Washed with Noon
Edited by Janice Dempsey
45 poems, 62 pages
Publisher: Dempsey and Windle
Price: £10.00
ISBN: 978-1-913329907
To order: www.dempseyandwindle.com
Reviewed by Neil Leadbeater
The title of this anthology, published by Dempsey and Windle under their VOLE imprint, is taken from a line by C Day Lewis: “Summer filled her veins with light and her heart was washed with noon.” The anthology contains 45 poems by 34 poets comprising three prize winning poems, three highly commended poems and 39 shortlisted poems from the VOLE Books Summer Poetry Competition 2023. In his helpful introduction, the competition judge, Richard Hawtree, says that he looked “for work which displayed craft, wit and a strong emotional pulse.” The poems in this anthology certainly fulfil these criteria.
Inspiration for some of the subjects covered in these poems comes from nature, art, mythology, family and city life. Richard Carpenter writes in praise of Acer Brilliantissimum while Eve Jackson describes a day in her garden “where the only sounds are those of its own / joyful quiet.” Everything here is keenly seen and heard right down to “the mischief of aquilegias nodding their bonnets” and the “rumble-roll” sound of her wheelbarrow with the “stop-start screech / of [the] lazy wheel.” Denise Bennett’s ‘A Parasol Afternoon’ takes its cue from ‘A Corner of the Artist’s Room’ by Gwen John while Michael Farry gives us two poems that, through the use of subtle allusion offer a unique take on some well-known characters from Greek mythology. A number of poems about family make use of memory as a critical starting-point. Penny Blackburn in her poem ‘She hangs the city’ [from a chain around her neck] is full of observant detail from early morning to late at night. In places it reads like vintage Larkin. Here is the scene from midday to mid-afternoon:
She feels the frustration of office workers
queueing on a too-short lunch, the attentive boredom
of sales assistants. After school the parks fill.
Ten minutes on the swings, a kickabout before tea.
Mothers WhatApping on half-alert.
Some poems are set in the context of specific areas or places such as the Cambridgeshire fens, a canal in Oxfordshire, a beach in the North East of England and a suburb in South London while others are not tied to any particular place. Gerald Killingworth pays homage to the traditional occupation of a Fenland eel-catcher – one of the few living Fenmen left who can weave eel-traps. Greg Freeman’s ‘Alnmouth’ begins and ends with two people but takes in the whole history of a place that has been shaped by the weather. The arresting first line draws us in to the scene:
Kipper pâté in the café.
We occupy the beach
in folding chairs
surveying the sea
like the two old pals
we have become.
Bake in the sun.
Among the many poems in this anthology, two poems by Marilyn Francis particularly caught my attention. ‘Blue in Green’ charts the changing seasons while ‘summer SAD’ attempts to put into words what it feels like to experience seasonal affective disorder when “days waste….nothing is right….and nothing seems to fit.”
Stylistically, some of the poems adhere to strict poetic forms such as the Golden Shovel, a rondeau and a Luc Bat, the latter being a Vietnamese verse form. Prose poems, visual poems and free verse make up the remainder. Some poems operate on the principle of contrast: in ‘For Lizzie’ by Annette Iles, youth and age are contrasted to good effect in the first and second stanzas and in the visual poem ‘Zebra Crossing’ by Victoria D’Cruz, the act of crossing a road in South London is contrasted with the act of watching real zebras crossing the plains in the Rift Valley. Describing the red London buses as a ‘herd’ acts as a link word between the first and last stanzas.
This enjoyable anthology offers readers poems on a variety of time-honoured themes presented in a fresh way that is alive to the possibility of several different modes of expression and poetic form. Brief biographies of all the poets are given at the end. |
