Poetry review – BRIDGING TIME 1944-2024: Thomas Ovans is both intrigued and moved by Patricia Townsend’s sonnet sequence incorporating and responding to wartime letters from her father.
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Bridging Time 1944-2024
Patricia Townsend
Latitude Press
ISBN 978-1-0369-3303-6
88pp £12 Hardcover
There must be very few people alive now who fought in World War Two. Indeed most of the children of those combatants must be approaching what used to be called the riper years. So first hand – and even second hand – oral memories of the conflict are becoming scarcer. Fortunately rich collections of written material sometimes come to light – for instance the brown envelope, given to Patricia Townsend by her father, which contained fifty letters that he sent home from active service in Europe in 1944 -45 following the D-Day landings. Although Townsend did not immediately read the letters she began to do so after her father’s death and was astonished by how much military information had been passed by the army censors. With the assistance of the National Archive she was able to get official accounts of the engagements her father was involved in and subsequently to make her own journey across Europe following in his footsteps. This book, Bridging Time, is a poetic response to what she found out from the letters and her own investigations and explorations. It is a collection of about seventy sonnets, enhanced by maps, press extracts, photographs and facsimile letters. The book’s title reflects the fact that her father was in the Royal Engineers and was chiefly employed on rebuilding river crossings destroyed to slow the advance of the allied armies.
The sonnets are unusual and interesting for the particular reason that many of them use quite lengthy extracts from the letters. It follows that they are not very regular as regards metre; but Townsend has been quite ingenious in finding rhymes and half-rhymes when using words not of her own free-choosing. We can see this in an early poem “The Beaches” which deals with the Normandy landings (specifically at Gold Beach) which begins with the lines.
Your first letter home, marked 1, you write
I’m still a rolling stone but ever faster.
You’ve crossed to France, the voyage more like
a pleasure steamer ride than the disaster
of going to war. Disaster’s my word not yours.
In the rhymes ‘write/like’ and ‘faster/disaster’ Townsend neatly picks up the opportunities offered by her father’s correspondence. (I am assuming that italicised text is taken verbatim from the letters although I recognise that some paraphrasing may have occurred.) The final six lines of the poem contain the turn in which the poet reports her own visit to the location of wartime events:
Just after dawn, we’re here where you began
at Arromanches-les Bains ……
…. The abandoned beach
stretches away from me, out of reach.
The next poem, “Blue Horse”, takes its title from a detail in the Bayeux tapestry. Here the poet constructs four lines almost entirely from found material describing how, on his travels between different army units, her father went to
see the tapestry town, the cathedral,
contact a lot of our old crowd
who seem to lead charmed lives … I’m having a whale
of a time and wouldn’t miss it for worlds.
The poems skilfully shift in mood to match a volatile situation. Some record the small personal triumphs of a posting to a good unit (‘I couldn’t possibly have gone / to anything better’) and a reunion with an old friend (‘just when I needed him most’); others report the shock of seeing and dealing with the consequences for civilians as the combat zones move further and further inland. Residents of a bombed city consider it
… an unnecessary action to speed our advance.
You sympathise with them but believe the attack
necessary for your move through France.
It is not a soldier’s job to resolve such larger questions about priorities; but it is difficult to ignore the fact that such questions exist. And sometimes civilian anger is turned in a different direction:
The nearer one gets to Germany the proportion
of collaborators increases
but you’re welcomed by the rest of the population .
The offenders get bottled up in gaols
and schools while we operate
in the area. The trials
will take place later.
Not very long after writing about these moral dilemmas, an even greater horror has to be faced and lived with: ‘I’ve seen a concentration camp … It has taken / me the whole war to believe the stories’.
For the most part of course, the letters, and hence the poems, are about personal experience. ‘It hasn’t taken long to settle down’ – which means, among other things, learning to distinguish one’s own artillery from that of the enemy and to ‘tell the “comers” from / the “goers” … one hugs the most unfriendly ground / when a shell is on its way.’ Sometimes the letters contain attempts to convey battle sounds by means of homely similes: ‘something like an attic hot water cistern / boiling over’. Not quite up to Wilfred Owen standard perhaps, but vivid nevertheless.
Alongside the battlefield descriptions Townsend also seeks for clues about what was going on at home among family and friends. As with many families, questions arise which have become impossible to answer now that no one is left alive from that time. Thinking of Judy – the girl that her father married after the war – Townsend find it ‘Strange you didn’t mention her in letters home’ and wonders ‘When did she become your girlfriend?’ Perhaps he did not write about her to his parents, ‘knowing they wouldn’t approve.’
With such a large cache of letters it would be easy to suppose that nothing has been lost. But the two-part poem “What can’t be said” deals with a few inconsistencies that suggest some went astray or were destroyed after arriving. One letter apologises for a predecessor that was ‘too dismal’; yet no such letter exists in the collection. Perhaps it was easier to write of the ‘frantic activity of your early days’. Any unsent or self-censored letters may have been the product of late stages of the war involving
months stuck in mud and snow, frustrating
delays. Time to witness the burnt out
homes and lives, the hunger. Did this waiting
give you pause for thought, perhaps for doubt?
The letters and poems take us all the way to the end of the war, the Victory Parades and the father’s return home. By Christmas Eve 1945 the engagement to Judy has been announced (notwithstanding that mysterious absence of her name in earlier correspondence). Over the whole sequence the reader is permitted to share the personal experience of a family in wartime. It is mostly from the point of view of a combatant but, thanks to Townsend’s interwoven commentary and reflections, we also understand something of the anxieties – briefly relieved by the arrival of each letter – of those waiting at home. For those of us who have never come so close to war the poems are both instructive and moving by virtue of their sensitive and skilful use of authentic material. For the poet, the writing of the book has clearly been a search for a deeper understanding of her father, ‘trying to tune in / to the feel of it, the sense between your lines / of how this war affected you’. She writes at the end of the last not-quite-complete sonnet
I’ve plunged into your underworld. It’s time
to surface but I can’t write
the last line.
I can see that the idea of using only the sonnet form has an appealing consistency and also poses an interesting challenge to the writer. But in this case, given the variously hectic, frightening, poignant and sometimes shocking nature of the material, are fourteen lines enough (or too many) to do justice to all the different episodes? This is certainly a fair question. But it is one I only thought to ask myself as I approached the final pages and therefore it is also fair for me to conclude that Townsend’s decision must have worked out pretty well for me to have got this far without being troubled by it! This is a most engaging book that succeeds in what I believe it set out to do. It is also elegantly produced and the interaction between the poetry and illustrations invites repeated browsing and enjoying.
Nov 22 2025
London Grip Poetry Review – Patricia Townsend
Poetry review – BRIDGING TIME 1944-2024: Thomas Ovans is both intrigued and moved by Patricia Townsend’s sonnet sequence incorporating and responding to wartime letters from her father.
.
.
There must be very few people alive now who fought in World War Two. Indeed most of the children of those combatants must be approaching what used to be called the riper years. So first hand – and even second hand – oral memories of the conflict are becoming scarcer. Fortunately rich collections of written material sometimes come to light – for instance the brown envelope, given to Patricia Townsend by her father, which contained fifty letters that he sent home from active service in Europe in 1944 -45 following the D-Day landings. Although Townsend did not immediately read the letters she began to do so after her father’s death and was astonished by how much military information had been passed by the army censors. With the assistance of the National Archive she was able to get official accounts of the engagements her father was involved in and subsequently to make her own journey across Europe following in his footsteps. This book, Bridging Time, is a poetic response to what she found out from the letters and her own investigations and explorations. It is a collection of about seventy sonnets, enhanced by maps, press extracts, photographs and facsimile letters. The book’s title reflects the fact that her father was in the Royal Engineers and was chiefly employed on rebuilding river crossings destroyed to slow the advance of the allied armies.
The sonnets are unusual and interesting for the particular reason that many of them use quite lengthy extracts from the letters. It follows that they are not very regular as regards metre; but Townsend has been quite ingenious in finding rhymes and half-rhymes when using words not of her own free-choosing. We can see this in an early poem “The Beaches” which deals with the Normandy landings (specifically at Gold Beach) which begins with the lines.
In the rhymes ‘write/like’ and ‘faster/disaster’ Townsend neatly picks up the opportunities offered by her father’s correspondence. (I am assuming that italicised text is taken verbatim from the letters although I recognise that some paraphrasing may have occurred.) The final six lines of the poem contain the turn in which the poet reports her own visit to the location of wartime events:
Just after dawn, we’re here where you began at Arromanches-les Bains …… …. The abandoned beach stretches away from me, out of reach.The next poem, “Blue Horse”, takes its title from a detail in the Bayeux tapestry. Here the poet constructs four lines almost entirely from found material describing how, on his travels between different army units, her father went to
The poems skilfully shift in mood to match a volatile situation. Some record the small personal triumphs of a posting to a good unit (‘I couldn’t possibly have gone / to anything better’) and a reunion with an old friend (‘just when I needed him most’); others report the shock of seeing and dealing with the consequences for civilians as the combat zones move further and further inland. Residents of a bombed city consider it
It is not a soldier’s job to resolve such larger questions about priorities; but it is difficult to ignore the fact that such questions exist. And sometimes civilian anger is turned in a different direction:
Not very long after writing about these moral dilemmas, an even greater horror has to be faced and lived with: ‘I’ve seen a concentration camp … It has taken / me the whole war to believe the stories’.
For the most part of course, the letters, and hence the poems, are about personal experience. ‘It hasn’t taken long to settle down’ – which means, among other things, learning to distinguish one’s own artillery from that of the enemy and to ‘tell the “comers” from / the “goers” … one hugs the most unfriendly ground / when a shell is on its way.’ Sometimes the letters contain attempts to convey battle sounds by means of homely similes: ‘something like an attic hot water cistern / boiling over’. Not quite up to Wilfred Owen standard perhaps, but vivid nevertheless.
Alongside the battlefield descriptions Townsend also seeks for clues about what was going on at home among family and friends. As with many families, questions arise which have become impossible to answer now that no one is left alive from that time. Thinking of Judy – the girl that her father married after the war – Townsend find it ‘Strange you didn’t mention her in letters home’ and wonders ‘When did she become your girlfriend?’ Perhaps he did not write about her to his parents, ‘knowing they wouldn’t approve.’
With such a large cache of letters it would be easy to suppose that nothing has been lost. But the two-part poem “What can’t be said” deals with a few inconsistencies that suggest some went astray or were destroyed after arriving. One letter apologises for a predecessor that was ‘too dismal’; yet no such letter exists in the collection. Perhaps it was easier to write of the ‘frantic activity of your early days’. Any unsent or self-censored letters may have been the product of late stages of the war involving
The letters and poems take us all the way to the end of the war, the Victory Parades and the father’s return home. By Christmas Eve 1945 the engagement to Judy has been announced (notwithstanding that mysterious absence of her name in earlier correspondence). Over the whole sequence the reader is permitted to share the personal experience of a family in wartime. It is mostly from the point of view of a combatant but, thanks to Townsend’s interwoven commentary and reflections, we also understand something of the anxieties – briefly relieved by the arrival of each letter – of those waiting at home. For those of us who have never come so close to war the poems are both instructive and moving by virtue of their sensitive and skilful use of authentic material. For the poet, the writing of the book has clearly been a search for a deeper understanding of her father, ‘trying to tune in / to the feel of it, the sense between your lines / of how this war affected you’. She writes at the end of the last not-quite-complete sonnet
I can see that the idea of using only the sonnet form has an appealing consistency and also poses an interesting challenge to the writer. But in this case, given the variously hectic, frightening, poignant and sometimes shocking nature of the material, are fourteen lines enough (or too many) to do justice to all the different episodes? This is certainly a fair question. But it is one I only thought to ask myself as I approached the final pages and therefore it is also fair for me to conclude that Townsend’s decision must have worked out pretty well for me to have got this far without being troubled by it! This is a most engaging book that succeeds in what I believe it set out to do. It is also elegantly produced and the interaction between the poetry and illustrations invites repeated browsing and enjoying.