The Importance of Not
by Dorothy Baird
24 poems, 32 pages
Price: £5
ISBN: 978-1-909404595
Publisher: Poetry Space Ltd
To order: www.poetryspace.co.uk
Reviewed by Neil Leadbeater
Edinburgh-based poet and creative writing tutor Dorothy Baird studied Russian and French at university, teaching English in France as part of her degree. After graduation, she taught English in Moscow for a year during the communist regime. She has travelled widely in South East Asia and Sri Lanka and spent a year in India and Nepal. In 1989 she returned to her home city of Edinburgh to bring up her three children and has lived there ever since.
Her first collection, Leaving the Nest, was published by Two Ravens Press in 2007, and her second, Mind the Gap, by Indigo Dreams in 2015. The Importance of Not was joint winner in the Poetry Space Pamphlet competition 2024.
The overarching theme of this collection is that of absence which is explored through the lens of lost loved ones, children leaving the nest, silence in remote places and the Sycamore Gap (see note below). The latter is reflected in the cover design by Hanni Shinton. In the title poem which appears at the end of the collection, Baird says ‘It’s absences that matter’ and then goes on to define these absences in a series of well-wrought metaphors beginning with ‘the hexagonal holes / in a bike spanner.’
The healing powers of nature are never far from these poems. In ‘Midsummer Trove’ we read of ‘barley becoming gold’ and experience ‘a startle of wood pigeons’ rising ‘from the shadows of the fir trees.’ In ‘Carpe Diem’ snowdrops in a graveyard become ‘small bulbs of hope’ and in ‘You can’t stand in the same river twice’ we learn that ‘bird-feeders are a drama / of blue-tits and that ‘a squirrel … could clearly run the country / with its problem solving.’
Another kind of silence is explored in ‘Social distancing’, a lockdown poem arising from the Covid-19 pandemic. Here is the opening stanza:
They haven’t hugged for a month
and the conversation stalls now
because she has no news to colour his days
and she has to shout because there’s
two metres between them and
his hearing aids need adjusted
and he can’t get them adjusted
because everywhere is closed.
Despite enforced limitations, ‘Morning’ puts on a brave face and offers up a positive, stoical stance on life:
You’ve got the sky from your window, she says,
learn to love the sky. It’s enough for
the skylark and the swift. It’ll do you too,
till your feet find the ground again. Sit
by the window and get to know the light.
…..
Pour your sadness into the day.
It is big enough to hold it.
Other poems in this collection confront us with the need to come to terms with middle age, children leaving home and personal grief: ‘Yesterday I slipped into a broken space / the wind couldn’t mend’.
Once again, Baird urges us to find positive things in nature: a reservoir dazzling in cold sunshine, the sound of a stonechat, and that ‘sense of certainty, the rightness of things.’
There are several arresting images in this collection that stay in the mind. In ‘Visiting Hour’ the skin on the face of a loved one is described as being ‘transparent as the wax circles / you used to slide on jars / of steaming jam,’ and in ‘Sycamore Gap’ we ‘Confront the presence of / absence, much as we see the shape of love in a now / empty armchair.’
Baird’s love of language comes to the fore in ‘Therapy of Vowels’ which moves from ‘Mourning’ to ‘morning’ and in ‘Solace’ where she ‘leans on’ the word ‘gloaming’ which she divides into ‘gloom’ and ‘loam’ and then, later in the poem, the word ‘solace’ – ‘Sol and ace. So and lace. In ‘The Sycamore Gap’ she speaks of ‘A gap / in the Gap’. Words, and how we play with them and interpret them are all a part of her repertoire.
For all the absences explored in this collection, it is ‘The hallelujah of small shoots’ springing from the stump of the sycamore tree that holds everything together, the small miracle against the time line of everything.
Note:
The Sycamore Gap is the name given to a dramatic dip, created by glacial meltwater, along the course of Hadrian’s Wall near Craig Lough in Northumberland. A sycamore tree (Acer pseudoplatanus) was planted there 120 years ago. In its maturity, it reached a height of 49 feet (15 metres) and was one of the country’s most photographed trees becoming a much loved emblem of North East England. The tree was felled illegally in a brutal act of vandalism on 28 September 2023 but has since sprouted from the stump. The first saplings, grown from the stump have now been planted. A total of 49 trees have been nurtured, representing the height of the sycamore when it was felled, and these will be planted as ‘peace trees’ across the country in memory of the original parent tree.
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