Reviews

This Poem Here Rob Walton Arachne Press 48 pp ISBN 9781913665302 £8.99

These poems concern themselves with loss and grief, both on a personal level caused by the author’s father's death, and on a collective level analysing the Covid-19 pandemic. It is, at its core, a collection of reflections and unanswered questions that could only come out of 2020. It’s pandemic writing at its finest, with frequent references to Zoom, particularly in the giggle-inducing One of the Very Worst Things, a longing for pubs and waiting rooms, and the awareness that the next quiz is never too far away. What really shapes the collection however is the way in which Walton uses the pandemic as a looking glass to address the most common of feelings. This new outlook focuses political anger, so that when he asks ‘Are there any other countries you’d like to break?’ in the closing poem Prime Minister’ s Questions, the weight of the question is backed by significant evidence. It also deepens the sadness, so that a poem about getting tearful over potatoes or waiting room magazines fits with the narrative of losing a parent or seeing your daughter have to miss graduation. These familiar ties and connections are what shines brightest through the collection, particularly in the connection with his daughters. Walton in his poems observes his daughters and is surprised by them, by the way they held themselves through the same grief that he is going through, missing not only their grandfather but their friends, their lives, their entire world being stopped. And Walton misses it alongside them. My favourite poem from the collection, Like in the Olden Days, is an ode to his daughter friends’ coming over for dinner. The poem is pandemic-specific, reflecting a time when the most mundane of evenings, making pasta for your daughter and her friend, has become impossible. But it is also permeated by that certain kind of sadness that comes with seeing your children growing up, turning it into a poem that transcends the specificity it was written about and becomes a mirror of the human experience at large. What keeps the collection so enjoyable is the humour that constantly runs through it. There is sadness, and regret, and wishing for things to be more and other, but in all of it there is time for laughs and joy. The humour comes both in content and form. There’s rhymes and alliteration about disinfectants, Covid becomes covey, and there’s jokes about bread, discoveries about places in the UK that have no business being real, reflections about toilet paper. Most of all, there is hope. Hope that next year Eve, Emily and Sarah will go travel, hope that we will get through this. There will be pain, and sadness, but we will get through. The hope doesn’t end the book nor does it open it, but it’s sprinkled with judgment throughout. Enough to keep us going, not enough to rose-tint the situation. The collection asks itself why we miss what we miss, and by highlighting the small things that have been taken away gives them a new importance. The poet walks into his daughter's room and sees a picture of her and his father, and that simple and daily act brings profound sadness worthy of poetry. There is lots of walking, and lots of looking for meaning in that walking. The collection already has a taste of hindsight towards the pandemic, even if written in the midst of it. It doesn’t let it take the wheel and drive the poems through anger and despair, but it guides the reader through all the feelings with the knowledge that everything is still uncertain, but if we stop and feel the feelings it might be alright. FC

This kilt of many colours David Bleiman Dempsey & Windle 50pp ISBN 978-1-913329-45-7 £8.00

David Bleiman’s pamphlet A kilt of many colours is a fittingly serious work about a serious subject – language as the bedrock not only of communication but of identity also, creating what the poet refers to as a double weight of significance. In a brief introduction, Bleiman references William McIIvanney’s description of Scotland, the poet’ s current abode, as a mongrel nation, signalling the principal thematic focus of the collection, namely the rich diversity of language, the mixter-maxter of origins and influences. The poet’s own background is Ashkenazi, a Jewish diaspora population that was concentrated in areas of the Austro -Hungarian Empire and one which suffered disproportionately during the Holocaust, leaving barely a family untouched by its ravages. Born in South Africa, Bleiman’s family moved to Britain when he was six, giving rise to the multilingual experiences that permeate the collection, one finding comic expression in the The Trebbler’s Tale, a poem written in lively couplets and in a reimagined version of Scots-Yiddish. Add to the mix the Spanish, which the poet is currently studying, and we have the pamphlet’s varied soundscape, one replete with the alliterative force of Yiddish:

He shlepped his shmatte aa through Fife, weel-kent by monie a lanely wife, whaur Yid and pekl war kenspeckle n ilka Fifan toun and shtetl. (from The Trebbler’s Tale)