Poetry review – SINGING LESSONS: James Roderick Burns finds that Matthew Barton’s New & Selected contains an impressive and comprehensive account of his poetic career
Singing Lessons: New and Selected Poems
Matthew Barton
Bowstring Poetry
ISBN: 9 781067 672027
149 pp £10.00
It is perhaps symptomatic of any new and selected poetry collection that the artistic burden of picking a selection representative of a career to date, as well as inviting to the new reader, will weigh heavily on the editor. But at four collections, a generous sampling of new work and a significant new, unpublished sequence, Matthew Barton’s Singing Lessons is weightier than most. At 150 pages, the book is both thrilling and daunting – Barton’s dense, image-laden style is a delight, his range of themes wide and impressive, and attention to detail (particularly in the many poems from the collections) meticulous and affecting; yet the whole defeated this reviewer’s usual practice of reading for review in a single day, and then some!
It is the case that Singing Lessons presents a surfeit of riches.
Take the first four sections (also bridging his new sequence), poems selected from four individual collections originally published across a 22 year span. Ordinarily one might expect dips or softnesses in any poet’s work – areas where the initial force of vision flags a little, or enters a cul-de-sac, a backwater for a period; maybe even flattens as inspiration wanes. Not here. The work from Learning to Row (1999) is as forceful and sustained as that from Dusk (2021):
pain passes
round the circle like the fine rim
of a glass finding its single note,
beginning to ring
(‘Writing Class’)
The once-loud hoofs
now on the point of clopping out
of earshot leaving the stillness
fuller for having been, and kept
by grace of memory more alive
in us perhaps in absence then by what
they granted in the actual ear
(‘Passed Away’)
Ranging over an imaginary landscape dense in natural figures – fruit, birds, trees, growth, husbandry – Barton charts the seasons of life and nature, entwined: “a wand/ threshing its glass of pearls” (‘Chalice Well’), “the panniers of slither, salt-silver … were the real/ freight of mythology” (‘Spawning Ground’). Though the conclusion of ‘Millennial’ avers – much as Larkin does, at the close of ‘An Arundel Tomb’, with memorable archness – “matter is what really matters”, we know from the dense forest of allusive description and metaphor, that while matter certainly does matter (if nothing else by providing the incredible texture of the collection) it always bodies forth something else.
At ‘2 am’, “shadows bulge/ into a fox: a shock/ to see myself printed on his watchfulness” – here the clustering of material and immaterial (behaviour, awareness, fleet perception) unite organically, suggesting a richer interconnectedness.
Or, in ‘Nettles’, we find a deeper meaning in the flipped harshness and softness of the single leaf:
Live wires – no leisure for more
than a perfunctory fuse of bloom,
they stick together in a pungent fresh
fury of belief, their flex of stalks
sparking static: each alert
and single, every leaf’s
sawteeth cut clear from
the green backcloth.
The poet has always liked them, it seems, not just for the “sharp respect” they command but “because they seem/ galvanized in the defence of some/ frail underside of innocence”. It is astounding how much physical – and metaphysical! – grace and complexity is found in a handful of spiky leaves, usually disregarded.
Even inanimate objects have their meditative aspects, captured in a language both rich and precise. ‘Tap’, for instance: “I clench/ my teeth and let you drink …”
and meditate
the power that gives you life. It’s worst at night
with all the tons of blindness building up
behind my sockets while you sleep.
If the book has any possible soft spot, it is not in the traditional sense of a dip in quality, but perhaps shift in focus – almost always to subjects of extraordinary sensitivity, of the gravest artistic and personal challenge. The poet’s thus far unpublished thirteen part sequence, for instance, charts an older generation’s abuse and control, its toxic effects through the generations, in passages plain and sanded-down as good furniture reclaimed from a skip. Quality, battered, recoverable – but somehow never unlit with the same explosive sheen. (The line “night crams itself into your throat” at the close of section XIII is a rare reversion to the book’s powerful sound.)
Or in ‘Ashes’, as the poet picks up his wife’s remains and is jolted by their weight back to recalling miscarriages, and thence their daughter’s birth, the lines become taut, simple and fragile as the wanted child ferried gingerly home like eggs:
And drive oh so carefully, suddenly
remembering how I drove you
home from the hospital holding
our newborn daughter:
putting the softest brakes on,
easing them off with a prayer.
It is not that the poems are lesser, just different. But the poet has established such a high bar with the force and bounding imagery, the sheer muscle of the surrounding poems, that their spareness – even blankness, understandable in the face of trauma – appears marked by a kind of absence.
That said, the weight of the collection has clearly fallen on its compiler (or compilers), not the reader. Here they will find a basket of exquisite work, wrested from a lifetime of experience, and laid out for their delight. As Barton notes in ‘Retirement’ – ordinarily a graveyard-lodge of interest – we move “every inch along with the weeds:”
brambles
throwing out grappling irons, bindweed
tangling with mint, buttercups
hooking their roots under any
available post or brick.
Nov 11 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Matthew Barton
Poetry review – SINGING LESSONS: James Roderick Burns finds that Matthew Barton’s New & Selected contains an impressive and comprehensive account of his poetic career
Singing Lessons: New and Selected Poems
Matthew Barton
Bowstring Poetry
ISBN: 9 781067 672027
149 pp £10.00
It is perhaps symptomatic of any new and selected poetry collection that the artistic burden of picking a selection representative of a career to date, as well as inviting to the new reader, will weigh heavily on the editor. But at four collections, a generous sampling of new work and a significant new, unpublished sequence, Matthew Barton’s Singing Lessons is weightier than most. At 150 pages, the book is both thrilling and daunting – Barton’s dense, image-laden style is a delight, his range of themes wide and impressive, and attention to detail (particularly in the many poems from the collections) meticulous and affecting; yet the whole defeated this reviewer’s usual practice of reading for review in a single day, and then some!
It is the case that Singing Lessons presents a surfeit of riches.
Take the first four sections (also bridging his new sequence), poems selected from four individual collections originally published across a 22 year span. Ordinarily one might expect dips or softnesses in any poet’s work – areas where the initial force of vision flags a little, or enters a cul-de-sac, a backwater for a period; maybe even flattens as inspiration wanes. Not here. The work from Learning to Row (1999) is as forceful and sustained as that from Dusk (2021):
pain passes
round the circle like the fine rim
of a glass finding its single note,
beginning to ring
(‘Writing Class’)
The once-loud hoofs
now on the point of clopping out
of earshot leaving the stillness
fuller for having been, and kept
by grace of memory more alive
in us perhaps in absence then by what
they granted in the actual ear
(‘Passed Away’)
Ranging over an imaginary landscape dense in natural figures – fruit, birds, trees, growth, husbandry – Barton charts the seasons of life and nature, entwined: “a wand/ threshing its glass of pearls” (‘Chalice Well’), “the panniers of slither, salt-silver … were the real/ freight of mythology” (‘Spawning Ground’). Though the conclusion of ‘Millennial’ avers – much as Larkin does, at the close of ‘An Arundel Tomb’, with memorable archness – “matter is what really matters”, we know from the dense forest of allusive description and metaphor, that while matter certainly does matter (if nothing else by providing the incredible texture of the collection) it always bodies forth something else.
At ‘2 am’, “shadows bulge/ into a fox: a shock/ to see myself printed on his watchfulness” – here the clustering of material and immaterial (behaviour, awareness, fleet perception) unite organically, suggesting a richer interconnectedness.
Or, in ‘Nettles’, we find a deeper meaning in the flipped harshness and softness of the single leaf:
Live wires – no leisure for more
than a perfunctory fuse of bloom,
they stick together in a pungent fresh
fury of belief, their flex of stalks
sparking static: each alert
and single, every leaf’s
sawteeth cut clear from
the green backcloth.
The poet has always liked them, it seems, not just for the “sharp respect” they command but “because they seem/ galvanized in the defence of some/ frail underside of innocence”. It is astounding how much physical – and metaphysical! – grace and complexity is found in a handful of spiky leaves, usually disregarded.
Even inanimate objects have their meditative aspects, captured in a language both rich and precise. ‘Tap’, for instance: “I clench/ my teeth and let you drink …”
and meditate
the power that gives you life. It’s worst at night
with all the tons of blindness building up
behind my sockets while you sleep.
If the book has any possible soft spot, it is not in the traditional sense of a dip in quality, but perhaps shift in focus – almost always to subjects of extraordinary sensitivity, of the gravest artistic and personal challenge. The poet’s thus far unpublished thirteen part sequence, for instance, charts an older generation’s abuse and control, its toxic effects through the generations, in passages plain and sanded-down as good furniture reclaimed from a skip. Quality, battered, recoverable – but somehow never unlit with the same explosive sheen. (The line “night crams itself into your throat” at the close of section XIII is a rare reversion to the book’s powerful sound.)
Or in ‘Ashes’, as the poet picks up his wife’s remains and is jolted by their weight back to recalling miscarriages, and thence their daughter’s birth, the lines become taut, simple and fragile as the wanted child ferried gingerly home like eggs:
And drive oh so carefully, suddenly
remembering how I drove you
home from the hospital holding
our newborn daughter:
putting the softest brakes on,
easing them off with a prayer.
It is not that the poems are lesser, just different. But the poet has established such a high bar with the force and bounding imagery, the sheer muscle of the surrounding poems, that their spareness – even blankness, understandable in the face of trauma – appears marked by a kind of absence.
That said, the weight of the collection has clearly fallen on its compiler (or compilers), not the reader. Here they will find a basket of exquisite work, wrested from a lifetime of experience, and laid out for their delight. As Barton notes in ‘Retirement’ – ordinarily a graveyard-lodge of interest – we move “every inch along with the weeds:”
brambles
throwing out grappling irons, bindweed
tangling with mint, buttercups
hooking their roots under any
available post or brick.