Believing in the Planet
by Myra Schneider
36 poems, 71 pages
Price: £9.95
ISBN: 978-1-909404557
Publisher: Poetry Space Ltd
To order: www.poetryspace.co.uk
Reviewed by Neil Leadbeater
British born poet, essayist and critic Myra Schneider grew up in Scotland, London and Sussex and read English at London University. She has worked for an educational publisher and as a teacher in a comprehensive school and a tutor to people with literacy problems, as well as working for many years with severely disabled adults. She is the author of over twelve previous collections of poetry and is a tutor for The Poetry School. She lives in London with her husband, a retired computer consultant, and they have one son.
‘Believing in the Planet’ is divided into four distinct sections whose span encompasses ancient Greek mythology, natural history, music and painting, medieval philosophy and Japanese prints. It also delivers some strong messages about the resilience of nature and our lack of regard for the planet which we neglect at our peril. Several poems touch upon the fortitude of women down the ages.
The first section, more than any other section in the book, looks in detail at the wonders of nature and its seeming ability to thrive in the most adverse of circumstances. The opening poem, ‘Poseidon’, draws attention to our careless disregard for the sea and all the creatures that live in its environment. Furious, Poseidon ‘rises up / he sees a seal / with a car tyre round its neck, a turtle / struggling with a baby-blue mask, a cuttlefish with microplastics / lining its stomach,’ and plans his counter-attack:
Enraged, he dives into the dark of a seabed
deeper than Everest is high, roars orders at his waters till they attack
a town perched on a coast.
We weep to see buildings crumble, telegraph poles
topple and cars drown but still fail to appease the world’s seas.
It is no accident that this poem is named after a god who was held responsible in ancient Greek mythology for earthquakes, floods and droughts in addition to anything involving water in general.
‘Grass’ explores the way in which we attempt to curb nature in the most reckless of ways, cropping everything in sight and covering our gardens with concrete. ‘A solitary yellow-gold dandelion that’s somehow evaded the chop’ catches the poet’s attention among the ‘mindlessly uprooted clover plants, [and] crushed daisies’. In ‘The Glory’ a dandelion head on a grass verge stops her in her tracks. Whatever survives is admired. In ‘Longing for Rain’ Schneider writes ‘I love the determination to survive’. In ‘Taormina’ the last lines conclude with the words ‘How small we are in this astonishing world, / how grievous it is that we don’t act to save it.’
The second section contains a number of ekphrastic poems. These include ‘Flame’ and ‘The Jazz Concert’ written in response to Thames Valley-based visual artist Chris Holley’s Flamenco Shawl series, mixed media on paper, and The Jazz Players respectively; ‘The Persian Robe’, after Matisse; ‘The Three Trees’ after Paul Nash’s deeply atmospheric painting ‘The Three’ and a series of poems inspired by works by the British born painter and printmaker Annie Soudain. Other poems that caught my attention in this section were ‘The Word’ which delves into the etymology of the word ‘manifold’ and ‘Gold’ in which Schneider attempts a description of the painting San Vito lo Capo by the abstract artist Robert (Bob) Aldous. This painting, incidentally, is reproduced with the kind permission of the artist on the front cover of the book. Schneider’s poem ‘Brussel Sprouts’ must be the only poem that I have ever read that takes this vegetable for its subject-matter! The poem seems to have been born out of a storm:
When the February sky is weighty with clouds and the wind,
a ferocious animal, knocks over fences and rickety sheds,
rushes rubbish down streets, rocks trees madly,
tears off their branches and crashes them to the ground…
and then the narrator finds comfort in a bag of Brussel sprouts, admiring their ‘construction, which is more subtle than any work of art'.
The third section of this collection consists of one long poem detailing the life of Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) and a shorter one on the Italian Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi (1593- c. 1656). In the former, Schneider traces in twelve sections the life of Hildegard from early childhood to old age. Specific parts of the poem cover her divine visions, her reception into the monastery at Disibodenberg, her guide, teacher and spiritual mother, Jutta, her election as leader of a community of nuns, the arrival of the learned monk, Volmar, who is permitted to be her helper, and the establishment of her own abbey at Rupertsberg. In writing this poem, Schneider drew directly from Hildegard’s own accounts, which are quoted at length in Fiona Maddocks’ biography of Hildegard which was published by Faber and Faber in 2013. She also drew on other twelfth century writings about Hildegard which are discussed in the above text and studied some of the images recording Hildegard’s visions which must have been painted by Hildegard herself or by someone who reproduced them under her supervision. In the latter, Schneider makes mention of the early influence of Caravaggio, the story of her rape by Agostino Tassi and her remarkable fortitude in the face of adversity at a time when women had few opportunities to pursue artistic training or work as professional artists. Gentileschi was the first woman to become a member of the Accademia di Arte del Disegno in Florence and she had an international clientele. Specific mention is made in Schneider’s text of Gentileschi’s painting of Judith slaying Holofernes which may be interpreted here as a kind of just retribution for the assault on her that was perpetrated by Tassi:
……….She knows the finished work
will be her first masterpiece, believes in time she’ll become
as famous as Caravaggio, be remembered for her paintings
of women as artists, goddesses, mothers nursing their babies.
In the final section, ‘Five Views of Mount Fuji’, Schneider draws inspiration from the works of the Japanese printmaker Katsushika Hokusai’s ‘Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji’. The poems are a mixture of description and statement, of ‘firs longing / to scramble to the summit’, of people who are ‘no more than dots beside Fuji’, of Fuji ‘in a blue mood….blues that are alert yet calming’. Once she is on its summit, she asserts: ‘I’ll forget / the worrying world below. Fuji, keeper / of the secret of immortality, will enfold me.’ In all of the poems in this section, the magnificence of Fuji dwarfs everything else in its sight, even the ‘great wave’:
The wave is huge but to mighty Fuji,
which in the distance appears tiny, it’s less
than a grasshopper, a raindrop, a speckle.
I relax and wait for the immense crest,
all the pomp and circumstance it carries,
to collapse, aware that Fuji who has overseen
humankind for millennia, Fuji will endure.’
These poems are very much of our age. They speak urgently of the need for us all to take responsibility for our actions, both individually and collectively, in order to care for the amazing world in which we live. |
