Poetry review – CROSSING THE HINGE : Nick Cooke praises Mandy Pannett for scrupulously avoiding dishonesty and self-deception in her poems about the challenges facing our world
Crossing the Hinge
Mandy Pannett
Tears in the Fence
ISBN 978-1-9000020-17-6
pp 40 £9.99
As so often in Mandy Pannett’s wonderfully evocative poetry, history (real and fictional) informs contemporary themes and concerns, with this hauntingly unsentimental pamphlet’s opening poem, “The Hills of Armonye” taking us back to Noah’s Ark but from the perspective of modern environmentalism. The poet’s feeling for suffering animals is at once evident:
and we, crying wo against
the tide, the rise of sandbag and floor, strain
watery, bloodshot eyes.
The watery surroundings of the spot where the Ark came to rest evoke notions of fertility and ‘spaciousness’:
Man and vegetable
may sprout in earthly slime
as a winter-wet bird pecks
at soil to discover the sweet, moist worm.
Those lines reminded me of the final lines in “Best After Frost”, from her 2012 book All the Invisibles, with its characteristically Keatsian sense of cloying sweetness within sensuous delight: ‘A tale where rain / was far-off drumming (…) a ripe and rotten group …/or not of blood but garnet-red: a medlar jelly / sweet for Spring’s return.’
Yet Pannett soon reminds us that where the Ark once represented an escape from an imaginary flood, our world today is often beset by a very real over-abundance of water, from which there is no respite, due to flooding caused by climate change (‘Today we exist with non- // stop rain’), so that when she asks ‘Where are they // now, those hilles of Armonye?’ we imagine them submerged, their wildlife drowned, very much lacking the balance between acquosity and airiness of the Biblical equivalent, where there were
good lands to counter
the rising swell with air for feathers,
the breathings of lung and gill?
Other legendary figures are re-cast in a 2020s light. In “Zeus in the Street”, the deceitful nature of the king of Greek gods is exposed:
his inner self
is masquerade façade cloak & cover-up
fallacious as a cuckoo bird
Pannett’s phrase ‘a white swan’s wing’ reminds us that Zeus is a rapist, with inevitable pointers to Yeats’ “Leda and the Swan”, and sardonic parallels with more modern examples of powerful men considering themselves exempt from condemnation of sexual crime –
inapplicable (to him)
are words such as
serial or predator
or prowler –
A final image reminds us how the God-king transformed himself, when he raped the Princess Danaë, into ‘a shower of gold’, but Pannett’s addition of ‘in a cesspit’ drives home her view of the supposedly heroic figure.
As in her earlier volumes, Pannett tends to fluctuate between despair and hope, pessimism and optimism. In this case the probable nadir is reached in “A Chain of Words for Roseanna”, a hard-hitting lament for someone very far removed from the Bible or Greek legend, in this case a downtrodden woman in Victorian Brighton, who ‘paddled / in puddles of shit and sickened / on water and grease’. Having buried two children, this unfortunate soul was forced into a workhouse and ended up in a mental institution in South London. Her life is one rejection after another – ‘There was always the slamming of gates’, in Pannett’s laconic summary – and the poem concludes with a spate of negatives:
no mass for your soul
no salve Regina no salve Roseannse
salve salvage lunacy asylum
No roses are named after you
But in the process of documenting Roseanna’s decline Pannett asks a key question, ‘Whose lunacy was this’, implying that the true madness lies in society, not the afflicted individual. The insanity of modern life increasingly becomes a theme, in poems such as “Orchards at Grenfell”, which also ends on an elegiac negative (‘Raindrops do not trickle /down panes of window glass’), and “An Accidental Shattering”, dealing with the emotional paralysis of a woman that the poet claims she is trying not to write about, ‘who claims she is slowly / turning to glass’. Here Pannett’s refusal to sugar-coat or pull punches results in the uses of ‘no’ reaching a crescendo:
Delusions of glass may console
through absence of touch.
No handshake, no kiss, nor meeting of cells.
No skin.
However, balance is in a sense restored by the fact that an earlier section utilises negatives in a positive way, so to speak, as the poet imagines a scenario in which cruel behaviour is negated:
Give me a galaxy of glass
in which there are
no secrets, lies, backhanded compliments
no snide remarks or stabs in the back.
The title poem, the worthy first-prize winner of a Nine Arches competition, is a tour de force of ekphrastic agility in which Pannett imagines a composite triptych spanning the ages, pointing up the change in typical artistic focus from Renaissance to modern times. The first panel gives her an opportunity to indulge once again her penchant for Keatsian sensuousness, describing a ‘seigneur / swathed in crimson velvet, rich in the wealth of spice’. The poet then ‘crosses the hinge’ into a second panel in which ‘a Virgin in a robe of lapis / blue presides on her throne’, while also suggesting potential dangers (‘a threat behind a hedge’) in the apparently idyllic scene. That sense of jeopardy is intensified in the final panel, where the artwork in question is based on (as Pannett’s note explains) Hans Memling’s Triptych of Wilhelm Moreel and His Family, except that the image has been hijacked by a military scene in which ‘A soldier in a city street twists and turns’, wondering where a sniper’s bullet will come from.
Later poems pursue similarly nightmarish glimpses of the realities of twenty-first-century life, such as “Bridge in a City”, where ‘We exist on a shaky grid // a corroded network / of pumps, pipes, ramshackle towers / and water littered with sewage and broken boats’, and ‘Refugees creep in from countryside swamps’ (an allusion, presumably, to David Cameron’s notorious remarks on the UK being swamped with migrants). Pannett may wish she could be her primary self, the poet of the first triptych panel, but her principles forbid her to rewrite current history –
Your hands long to clutch the wheel, to spin it, to create and
Arcadian world where melting waters are siphoned back and
glaciers reclaimed (‘Eclogue Concerning a Weather Machine’) –
and as “The Scheme of Things” spells out in chilling simplicity, a world where people ‘suffer the plight of sleet, / and shiver in cardboard and rags’ (recalling the opening poem from Pannett’s 2006 debut collection Frost Hollow, in which ‘we enter the landscape of Lear’) makes the individual human pathetically insignificant:
This is your country and you,
existing now in the scheme of things,
are miniscule as plankton.
Nonetheless, she does acknowledge the possibility of hope, through concerted protest and collective action:
women who live in trauma and fear listen
to a single rising voice
and like birds first one then another then score upon score
will speak out until
a multitude
will swell
(“The Loom & the Ship”)
The book’s closing section, “Potholes of Light”, builds on this sliver of optimism, with ‘‘The Beginning of Hope” living up to its title, even though the last lines suggest that the hope depends at least partially on a form of self-deception that the collection hitherto has spurned:
Tanya, my hope, my beginning of hope, how
wildly we cling to our memory
of memories, say illusion is real,
narrate a new tale, with us at the heart, gather in
our own small visions.
Ultimately, Pannett’s scrupulous honesty encompasses an admission that self-protective dishonesty is a challenging temptation in a world that is fundamentally, to quote the final words of “Apaston”, a ‘puny cosmos’.
Aug 26 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Mandy Pannett
Poetry review – CROSSING THE HINGE : Nick Cooke praises Mandy Pannett for scrupulously avoiding dishonesty and self-deception in her poems about the challenges facing our world
Crossing the Hinge
Mandy Pannett
Tears in the Fence
ISBN 978-1-9000020-17-6
pp 40 £9.99
As so often in Mandy Pannett’s wonderfully evocative poetry, history (real and fictional) informs contemporary themes and concerns, with this hauntingly unsentimental pamphlet’s opening poem, “The Hills of Armonye” taking us back to Noah’s Ark but from the perspective of modern environmentalism. The poet’s feeling for suffering animals is at once evident:
and we, crying wo against
the tide, the rise of sandbag and floor, strain
watery, bloodshot eyes.
The watery surroundings of the spot where the Ark came to rest evoke notions of fertility and ‘spaciousness’:
Man and vegetable
may sprout in earthly slime
as a winter-wet bird pecks
at soil to discover the sweet, moist worm.
Those lines reminded me of the final lines in “Best After Frost”, from her 2012 book All the Invisibles, with its characteristically Keatsian sense of cloying sweetness within sensuous delight: ‘A tale where rain / was far-off drumming (…) a ripe and rotten group …/or not of blood but garnet-red: a medlar jelly / sweet for Spring’s return.’
Yet Pannett soon reminds us that where the Ark once represented an escape from an imaginary flood, our world today is often beset by a very real over-abundance of water, from which there is no respite, due to flooding caused by climate change (‘Today we exist with non- // stop rain’), so that when she asks ‘Where are they // now, those hilles of Armonye?’ we imagine them submerged, their wildlife drowned, very much lacking the balance between acquosity and airiness of the Biblical equivalent, where there were
good lands to counter
the rising swell with air for feathers,
the breathings of lung and gill?
Other legendary figures are re-cast in a 2020s light. In “Zeus in the Street”, the deceitful nature of the king of Greek gods is exposed:
his inner self
is masquerade façade cloak & cover-up
fallacious as a cuckoo bird
Pannett’s phrase ‘a white swan’s wing’ reminds us that Zeus is a rapist, with inevitable pointers to Yeats’ “Leda and the Swan”, and sardonic parallels with more modern examples of powerful men considering themselves exempt from condemnation of sexual crime –
inapplicable (to him)
are words such as
serial or predator
or prowler –
A final image reminds us how the God-king transformed himself, when he raped the Princess Danaë, into ‘a shower of gold’, but Pannett’s addition of ‘in a cesspit’ drives home her view of the supposedly heroic figure.
As in her earlier volumes, Pannett tends to fluctuate between despair and hope, pessimism and optimism. In this case the probable nadir is reached in “A Chain of Words for Roseanna”, a hard-hitting lament for someone very far removed from the Bible or Greek legend, in this case a downtrodden woman in Victorian Brighton, who ‘paddled / in puddles of shit and sickened / on water and grease’. Having buried two children, this unfortunate soul was forced into a workhouse and ended up in a mental institution in South London. Her life is one rejection after another – ‘There was always the slamming of gates’, in Pannett’s laconic summary – and the poem concludes with a spate of negatives:
no mass for your soul
no salve Regina no salve Roseannse
salve salvage lunacy asylum
No roses are named after you
But in the process of documenting Roseanna’s decline Pannett asks a key question, ‘Whose lunacy was this’, implying that the true madness lies in society, not the afflicted individual. The insanity of modern life increasingly becomes a theme, in poems such as “Orchards at Grenfell”, which also ends on an elegiac negative (‘Raindrops do not trickle /down panes of window glass’), and “An Accidental Shattering”, dealing with the emotional paralysis of a woman that the poet claims she is trying not to write about, ‘who claims she is slowly / turning to glass’. Here Pannett’s refusal to sugar-coat or pull punches results in the uses of ‘no’ reaching a crescendo:
Delusions of glass may console
through absence of touch.
No handshake, no kiss, nor meeting of cells.
No skin.
However, balance is in a sense restored by the fact that an earlier section utilises negatives in a positive way, so to speak, as the poet imagines a scenario in which cruel behaviour is negated:
Give me a galaxy of glass
in which there are
no secrets, lies, backhanded compliments
no snide remarks or stabs in the back.
The title poem, the worthy first-prize winner of a Nine Arches competition, is a tour de force of ekphrastic agility in which Pannett imagines a composite triptych spanning the ages, pointing up the change in typical artistic focus from Renaissance to modern times. The first panel gives her an opportunity to indulge once again her penchant for Keatsian sensuousness, describing a ‘seigneur / swathed in crimson velvet, rich in the wealth of spice’. The poet then ‘crosses the hinge’ into a second panel in which ‘a Virgin in a robe of lapis / blue presides on her throne’, while also suggesting potential dangers (‘a threat behind a hedge’) in the apparently idyllic scene. That sense of jeopardy is intensified in the final panel, where the artwork in question is based on (as Pannett’s note explains) Hans Memling’s Triptych of Wilhelm Moreel and His Family, except that the image has been hijacked by a military scene in which ‘A soldier in a city street twists and turns’, wondering where a sniper’s bullet will come from.
Later poems pursue similarly nightmarish glimpses of the realities of twenty-first-century life, such as “Bridge in a City”, where ‘We exist on a shaky grid // a corroded network / of pumps, pipes, ramshackle towers / and water littered with sewage and broken boats’, and ‘Refugees creep in from countryside swamps’ (an allusion, presumably, to David Cameron’s notorious remarks on the UK being swamped with migrants). Pannett may wish she could be her primary self, the poet of the first triptych panel, but her principles forbid her to rewrite current history –
Your hands long to clutch the wheel, to spin it, to create and
Arcadian world where melting waters are siphoned back and
glaciers reclaimed (‘Eclogue Concerning a Weather Machine’) –
and as “The Scheme of Things” spells out in chilling simplicity, a world where people ‘suffer the plight of sleet, / and shiver in cardboard and rags’ (recalling the opening poem from Pannett’s 2006 debut collection Frost Hollow, in which ‘we enter the landscape of Lear’) makes the individual human pathetically insignificant:
This is your country and you,
existing now in the scheme of things,
are miniscule as plankton.
Nonetheless, she does acknowledge the possibility of hope, through concerted protest and collective action:
women who live in trauma and fear listen
to a single rising voice
and like birds first one then another then score upon score
will speak out until
a multitude
will swell
(“The Loom & the Ship”)
The book’s closing section, “Potholes of Light”, builds on this sliver of optimism, with ‘‘The Beginning of Hope” living up to its title, even though the last lines suggest that the hope depends at least partially on a form of self-deception that the collection hitherto has spurned:
Tanya, my hope, my beginning of hope, how
wildly we cling to our memory
of memories, say illusion is real,
narrate a new tale, with us at the heart, gather in
our own small visions.
Ultimately, Pannett’s scrupulous honesty encompasses an admission that self-protective dishonesty is a challenging temptation in a world that is fundamentally, to quote the final words of “Apaston”, a ‘puny cosmos’.