Poetry review – AGAINST FALLING: John Forth follows Linda Anderson through an exploration of the birth, life and afterlife of poems
Against Falling
Linda Anderson
Liverpool University Press (Pavilion)
ISBN 9 7818059661 3 5
64pp £10.00
Linda Anderson’s new book is concerned with a journey to the source of a poem; it asks what the poem is and how it comes to be. There is, too, a focus on the not-poem, the shadow poem, or what might have been a poem. Tucked away in the final third of the book as an epigraph to “Mirror”, is Elizabeth Bishop: ‘Well, it takes an infinite number of things coming together, forgotten or almost forgotten, books, last night’s dream experience, past and present – to make a poem’. In the current PBS Summer Bulletin, Anderson writes ‘I was thinking about the notion of the ‘unfinished’ in its many different forms and meanings’, and includes excerpts from notebooks which become ‘the shadow text behind the poems’.
I recall the late Herbert Lomas, speaking of Yeats in the 1970s, asking ‘how far is it from Innisfree to Byzantium?’ It took me a while to guess – forty years and no distance at all, with each place being heard ‘in the deep heart’s core’. Both of Anderson’s books: The Station Before (2020) and Against Falling (2026) appear to be taking a microscope into the same territory with their attention to memory, perception and the passing of time. In her “Notebook 1” she writes ‘something passes between one fragment and another and helps me to see a pattern’ and later in the same piece comes a reference to Susan Stewart, who is not alone in believing that finding the right tone of voice involves ‘listening to the silence between voices…the individual voice carries within it the seeds of its own disappearance’.
The opening poem “Vertigo” (a dialogue with Alice, pre-rabbit-hole) claims that ‘this world and I are attached / only by a thread’. What resembles a conversation between Locke and Bishop Berkeley exploits similar imagery to North by Northwest but, aside from the title, there is no direct allusion to Hitchcock until “The Lady Vanishes”:
We know she’ll come back to make
another brief appearance, then fade again…
“Vertigo” goes on to assert a context for childhood recollections in the phrase ‘a headlong shimmering’, which turns out to be a perfect way to encapsulate what happens in other poems here. “The Lady Vanishes”, with its convoluted ending, enables the poet to sidestep Auden’s need to abandon what can’t be finished and admit that ‘Completing poems has always felt difficult, even risky, because it closes off the poem’s potential’. In an earlier interview on the L.U.P website she mentions an invisible ‘meantime of the forest’ for the vanishing lady and the poem plays at fleshing out what isn’t seen or doesn’t happen.
Each of Anderson’s collections, published six years apart, include a poem called “Garden” and she declares an interest in D.W.Winnicott’s idea of a transitional space (as with play and creativity) where ‘the provisional can be kept alive’. The gardens complement each other; in the second longer piece, a child ‘busy being multiple selves’ is embarrassed by an uncle and finds herself at the edge of an adult world that excludes her. It’s an evocation of a child’s uncertainty, told in the third person, which closes when ‘They drove through the darkness to get home’. But three more couplets wrap up ‘what happens next’ (as if in a film) to open up a second ‘ending’, which is the production of the poem: ‘She entered the story again, everything alive, as a gift’. Combining snaps of experience with a language game is preparation for some deeply personal poems about grief and loss, shedding light on part-submerged memories of a daughter, parents, a friend and the places they inhabit – ‘a conversation continuing’. Arguably the most direct of these is “Dear Life”, juxtaposing two distinct memories from childhood – one of a child being rushed back to school by her mother because of ‘a story’ she has told, and another of the mother being taken out of the house on a stretcher. ‘A story is not just a story’, she learns, and also: ‘There should be points of connection’. Indeed, the opening lines of “Dear Life” (‘When I arrive at this place / I know it’s about time) introduce a grammatical legerdemain that’s more pronounced elsewhere:
…Then I longed for you passionately / already lost / the sweet odour of earth… (“Petrichor”)
…You follow the poem you did not write / but could not forget. Nor the feather…(“Feather”)
…a path would lead to where / I was waiting. My arrival / the waving of wheatfields. (“Lane”)
There’s a kind of manifesto emerging. ‘The place’ is where poems might be found though it elides into being ‘a time’, an object or an atmosphere, and later,
Call it life, this haunting.
How we pass through it all,
wondering, enduring
It is the jarring that evokes a multi-layered response, as in three emotional glimpses of reaction to the loss of an unborn child (“Unfinished”). An apparent randomness becomes evident in four brief recollections of schooldays in “Memory”:
Unknown. It’s all still to happen, as you look out,
while the ghost inside you beckons.
One of the strongest poems in this second group is “Forgiveness”, offering a detached view of two parents in a photograph and on the perceived distance between them:
And behind them both, the echo of a war.
How could I understand? Their lives
were interwoven with an era
and the distance that seemed chosen
maybe, after all, a matter of perspective.
The ‘headlong shimmering’ in this group of poems is mainly shared with animals, dead or alive: small corpses in a garden, horses, bulls and being out dog-walking, all of which offer signals of vulnerability summed up in the poem “Wind”:
This is the risk – being in this body, in this world.
It rushes to meet you, lifting you skywards.
Equally strong in these poems is the sense of place which characterises their various contexts, and which dovetails with “Notebook 2”, at once more theoretical, abstract and literally concerned with sight and seeing. The sources are Helene Cixous, Emily Dickinson and Anderson herself who each experienced difficulties with sight at various times. The unseen is very much a platform for profound seeing when eye-sight returns to normal. The centre-piece in this group of poems is concerned with differing angles on chaos and uncertainty in an artist’s later years. “Late”, an adventurous three-parter, focuses on Degas, Donne and Freud in which the guiding principle is Adorno’s view of ‘late style’. Later works are contrasted with mature fruit because of their ‘furrowed, even ravaged’ appearance. All three sections make use of quotation from a variety of relevant texts. Other paths in the collection also lead here and conform to Freud’s stipulation in a letter written in 1922: in view of life’s insoluble conflicts, it is good life comes to an end. “Nevertheless” immediately re-affirms that ‘there is a syntax of hope…a corner you can turn’:
…admiring the patterning of frost on leaves
that may not survive this weather, but glisten now.
A favourite may turn out to be “Dustman” based on the Stanley Spencer painting and combining its description with ‘the dustmen clattering the bins / in the street, a paean of bells’. It remains to be seen how far the artist or the men in question would appreciate the comparison – but that’s how notebooks work. Although the book displays two numbered sections it can also appear as three tens. The first group ends with “Notebook 1” followed by ten poems before “Notebook 2” and finally a group end-stopped by “Notebook 3” (being eight enigmatic lines that may be a gateway to a third collection). The notebooks appear ‘open’ for echoes and back-tracking, but only apparently, because there’s little doubt that the extracts have been tidied by wise hands. There are two lines preceding the book’s opening section, headed “Poem”:
A net to stop the stones from falling.
While up above soars a single swift.
Possibly a sideways glance at Marianne Moore’s imaginary garden with real toads, and/or maybe even Robert Graves with his ‘flying backwards’ swift? A person from Porlock still calls on some business of the day, and there is a complete-looking ‘unfinished’ Kubla Khan left behind for perusal, stubbornly resisting what Coleridge claimed to think about it. It’s interesting, if not surprising, that Yeats tried to erase his youthful Innisfree from the later repertoire with two Byzantiums, but was blocked by his audiences who appeared to prefer to go on hearing it. It’s powerful stuff, is notebooking, and never comfortable or static.
Oct 8 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Linda Anderson
Poetry review – AGAINST FALLING: John Forth follows Linda Anderson through an exploration of the birth, life and afterlife of poems
Against Falling
Linda Anderson
Liverpool University Press (Pavilion)
ISBN 9 7818059661 3 5
64pp £10.00
Linda Anderson’s new book is concerned with a journey to the source of a poem; it asks what the poem is and how it comes to be. There is, too, a focus on the not-poem, the shadow poem, or what might have been a poem. Tucked away in the final third of the book as an epigraph to “Mirror”, is Elizabeth Bishop: ‘Well, it takes an infinite number of things coming together, forgotten or almost forgotten, books, last night’s dream experience, past and present – to make a poem’. In the current PBS Summer Bulletin, Anderson writes ‘I was thinking about the notion of the ‘unfinished’ in its many different forms and meanings’, and includes excerpts from notebooks which become ‘the shadow text behind the poems’.
I recall the late Herbert Lomas, speaking of Yeats in the 1970s, asking ‘how far is it from Innisfree to Byzantium?’ It took me a while to guess – forty years and no distance at all, with each place being heard ‘in the deep heart’s core’. Both of Anderson’s books: The Station Before (2020) and Against Falling (2026) appear to be taking a microscope into the same territory with their attention to memory, perception and the passing of time. In her “Notebook 1” she writes ‘something passes between one fragment and another and helps me to see a pattern’ and later in the same piece comes a reference to Susan Stewart, who is not alone in believing that finding the right tone of voice involves ‘listening to the silence between voices…the individual voice carries within it the seeds of its own disappearance’.
The opening poem “Vertigo” (a dialogue with Alice, pre-rabbit-hole) claims that ‘this world and I are attached / only by a thread’. What resembles a conversation between Locke and Bishop Berkeley exploits similar imagery to North by Northwest but, aside from the title, there is no direct allusion to Hitchcock until “The Lady Vanishes”:
We know she’ll come back to make
another brief appearance, then fade again…
“Vertigo” goes on to assert a context for childhood recollections in the phrase ‘a headlong shimmering’, which turns out to be a perfect way to encapsulate what happens in other poems here. “The Lady Vanishes”, with its convoluted ending, enables the poet to sidestep Auden’s need to abandon what can’t be finished and admit that ‘Completing poems has always felt difficult, even risky, because it closes off the poem’s potential’. In an earlier interview on the L.U.P website she mentions an invisible ‘meantime of the forest’ for the vanishing lady and the poem plays at fleshing out what isn’t seen or doesn’t happen.
Each of Anderson’s collections, published six years apart, include a poem called “Garden” and she declares an interest in D.W.Winnicott’s idea of a transitional space (as with play and creativity) where ‘the provisional can be kept alive’. The gardens complement each other; in the second longer piece, a child ‘busy being multiple selves’ is embarrassed by an uncle and finds herself at the edge of an adult world that excludes her. It’s an evocation of a child’s uncertainty, told in the third person, which closes when ‘They drove through the darkness to get home’. But three more couplets wrap up ‘what happens next’ (as if in a film) to open up a second ‘ending’, which is the production of the poem: ‘She entered the story again, everything alive, as a gift’. Combining snaps of experience with a language game is preparation for some deeply personal poems about grief and loss, shedding light on part-submerged memories of a daughter, parents, a friend and the places they inhabit – ‘a conversation continuing’. Arguably the most direct of these is “Dear Life”, juxtaposing two distinct memories from childhood – one of a child being rushed back to school by her mother because of ‘a story’ she has told, and another of the mother being taken out of the house on a stretcher. ‘A story is not just a story’, she learns, and also: ‘There should be points of connection’. Indeed, the opening lines of “Dear Life” (‘When I arrive at this place / I know it’s about time) introduce a grammatical legerdemain that’s more pronounced elsewhere:
…Then I longed for you passionately / already lost / the sweet odour of earth… (“Petrichor”)
…You follow the poem you did not write / but could not forget. Nor the feather…(“Feather”)
…a path would lead to where / I was waiting. My arrival / the waving of wheatfields. (“Lane”)
There’s a kind of manifesto emerging. ‘The place’ is where poems might be found though it elides into being ‘a time’, an object or an atmosphere, and later,
Call it life, this haunting.
How we pass through it all,
wondering, enduring
It is the jarring that evokes a multi-layered response, as in three emotional glimpses of reaction to the loss of an unborn child (“Unfinished”). An apparent randomness becomes evident in four brief recollections of schooldays in “Memory”:
Unknown. It’s all still to happen, as you look out,
while the ghost inside you beckons.
One of the strongest poems in this second group is “Forgiveness”, offering a detached view of two parents in a photograph and on the perceived distance between them:
And behind them both, the echo of a war.
How could I understand? Their lives
were interwoven with an era
and the distance that seemed chosen
maybe, after all, a matter of perspective.
The ‘headlong shimmering’ in this group of poems is mainly shared with animals, dead or alive: small corpses in a garden, horses, bulls and being out dog-walking, all of which offer signals of vulnerability summed up in the poem “Wind”:
This is the risk – being in this body, in this world.
It rushes to meet you, lifting you skywards.
Equally strong in these poems is the sense of place which characterises their various contexts, and which dovetails with “Notebook 2”, at once more theoretical, abstract and literally concerned with sight and seeing. The sources are Helene Cixous, Emily Dickinson and Anderson herself who each experienced difficulties with sight at various times. The unseen is very much a platform for profound seeing when eye-sight returns to normal. The centre-piece in this group of poems is concerned with differing angles on chaos and uncertainty in an artist’s later years. “Late”, an adventurous three-parter, focuses on Degas, Donne and Freud in which the guiding principle is Adorno’s view of ‘late style’. Later works are contrasted with mature fruit because of their ‘furrowed, even ravaged’ appearance. All three sections make use of quotation from a variety of relevant texts. Other paths in the collection also lead here and conform to Freud’s stipulation in a letter written in 1922: in view of life’s insoluble conflicts, it is good life comes to an end. “Nevertheless” immediately re-affirms that ‘there is a syntax of hope…a corner you can turn’:
…admiring the patterning of frost on leaves
that may not survive this weather, but glisten now.
A favourite may turn out to be “Dustman” based on the Stanley Spencer painting and combining its description with ‘the dustmen clattering the bins / in the street, a paean of bells’. It remains to be seen how far the artist or the men in question would appreciate the comparison – but that’s how notebooks work. Although the book displays two numbered sections it can also appear as three tens. The first group ends with “Notebook 1” followed by ten poems before “Notebook 2” and finally a group end-stopped by “Notebook 3” (being eight enigmatic lines that may be a gateway to a third collection). The notebooks appear ‘open’ for echoes and back-tracking, but only apparently, because there’s little doubt that the extracts have been tidied by wise hands. There are two lines preceding the book’s opening section, headed “Poem”:
A net to stop the stones from falling.
While up above soars a single swift.
Possibly a sideways glance at Marianne Moore’s imaginary garden with real toads, and/or maybe even Robert Graves with his ‘flying backwards’ swift? A person from Porlock still calls on some business of the day, and there is a complete-looking ‘unfinished’ Kubla Khan left behind for perusal, stubbornly resisting what Coleridge claimed to think about it. It’s interesting, if not surprising, that Yeats tried to erase his youthful Innisfree from the later repertoire with two Byzantiums, but was blocked by his audiences who appeared to prefer to go on hearing it. It’s powerful stuff, is notebooking, and never comfortable or static.