Poetry review – CANDLELIGHT: Nick Cooke enjoys the way that Sean Street’s poems play with sound as well as with the illumination implied by the title
Candlelight
Seán Street
Poetry Salzburg
ISBN 978-3-901993-88-6
pp 37 £9
Seán Street’s sixteenth collection of poetry is a pamphlet of 37 pages that does not overstay its welcome but leaves a lasting impression on mind and heart.
From the start, Street examines the extent to which the eternal metaphorical opposition of light and darkness – broadly symbolising optimistic perspectives as against gloomier outlooks – can most objectively be assessed. The eight-line opening poem, significantly entitled “Viewpoint”, has as its epigraph Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive’, from his essay “El Dorado”. The first stanza appears to encourage progress and upward/forward movement – ‘Keep on climbing, they said, there’ll be a view’ – but when the putative climber reaches the summit, that view does not materialise:
Now, finally here, we stare, we listen and we wait.
Nothing. Not even sound: fog inhaled every last note of it, …
‘Not even sound’ could be read as a sly wink at experienced readers of Street’s work, who will be expecting some degree of sonic allusion from a poet well known for his acoustic sensitivity, while the deft synaesthesia by which fog inhales notes emphasises just how all-enveloping this particular ‘pea-souper’ is. For a pamphlet called Candlelight to begin with the apparent anticlimax of dense fog, the author needs a well-attuned sense of the link between deliberate bathos and an implied message that the collection will not be sugar-coating the realities – the battle against darkness won’t be an easy one. The ending drives home that message:
dry of light, a blankness of possibilities for weather;
Sea those distant hills there? No. No, me neither.
We travel, we climb in hope, perhaps in expectation, but never with any basis for certainty that the outcome will be sunny.
However, the title poem gives us a different angle. Dedicated to the memory of Colin Wishart, a friend and fellow actor from Street’s younger days, it recounts how ‘We lit a candle for you / that day in Sacré Coeur’, establishing that the well-known landmark is ‘as high as Paris could go / and still be Paris’. But this time being on a form of peak brings more positive connotations. As memories of ‘beers and salades gourmandes’ with the departed friend proliferate, the gleaming white church takes on its own symbolism, despite ‘flickering […] with shadows’: ‘held in a small fountain of light / that becomes the pole star / for this blank age, burning / still as far as I know’. The candle of tribute to memories of an old friend must be kept alight, even if ‘small’ and not necessarily burning forever – Street is honest enough to admit his own subjectivity and lack of omniscience. The same awareness of transience pervades even his expression of gratitude for life, in ‘Q&A’, with ‘flickering’ used once more, though neatly balanced against a ‘forever’ suggesting some form of posthumous existence or consciousness:
I’ll be grateful,
. forever, for my days in it [the lights], being a part
. of the whole green flickering thing
. while it lasts, nor now.
Another ‘i.m.’ poem, “Shap Fell”, which is for railway artist Eric Bottomley, celebrates a collaborative approach to art, with ‘the poem at the striving heart’ of the kind of scene Bottomley painted, as if asserting the power of writers like Street himself to immortalise the creative endeavours of others, or to offer another ‘take’ on their achievement., capturing in words the images left us by the painter: ‘mechanics of colour, sound and speed, / the spirit in the memory passing trains leave’. A poet can have an advantage over a painter because of techniques like the ability to enact movement and sound, such as the pentameter-like de-DER, de-DER rhythm of a train at full speed, or the more tortuous, serpentine tempo as it ascends a hill:
There you are, the buffeting wind an engine
Voicing the iambics of lost steam along the line […]
On, up, up Shap Fell, finally obtaining its long true height, …
with the ultimate effect being one of hard-won brightness and the inevitable nexus between nature and the sun – ‘leaving the hills to curlew, lapwing, light’. ‘Height’ now rhymes, and chimes, with ‘light’, in a way it didn’t in ‘Viewpoint’, as though suggesting Street is finding grounds for cautious optimism as he progresses through the book. The gradual progress had previously been indicated in the opening of ‘Threshold’: ‘January and the valley town new year / slowly starting to emerge through fog.’
That reference to curlews and lapwings hints at a view that prioritises, in Wordsworthian-Hughesian fashion, the natural world over the human, a sense given more strongly by ‘Bidston Hill’, which Street’s footnote explains refers to an area of heathland and woodland near Birkenhead. This journey upward occurs in rain, as ‘we walked up the hill past carved stone’, implicitly bypassing human achievements exemplified by the area’s historic buildings and ancient rock carvings, in favour of noting the birdlife:
. Sparrowhawk, goldcrest:
. of all countless species
. we ask most know least.
The final stanza seems to confirm human insignificance in the wider natural scheme:
When we came back down
there was no trace of us
when the moss sprang back
and the grass bore no witness.
Yet Street’s vision also abounds in human beings and their accomplishments. In line with his introductory description of the pamphlet’s trajectory as a ‘personal pilgrimage from the darkness of loss’, there are several other elegies, to poets Michael Longley, John Lucas and Benjamin Zephaniah, providing some touching memories of figures – brothers in creative arms – whom Street either knew directly or feels as if he did. These writers supply their own form of candlelight, although ‘Breakfast with Michael Longley’ performs another type of synaesthesia as it evokes the musical equivalent of a spark of light, or perhaps a Joycean epiphany, first through Billie Holiday’s “God Bless the Child” soundtracking the meal shared by the poets, then with a Larkinesque old-time jazz reference and a reprise of ‘the Lady’:
Fats Waller’s Honeysuckle Rose. And then it rained,
but Billie sang, I’ll find you in the morning sun,
so Autumn returned, playing still-bright notes that
fell through harvest light, prisms in every one.
The tinkling notes in the light of harvest (with autumn nicely balanced between seasons of light and dark, as well as inevitably intimating Keats’ ode) perhaps sum up Street’s always well-chosen words, as they flicker (to borrow his word) in and out of moods and thoughts, in this meditative and unsentimental reflection on light, shade, nature and life itself. Perhaps his overall approach, tempering hope with unflinching realism, can best be conveyed via the four lines of “Dawn Chorus, Evensong”:
Take syrinx, wing, dissolve night into light,
sing to it, hold it awake by day-long song.
Earth is deserted by sun before the high branch.
You will fail to keep dark at bay, but you must try.
The second person in the last line could refer to the bird, the reader or the poet himself.
Grimly strenuous as that final injunction sounds, the pamphlet has several more upbeat allusions to keeping one’s own candle glowing, as the now octogenarian Street refuses to take each day granted him for granted. “In the Meantime”, having started by observing ‘Once there was all the light you needed’, ends by offsetting good fortune against the ongoing challenge of ‘the moment’:
You are lucky enough to be here,
to be in the predicament at all.
It’s down to this: there’s in the meantime
always the one fact of the moment
in darkness – whatever’s left of you –
to get on with. Try to deal with that.
Oct 21 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Sean Street
Poetry review – CANDLELIGHT: Nick Cooke enjoys the way that Sean Street’s poems play with sound as well as with the illumination implied by the title
Candlelight
Seán Street
Poetry Salzburg
ISBN 978-3-901993-88-6
pp 37 £9
Seán Street’s sixteenth collection of poetry is a pamphlet of 37 pages that does not overstay its welcome but leaves a lasting impression on mind and heart.
From the start, Street examines the extent to which the eternal metaphorical opposition of light and darkness – broadly symbolising optimistic perspectives as against gloomier outlooks – can most objectively be assessed. The eight-line opening poem, significantly entitled “Viewpoint”, has as its epigraph Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive’, from his essay “El Dorado”. The first stanza appears to encourage progress and upward/forward movement – ‘Keep on climbing, they said, there’ll be a view’ – but when the putative climber reaches the summit, that view does not materialise:
Now, finally here, we stare, we listen and we wait.
Nothing. Not even sound: fog inhaled every last note of it, …
‘Not even sound’ could be read as a sly wink at experienced readers of Street’s work, who will be expecting some degree of sonic allusion from a poet well known for his acoustic sensitivity, while the deft synaesthesia by which fog inhales notes emphasises just how all-enveloping this particular ‘pea-souper’ is. For a pamphlet called Candlelight to begin with the apparent anticlimax of dense fog, the author needs a well-attuned sense of the link between deliberate bathos and an implied message that the collection will not be sugar-coating the realities – the battle against darkness won’t be an easy one. The ending drives home that message:
dry of light, a blankness of possibilities for weather;
Sea those distant hills there? No. No, me neither.
We travel, we climb in hope, perhaps in expectation, but never with any basis for certainty that the outcome will be sunny.
However, the title poem gives us a different angle. Dedicated to the memory of Colin Wishart, a friend and fellow actor from Street’s younger days, it recounts how ‘We lit a candle for you / that day in Sacré Coeur’, establishing that the well-known landmark is ‘as high as Paris could go / and still be Paris’. But this time being on a form of peak brings more positive connotations. As memories of ‘beers and salades gourmandes’ with the departed friend proliferate, the gleaming white church takes on its own symbolism, despite ‘flickering […] with shadows’: ‘held in a small fountain of light / that becomes the pole star / for this blank age, burning / still as far as I know’. The candle of tribute to memories of an old friend must be kept alight, even if ‘small’ and not necessarily burning forever – Street is honest enough to admit his own subjectivity and lack of omniscience. The same awareness of transience pervades even his expression of gratitude for life, in ‘Q&A’, with ‘flickering’ used once more, though neatly balanced against a ‘forever’ suggesting some form of posthumous existence or consciousness:
I’ll be grateful,
. forever, for my days in it [the lights], being a part
. of the whole green flickering thing
. while it lasts, nor now.
Another ‘i.m.’ poem, “Shap Fell”, which is for railway artist Eric Bottomley, celebrates a collaborative approach to art, with ‘the poem at the striving heart’ of the kind of scene Bottomley painted, as if asserting the power of writers like Street himself to immortalise the creative endeavours of others, or to offer another ‘take’ on their achievement., capturing in words the images left us by the painter: ‘mechanics of colour, sound and speed, / the spirit in the memory passing trains leave’. A poet can have an advantage over a painter because of techniques like the ability to enact movement and sound, such as the pentameter-like de-DER, de-DER rhythm of a train at full speed, or the more tortuous, serpentine tempo as it ascends a hill:
There you are, the buffeting wind an engine
Voicing the iambics of lost steam along the line […]
On, up, up Shap Fell, finally obtaining its long true height, …
with the ultimate effect being one of hard-won brightness and the inevitable nexus between nature and the sun – ‘leaving the hills to curlew, lapwing, light’. ‘Height’ now rhymes, and chimes, with ‘light’, in a way it didn’t in ‘Viewpoint’, as though suggesting Street is finding grounds for cautious optimism as he progresses through the book. The gradual progress had previously been indicated in the opening of ‘Threshold’: ‘January and the valley town new year / slowly starting to emerge through fog.’
That reference to curlews and lapwings hints at a view that prioritises, in Wordsworthian-Hughesian fashion, the natural world over the human, a sense given more strongly by ‘Bidston Hill’, which Street’s footnote explains refers to an area of heathland and woodland near Birkenhead. This journey upward occurs in rain, as ‘we walked up the hill past carved stone’, implicitly bypassing human achievements exemplified by the area’s historic buildings and ancient rock carvings, in favour of noting the birdlife:
. Sparrowhawk, goldcrest:
. of all countless species
. we ask most know least.
The final stanza seems to confirm human insignificance in the wider natural scheme:
When we came back down
there was no trace of us
when the moss sprang back
and the grass bore no witness.
Yet Street’s vision also abounds in human beings and their accomplishments. In line with his introductory description of the pamphlet’s trajectory as a ‘personal pilgrimage from the darkness of loss’, there are several other elegies, to poets Michael Longley, John Lucas and Benjamin Zephaniah, providing some touching memories of figures – brothers in creative arms – whom Street either knew directly or feels as if he did. These writers supply their own form of candlelight, although ‘Breakfast with Michael Longley’ performs another type of synaesthesia as it evokes the musical equivalent of a spark of light, or perhaps a Joycean epiphany, first through Billie Holiday’s “God Bless the Child” soundtracking the meal shared by the poets, then with a Larkinesque old-time jazz reference and a reprise of ‘the Lady’:
Fats Waller’s Honeysuckle Rose. And then it rained,
but Billie sang, I’ll find you in the morning sun,
so Autumn returned, playing still-bright notes that
fell through harvest light, prisms in every one.
The tinkling notes in the light of harvest (with autumn nicely balanced between seasons of light and dark, as well as inevitably intimating Keats’ ode) perhaps sum up Street’s always well-chosen words, as they flicker (to borrow his word) in and out of moods and thoughts, in this meditative and unsentimental reflection on light, shade, nature and life itself. Perhaps his overall approach, tempering hope with unflinching realism, can best be conveyed via the four lines of “Dawn Chorus, Evensong”:
Take syrinx, wing, dissolve night into light,
sing to it, hold it awake by day-long song.
Earth is deserted by sun before the high branch.
You will fail to keep dark at bay, but you must try.
The second person in the last line could refer to the bird, the reader or the poet himself.
Grimly strenuous as that final injunction sounds, the pamphlet has several more upbeat allusions to keeping one’s own candle glowing, as the now octogenarian Street refuses to take each day granted him for granted. “In the Meantime”, having started by observing ‘Once there was all the light you needed’, ends by offsetting good fortune against the ongoing challenge of ‘the moment’:
You are lucky enough to be here,
to be in the predicament at all.
It’s down to this: there’s in the meantime
always the one fact of the moment
in darkness – whatever’s left of you –
to get on with. Try to deal with that.