The cover of Alison Brackenbury’s Selected Poems, Gallop, reproduces Franz Marc’s ‘Two Horses, 1912.’ And there recurs, in the backbeat of these welcoming verses, a vision of an enviable life of rural concerns around not only horses but bicycles and birds and radios, ploughing and Lincolnshire accents. But if I had to choose a line or two to capture this particular poetic sensibility, it must be from the ending of Brockhampton, a poem of the landscape that might be Plath’s judgement on Hughes: “… the last crow’s wings / Cannot frighten from my blood / The stubborn light of things.” Alison Brackenbury conjures a poetry that brings those frightening things into plain daylight, a poetry of the active life, of thrift and graft, of spirits that when pressed resort to sanity.
These are poems selected from nine collections written over 35 years. They are crafted with unforced rhymes and formal schemes played lightly. Wise and witty, they score a robust folk music.
There are perceptive portraits from nature, of for example Lapwings: “the heavy winter fields / from which they flashed and kindled and uprode” and in On the Aerial the starling that “each year… finds new noise” in mimicry as “through his voice are poured / jay, blackbird’s honey, thrush-lilts. He, half heard, / tilts as faint stars, is Spring, is every bird.” Or delightfully in Visitors, where the proficiency of the hummingbird hawkmoth looks so slick against the “humped bumblebees, who stagger / to line cold clay with nectar” until the hawkmoths take cover, when “Cautiously, like a swimmer, / A bee begins to hover.”
Horses reappear, for themselves and as symbol, often nobler and better than us, provoking in one instance this unforeseen bluntness in On the Second of August: “Oh I am very tired, but the old horse is dead / I had for eighteen years. / He was twenty-eight. Do you like horses? / One day you will be dead.”
There are concerns too with the past, with continuity of line, found for example in Your Signature is Required with its description of her grandmother’s “shaped child’s letters, crimped like pastry, / pinched, like the cowslip’s petal. / Who will write like that again?” We are reminded that her father was a ploughboy in Lincolnshire. In Thermal, “Roman pipes pump to a Celtic languor”, while Levellers Day remembers when “The Levellers came to Burford,” and how at the end “One lifted up his face and turned / In silence to the guns.”
It is no surprise to find in the titles and subjects of some poems the names of Wilfred Owen, John Wesley, John Clare, and Edward Thomas. Less expected are music hall star Vesta Tilley, aeronaut Wilbur Wright (“Life could not be quite as simple again”), and at length in Dreams of Power, a rich life study in the first person of Arbella Stuart, noblewoman descendent of Henry VII and woman of letters.
Echoes of other voices we recognize, or at least think we hear, among the lines. Haunted Charlotte Mew is alive in Hawthorn: “I walked through a town I longed to leave”, while something of Louis MacNeice’s dazzling counterpoint occurs in Last Week: “I promised next, to strike, risking the dull future – / not the best of weeks, in short. Again, the lilac / hangs heavy over other people’s fences…” John Betjeman is, I think, less influence than coincidental voice in the one-to-one delivery of English domestic matters, as in At Home where “in the clouded gilt of his mirror / George Handel nods to God”, or again in All: “Then wait in rooms, without a fire, / With tea uncleared, without a fuss; / In cushioned chairs, now closer drawn, / Nod to each other, not to us.” Often, we seem to overhear, as on a background wireless, the mid-century voices of Elizabeth Jennings, Larkin, Anthony Thwaite.
Some of the most direct poems are those that derive from the slightest of inspirations. There is something wonderful in The Blue Door, for example, nothing but “a rectangle of blue light” behind the stage as the audience takes its place, that opens onto a reverie of a dancer, in childhood at the sea and then in a lover’s bed, the “sky’s pane above” reflected as “a blue square in the baby’s eye”, until “the light grows richer, stills then thins” and the play begins.
Endings matter: some final lines pan out from particular to universal, some to resolution, as in After Beethoven: “… and snuffing out the candle, / Listened to the echo he became.” Alison Brackenbury makes good use of paradox, in for instance Produce of Cyprus: “… Paradise is the place / of which we know nothing, which we know best.” Or again, with an echo of John Donne, Spinner, about a spider weaving its web: “Although his lightness turns a trap / Though all he makes there, will destroy.”
There is no typical poem here, for illustration, but one that gives a good flavour of the wit and liveliness of many is Epigrams:
My Latin has left me,
which might be as well.
They were brute engineers
and their afterlife, hell.
Only one tag stays:
a bird with no wings.
‘In media res’
in the middle of things.
I am weighed down by parents,
made mad by my child.
The late sky is sleeting
the garden is wild.
I slump on a chair
in the last glow day brings.
In media res
in the muddle of things.
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Alison Brackenbury, Gallop: Selected Poems, Carcanet, 2019