and the father have felt it too, and in the same way? We can’t tell, but the reader has experienced what the poet saw and felt:

That strange scent in the air –
The trees’ trunks turned as if towards some song,
Like bird quiver in the undergrowth…

We’re left questioning. What secrets were the girls sharing? Why did one go off alone? What kind of change has taken place ‘Where water, dark, miraculous, assuages, / And the deep shadows of the pools / Descend and descend.’? The word ‘miraculous’ occurs three times in the poem, always associated with the water. And how can we be un-moved when the language is so sensuous and atmospheric: ‘the hour between leaf-tip and leaf-tip’; ‘the drenched light dancing’; ‘the insects’ high festival / In the drowsing air.’?

This is sacred music for a secular world, where the ordinary becomes sacramental: ‘She offers me the cake and I take and eat it’ (“The Dead of Chorion”) and we encounter ‘Bushes no higher than a fox’s reach / And dense as a garment of thorns.’ (“Under the Anvil Mountain”) The collection’s visionary intensity is amplified by loss. Compass Light continues the journey of grieving begun in The Exile and the Kingdom. The presence of the poet’s late husband, Sebastian Barker, is felt throughout, and especially in the sections entitled ‘The Vine the Rosemary and the Olive Tree’ and ‘The Wild Grave’. The title poem of the latter is Yeatsean in its lyric tenderness—a moment of abandonment to a scarcely bearable sorrow.

In general, the grief isn’t tempered, but dignified by self-scrutiny, which can be as direct as anything in Eliot’s Quartets.

We have abandoned ourselves often enough
By our lack of care;
…
How could there be any mending
Unless a readiness to admit it?
Adulthood is getting down on our knees.
Counterpoint this new song with mercy:
We pray for light to come again upon the lawns.  
                                                  (“Ingatestone”)

Hilary Davies is prepared to commit to the spiritual labour her faith demands, and what’s extraordinary is her ability to work the transcendental seamlessly into the day-to-day:

                          By the old red pump
There is a seat. It’s a secret place
Because the furze crowds in.
In the creek below the long-discarded boats
Have burst open like coffins.
How massive the true world’s sound is.
An ant moves like thunder.
The water’s edge is the sip of presence:
The round hill, the clacking masts
And running sandpipers, all are suddenly bright
And shine upon the past.
Dear God, does time really ring so?
Love, who never here made memory,
Steps my gentle friend into the light.
My love, come close beside me,
Let me tell you what we never dreamt of long ago –
That I would carry you into a future
Not of your carpentry or dancing
Yet which you enter and presence fills the land.    
                                              (“The Old Tram Road”)

Yet Compass Light is anchored in this world, not the hereafter. It’s remarkable how often place-names appear in the titles. Davies has a profound sensitivity to the resonances of time in specific locations. The middle section of the book explores the historical and mythological connectedness of various places in the Celtic west—in Cornwall and Pembrokeshire. Notably, the section’s title poem, “In the Carnon Valley”, fuses the spirit of place and the place of the human spirit in the created universe, using an object, an artefact, that has both local and cosmic significance. The Nebra Sky Disc, three and a half thousand years old and discovered on the summit of the Mittelberg in Saxony-Anhalt in 1997, is a Bronze Age visualisation of the sun, moon and stars, and a boat voyaging the celestial ocean. The gold used in the central symbols has been shown—by geochemical comparison—to have come from the Carnon valley. Predicated on the repeated ‘Time was once gold in this valley’, the poem takes us from the sensory present—‘Our ankles shift in the silt. / Deep cold in the trickle of the tide’—back to the those early gold-panners ‘cast out in a slow line, / Slow and careful as the curlews on the mudflats’. The brutal wind of history has blown us from their pieties to a point where we live in ‘Pit-pens… full of our noises’ and where ‘Our only vision [is] the light we make ourselves’. Such a summary scarcely does justice to the economy and precision of the language (‘Scourings, undertow, sloops of lead water’) and the way it returns to ‘The circling of heavenly things’ at its conclusion. ‘Time’, Davies argues, ‘is our conversation with the gods.’ But we have grown careless of their intercession and they have withdrawn—and taken time with them.

Sometimes there’s a Hopkins-esque intensity in the writing. (‘A ribbon of road is glory’; ‘Fiery green woods!’) and occasionally she’ll slip into the Psalmist’s mode (‘Gentle it sits as a lily flower upon the land’). Neither is Davies afraid of the philosophical:

Love begets faith
And faith begets perception.
We believe in the face of all the evidence
And then find that the evidence has changed.  
                                               (“East: Canterbury”)

In the ‘Octave for Our Lady of Time’ that rounds off the collection, we journey pilgrim-wise through Kent, Essex, Cornwall… even to the gate of the Underworld. It’s a sequence that contains two of the most appealing poems in book: “At the Underground Gate” tells the story of a growing understanding between Abdar, an Albanian migrant, and the speaker who encounters him on her daily commute. An antidote, perhaps, to the shrill discourse that swirls around today’s politics. And I was delighted to find within the Octave the fine and mysterious “At the Sea Wall” that I first read in PN Review a year or so ago. Davies’s handling of the quiet approach of a stranger in a fishing village, requesting to be ferried through the sea-mist to an island, summoned by a bell and powers beyond our ken, is exemplary. Consider the perfect rendition of the visual in the second part of this question:

     Will the boats run
       In the great fog?

  In the bleak oyster-light,
      On the desert sea?

The gently-spoken demand of the traveller becomes a test of the good-will of the fishermen Peter and Andrew Morgan. (The choice of their names may be simply a record of real people in a known place. But I wonder. Peter, I believe, is the only named disciple in the Gospel accounts of Christ walking on the water.) At the moment of crisis

Beyond the jetty
Fishermen clatter their lobsterpots.
A lathe turns, somewhere.

Then silence. Even the seagulls are silent.
A breath, a look, a cigarette butt in the water.
The moment’s abundance.
Carefully, the traveller descends the sea-ladder
And they wrap him in their coats.
The normal bustle, untyings and stashings of things
Ready for the harbourmaster’s light.
It is time. The bell sounds continuously 
Out of the cloud. It is time.

Your senses are sharpened, your perceptions intensified. Great credit to Renard that they’ve taken up the torch from Enitharmon in publishing Hilary Davies’s work. Compass Light is a book worthy to stand with the canon—Julian, Herbert, Hopkins, Eliot, Jennings…

What’s not spoken of the soul
Is in it, the life we live in
At the edge of words.