Italian Air / Radiant Days
by Neil Leadbeater
50 poems, 68 pages
Publisher: Cyberwit.net
Price: $15
ISBN: 978-81-19654505
To order: www.cyberwit.net
Reviewed by Michael W. Thomas
Neil Leadbeater’s poetry, fiction and essays are widely known and admired. His previous poetry collections include Librettos for the Black Madonna, The Worcester Fragments and Finding the River Horse; his short fiction collections are The Engine-Room of Europe and The Man Who Loved Typewriters. Italian Air / Radiant Days is a fascinating addition to these works. Here is the same eye for telling detail, the same careful reflection, the same capacity to surprise that characterize his previous titles. Those familiar with his work will greatly enjoy the ways in which he extends those qualities. As for new readers – start here. You won’t be disappointed.
The collection is divided into five sections: ‘The Slipping Forecast’, ‘Italian Air / Radiant Days’, ‘From a Medieval Bestiary’, ‘Diversions’ and ‘London Days’. Together, they take the reader far and wide: to Italy ancient and modern; to creatures real, peculiar and mythical; inside the heart of precious gems; and around London districts with magic lurking in their workaday corners.
Throughout the collection, the tone appears quiet, restrained. As the poems quickly demonstrate, restraint equals power. ‘The Slipping Forecast’, whose title echoes The Shipping Forecast, that staple of British radio, warns of tempestuous weather in the offing: ‘Enough to reel you off your feet / for a hard landing on deck’. This is a perfect introduction to the poems that follow. In them, scenes and images surface unexpectedly, catching the reader happily off-guard. If there is any hard landing, it is judiciously cushioned by a host of memorable lines.
The section ‘Italian Air / Radiant Days’ offers views both literal and figurative of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, famed throughout the world for its whimisical defiance of gravity. Its creator, Bonnano Pisano, ‘was not acquainted with ground engineering / his head was too much taken up with classical capitals / and blind arches’ (‘A Leading Question’). This leads the speaker of another poem,‘Facts I Did Not Know about The Leaning Tower of Pisa’, to blend practical matters with playful metaphor: ‘3. That it only leant when it put on weight. 4. That its feet found fault with the ground’. Ultimately, the Tower behaves as it does because, inanimate or not, it is in some way only human: ‘It just wanted / to slip off its shoes / in order to rest its feet’ (‘Who Put the Lean in the Tower of Pisa?’).
Pisano is soon joined by other celebrated countrymen. Seventeenth century botanist Paolo Boccone, in his later incarnation as Cistercian Brother Silvio, is skilfully captured at the moment he discovered the trachelium:
It was almost as if
the plant had been waiting for him
to really see it for what it was,
ringing its bell-like colours
in all the rocky places. (‘Paolo Boccone’s Campanula saxatilis’)
Elsewhere, in ‘Petrarch’s Feet’, the speaker contrasts the science of podiatry and its emphasis on movement, ‘gait, footwear and more’, with the poet’s constant return to the snug fit of the sonnet, ‘the challenge of exploring fourteen lines’ – which, in his expert hands, seem like no constraint at all. Returns of a more uncertain kind are explored in ‘Running Late’, in which ‘[t]he girls at the Ospidale’, the famed all-female orchestra of Venice, wait patiently for their frequently tardy maestro, Vivaldi. They know that, for him, crude time-keeping is a footling concern. Musical time is what matters: ‘Composing a work like La Stravaganza / stops all the clocks inside him’. And ‘Italian Inventions’ offers an unhurried sweep of a well-appointed room, with all the objects that Italy has gifted to the world, including a Cristofori piano (‘lid half raised, in welcome’) a radio (preserving ‘Antonio Meucci’s / wireless telegraphy’) and ‘Ravizzi’s typewriter’ in which ‘A sheet of paper / with this poem in it awaits the last three lines’. On completion, ‘this poem’ is at once a creative achievement and a gesture of thanks to its several inspirations. Another Italian invention, it completes the room.
‘From a Medieval Bestiary’ offers creatures both foursquare and evanescent. ‘Centaurs’ presents ‘liminal beings / caught between two natures – / the wild offspring / of Magnesian mares’. In striking contrast, ‘Mayflies’ ponders creatures of a moment, ‘living long enough / into the night / just to feed on air’. Here, as throughout the collection, image and tone are in perfect balance.
With ‘Diversions’, the reader enters the world of gems, with their power to hypnotize, to set the mind on strange trajectories. ‘Emerald’ contrasts permanence and brevity. The woman in the poem forgets ‘the emerald pendant’ at her throat and considers instead ‘the luna moths / alighting in handfuls from heaths and moors’. As with mayflies, their hold on life is ‘brief’, in contrast to her durable gem. Quiet and delicate, the poem’s language honours the creatures’ frailty. ‘Amber’, on the other hand, considers a substance which, unlike diamonds, may not be everything’s best friend:
Tumble polished,
everything stalls
between RED
and GREEN:
spiders, termites,
pollen, leaves,
unable to
cross the road.
No such obstructions appear in the section, ‘London Days’. In ‘The Fat Black Woman Goes Shopping’, Grace Nichols speaks of ‘all this journeying and journeying’, and restless movement, together with focused attention, characterizes these ventures around London. ‘South Acton’ offers a renewed version of ‘Adlestrop’: amid ‘places of no name / or home’, the train-travelling speaker waits ‘for the bell / to release the brake. / Nobody changes here.’ (The possibilities of train travel form one of Leadbeater’s preoccupations, appearing to rich effect in, for example, several stories in The Man Who Loved Typewriters.) The speaker of ‘London Zoo’ confesses to a beguiling memory: ‘I thought the animals who had come by sea’ were another species of renter, moving house ‘as we had done / from Palmers Green to Winchmore Hill’. Elsewhere, in ‘Hainault’, the speaker’s journeying is halted by the wonderfully vivid image of ‘a well-loved oak / whose girth stretched some seventy feet / and held the weather of Hainault / deep within its rings’.
There is a generosity of spirit in Italian Air / Radiant Days. Its speakers share in full their curiosity about the quirks and wonders of the world. In all, the collection offers an arc that links the solid and tangible – towers, cars, trains – to the mysteries of colour and fleeting specks of airborne life. It rewards reading and re-reading – after which, delving into history will never feel the same again, and nor will hopping on the next connection.
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