Sheenagh Pugh's Blog

Thank you, dear,’ she said, the way adults did when they thanked you for something that hadn’t really helped and that they hadn’t really wanted.

This is a coming-of-age novel, the progress of the eponymous Henry through the sixties and seventies, from birth to leaving for an unspecified university. It is written in close third person, and almost all from Henry’s point of view.

A child’s-eye view can give a fresh outlook on things, because their perspective is so different from an adult one. They observe in a way adults seldom do – “the mangle, a strange thing that looked alive and sad and whose rubber lips were chapped and perished” – and their sense of priorities and realities is different, as becomes apparent when a sudden accidental death happens at Henry’s primary school. The adults are horrified, but the children sharing the news, “smiled, because deaths never happened at boring old school, and it was exciting and not quite real, like something in a story or film”.

They also tend to be solipsistic, and Henry is no exception. He is not particularly likeable or dislikeable, more your average ordinary child morphing into your average whiny. self-obsessed, self-pitying teenager. Indeed a key moment in his development is when he briefly contemplates suicide, for no better reason than that a girl he’s only just met has refused to go out with him, but is distracted by a phone call from a friend. Afterwards, returning to the pills he has collected: “he stared at them for a while and tried to remember how he’d been feeling before the phone call but could not. Then he picked up the pills and went back to his mum’s room, replacing them in her medicine bag. Back in his room, he re-read his note and shook his head, as Mr Muldoon would have done, at the hackneyed phrasing. Then he tore the note into small pieces, and put them carefully in the bin.”

Henry’s viewpoint is challenging, both for the writer and any adult reader, because we can share, as Henry at the time cannot, the adult viewpoints that baffle him as a child and annoy him as an adolescent. It may be particularly challenging for a female reader, because part of Henry’s trouble, in his own mind, is that he is male. His father does not provide the kind of male role model he wants, and he feels his mother prefers his sisters and sees his masculinity as a nuisance: “‘Why can’t you be more like your sisters?’ she said, waving her duster, a technicolour nylon thing on a stick, as if she would dust him out of existence, or at least, into femininity”.

An adult reader can see that this may not be what she means at all, and can also see that Henry’s resentment at his sisters “getting away” with things at certain times stems from his total inability to appreciate how enervating the onset of menstruation can be: “They were girls; they had strange fits of weakness where all that would console them was cake and music and cartoons on TV. Henry knew then that girls would always get away with things that he couldn’t, and that, all things considered, he would have been better off born female.” But though the first reaction of a female reader to this whinge may be pardonable irritation, it is illuminating and thought-provoking to see how things look to him, and perhaps to boys in general.

Henry grows up in the 60s and 70s, which makes him about 10 years younger than me. For the most part, I think the evocation of the time period is convincing without looking over-researched. The obsession of Henry’s mother with class and her horror of anything “common” ring very true for the time, as does the gradual change in dietary habits: “You should never invert your fork and shovel in food as if it were coal going into a boiler. Holding your fork that way was only acceptable if you moved it to your right hand and were eating spaghetti Bolognese, which you sprinkled with a thin dusty cheese called Parmesan, that smelled faintly of vomit. The smell made it sophisticated and more Italian, his mother said. Sophisticated meant eating food that was slightly disgusting. This food was what was called an acquired taste.” Only at two points did I feel “hang on, it wasn’t like that”. One was when we hear that Henry and his sisters, as teens, liked The Waltons. Now admittedly it is hard to judge, because I was a teenager in the 60s, which were more rebellious and cynical than the 70s, and it’s also possible that because of the Vietnam war, we were more anti-American than the next wave of teens, but I recall The Waltons (first broadcast 1972) as the sort of squeaky-clean programme one’s parents liked, which pretty much made it anathema; I can’t imagine teenagers of any time watching it unless to mock.

The other point that puzzled me was the indifference of Henry’s teenage schoolmates to events in the wider world: “Outside the window, the other world was still there. It was a world of power cuts, and punk; a world of strikes and the IRA. Bombs were everywhere: in pubs, letters, packages, carrier bags, pillar boxes; in tube stations, trains and litter bins. There were firebombs and nail bombs, car bombs and boat bombs. All this was in the air and on the radio and on the TV in the living room, but the boys hadn’t been taught to take an interest, and these events might as well have been happening in another country.” I went to the same kind of school as Henry (except that mine was co-ed) and I remember heated conversations in the playground about current events. Again, this may point to a difference between the two decades: maybe the space race, swinging London and the 1968 assassinations in the USA were just more interesting, but one would have thought the IRA bombs at least would have held their attention.

The author’s wry, observational tone can often be very funny, and he is good at pinpointing a character. The foibles of Henry’s mother make an especially good target: “She believed in extra sensory perception and sometimes exclaimed when she turned on the radio, because the song she’d been humming in her head was playing right now, and that just showed you, didn’t it?”  Not that Henry himself escapes: “He’d begun drinking coffee because he believed doing so made him an intellectual. In fact, it only succeeded in making him jittery and giving him heartburn, but still, he thought, one must suffer for one’s art.”

In many ways, this is an ambitious first novel – set in a past many can still recall, seen through a child’s eyes – and one of the most ambitious things about it is its choice of a really quite ordinary boy as protagonist. Henry’s progress toward being adult, male and reasonably comfortable in his skin is not that of someone in any way remarkable but of Everyman, which makes it the more interesting and meaningful.

“Marcus. If Meton is stuck in bed upstairs for the foreseeable future, then who’s doing the cooking?”

Who indeed? Meton the anarchic but brilliant chef is so essential to the Corvinus household that his indisposition is a serious matter, especially since the solution proposed by Vipsania, Corvinus’s mother, is to play her own chef, the too-inventive Phormio, as substitute… Meanwhile Corvinus is investigating another murder, that of an inoffensive boatman with no known enemies. His investigations take him to Corsica, where he runs into an old acquaintance of his and ours, the philosopher Seneca, currently in exile. Corvinus has fond memories of their former meeting:

“He may be a serial furkler, a social climber of the first water and a third-rate poet, but he hasn’t got a speck of real political ambition in his makeup, let alone the stomach for any kind of risk-taking. He’s a worm, the sort that gives other invertebrates a bad name.”

It's the presence of Seneca that alerts us to the fact that this is one of the “political” Corvinus cases. As so often with these cases, the ending proves frustrating for Corvinus, in that though he knows whodunnit, there is a limit to what he can do about it.

Indeed in some ways this feels like one of those films-in-the-middle-of-a-trilogy, where you can sense that the author is building up to No 3. The first in this “trilogy” would have been Family Commitments, two or three books ago, in which Corvinus became aware of certain treasonable goings-on involving a relative.  Three characters from that book, his major-domo Bathyllus. the latter’s slightly dodgy brother Damon, and the freedman at the top of the civil service, Narcissus, also figure in this case.  And I can guess what the climax of the third is set to be…

In the meantime we have a complex plot with one quite surprising (but plausible) twist at the end, and some memorable characters.

You can keep up with Mr Wishart’s proceedings on his website.

Here's my list of this year's reviews, with links

Poetry

Real Lear: New & Selected Poems by Claire Crowther, pub. Shearsman 2024
From Base Materials by Jenny Lewis, pub. Carcanet 2024
Chalking the Pavement by Kate Noakes, pub. Broken Sleep Books 2024
A Bird Called Elaeus: poems for here and now from the Greek Anthology, by David Constantine, pub. Bloodaxe 2024
Leaving the Hills by Tony Curtis, pub. Seren 2024
Aleph Bet by Sue Rose, pub. Cinnamon 2025
maybe i'll call gillian Anderson by Rhian Elizabeth, pub. Broken Sleep Books 2025
Object Permanence by Anne Berkeley, pub. The Garlic Press 2025
The Green Month by Matthew Francis, pub. Faber 2025

Anthologies
Fire, Brigid and the Sacred Feminine, eds Shauna Gilligan and Niamh Boyce, pub. Arlen House, 2024

Prose fiction
Fox Bites, by Lloyd Markham, pub. Parthian 2024
Circulation, by Magnus Florin, trs. Harry Watson, pub. Vagabond Voices 2024
The Bruegel Boy, by Emma Darwin, pub. Holland House Books 2025

Children’s/YA
Kata & Tor, by Kevin Crossley-Holland, pub. Walker Books Ltd 2025

Non-fiction
The Hundred Years War Vol 5: Triumph and Illusion, by Jonathan Sumption, pub. Faber 2023
Edinburgh: A New History, by Alistair Moffat, pub. Birlinn 2024
Embers of the Hands; Hidden Histories of the Viking Age, by Eleanor Barraclough, pub. Profile Books 2024
The Haitian Revolution: An Enthralling Tale of Resistance, Freedom, and the Birth of a Nation, by Billy Wellman, pub. Enthralling History, 2024
Little Englanders: Britain in the Edwardian Era, by Alwyn Turner pub. Profile Books 2024
The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for an Endangered Planet by Jane Goodall and Douglas Abrams, pub. Viking 2021
Twilight Cities, Lost Capitals of the Mediterranean, by Katherine Pangonis, pub. Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2023
Bletchley Park’s Secret Source, by Peter Hore, pub. Greenhill Books 2021
The Ship Beneath The Ice, by Mensun Bound, pub. Macmillan 2022
Our Daily War by Andrey Kurkov, pub. Open Borders Press 2025

If he’s lying by omission then it’s only as all storytellers lie: they tell what makes the story work and they don’t tell what they must not; nor what they cannot.

In 1627, Gillis Vervloet, known as Gil, is a man of 79, seeking to end his life as a monk at an abbey in Saarland. But because, in his far-back youth, he was involved in some dubious activities, his admission to the abbey depends on two things: doing the abbey a favour via some detective work involving a statue looted and possibly destroyed during the religious wars of those times, and an account of his life that he is writing to help the abbot decide whether he is suitable.

There is a split narrative from then on, between 1627 and Gil’s youth. In addition we see some of the account he is writing, from which it becomes clear that the abbot is getting a heavily edited version of the story that we, as readers, are hearing from Gil. Indeed there are sixty years for which we do not see this account, and it is implied that whatever else Gil told of these years, he cannot have included the profession he practised then, or the abbey doors would surely be shut to him.

Most of the narrative takes place in the Low Countries – Antwerp and Brussels, mainly – between the years 1562 when the 15-year-old Gil arrives in Antwerp and somewhere around 1567, when he has to flee abroad. They are eventful years, dominated by religious strife and Gil’s friendship with the artist Pieter Bruegel, who takes him on as an artist’s model and to keep his accounts. Gil also models for other painters and sculptors and there is an intriguing possibility that he may have modelled for the very statue he is seeking.

Gil’s life at this point in his youth is complicated by the involvement of his brother Roeland and his religious mentor the priest Paulus in reform movements which could get them and all their associates into trouble with the Inquisition. His other problem is that though his greatest wish is to be a priest himself, his attraction to women, and to the idea of marriage and a family, is almost equally strong. He is continually having to choose between friendship and duty (as he sees it), and between the religious life and his natural inclinations.

A major factor in the religious strife of the time is the question of images, which ties into Gil’s search for the statue. Paulus the reformist priest objects to the whole idea of earthly representation of holy images; ‘But in kneeling to lead-white and madder, and to the image of a lazy servant girl and a lewd apprentice paid by the hour to represent the saints, a man plants God’s gift of adoration into the sinful earth of his gross and worldly desires.’  This could not be further removed from Bruegel’s ethos in painting, as expressed in a conversation with Gil: ‘Why do you draw drunkards? Or criminals?’ ‘Because they’re men, and men get drunk and so do women, and they’re proud, and wrathful, and they fornicate. So I need them for my pictures.’ ‘So you paint sin?’ ‘Men sin, and women too. Wrong-doing – malice and hurt – or folly, or simply what we break by our own carelessness…they’re in our nature.’ All his life, Gil is torn between seeking fulfilment in the religious or the secular, between idealism and nature, and it may seem that at the end of his life he has opted for the former, but a key passage earlier suggests that it is Bruegel’s view of the world that has influenced him more:

 ‘It was on the long, damp trudge back home to Antwerp that happiness came on him suddenly, like sunshine. It was in the moment he stooped to talk to a dog who reminded him of Pelle, and when he broke his limping stride to help an old man and his even older wife over a stile. It overflowed when he came on a woman at a crossroads weeping over a newborn baby as she sought the White Sisters’ orphanage at Middelheim. He could say with truth that the Sisters would be good to the baby and were very holy and loving, and when he left her and the child with the portress she was quite calm, her face softened if not smiling, and reconciled to her sacrifice. And in all that ordinary road was nothing glorious: no beauty among the dripping hedgerows and the cow-pats, no glory of angels in those sodden skies, no high majesty and passion in the sacrifice, no joy in being reconciled to sorrow…only the happiness granted to an ordinary witness to these ordinary things.’

In a time of murderous religious intolerance, Gil eventually seems to come close to believing, with Elizabeth I, that ‘there is only one Christ Jesus, one faith. All else is a dispute over trifles”.  He also comes to see that concepts like “truth” and “memory” are not as clear-cut as some imagine and that ‘people are lots of things’, as Bruegel paints them, unlike the saints his fellow-servant Doortje recalls from the orphanage of her childhood:

‘the saints they taught us in the Maagdenhuis – I shouldn’t say it, I suppose – but they were so simple. Like the puppets at the Poesje Theatre: carved to be good, or bad, and the same – just wood – all through. You never wonder what they’re thinking, the way you do with Mijnheer’s people.’

Gil, looking at one such painting, reflects, ‘it was the Bruegel Gil had always known – a true Bruegel if not the only true Bruegel – who had painted it. Gil could not accept Bruegel’s faith, any more than he could accept Roeland’s. But each was a good man, and a wise man – most of the time – and surely the rest of it all could be left to God’.

The end of the book, where sixty years are skipped over in a few paragraphs, did feel somewhat rushed to me. In a way, this is inevitable given the novel’s structure. It is the events between 1562 and 1567 that Gil is trying to justify to the abbot, plus for his own safety he needs to conceal from him much of what happened afterwards. But given that Bruegel had been so important to him, it seems odd that his early death in 1569 doesn’t rate a mention – it would have happened while Gil was abroad, but we are told they kept in touch by letter.

One reason this struck me, though, is that Bruegel is such a towering character in the novel – fully realised, fully rounded, as contradictory and exasperating as humans generally are. He comes alive as Doortje’s wooden saints did not. So, and this is important in a historical novel, do the place and time.

“But things feel strange – they feel different. Like this is a waiting time. Like when you see dark clouds riding in, and swelling, and you know that before long there’ll be a storm.”

The publisher labels this novel as being for ages 12 and upwards; in other words it’s one of those that get labelled YA because the protagonists are aged about 15. I’ve never been entirely sure why this fact should automatically render a book YA rather than adult, particularly since, these days, the designation doesn’t mean a certain amount of sex and violence can’t be included. I don’t feel I need to be a pensioner to interest myself in Lear, and though I may no longer be 15, I do recall what it was like. Certainly I did not feel, when reading this as an adult, that the author was simplifying his message or vocabulary for a young audience in a way he wouldn’t have for adults, which is just as well, because young readers notice and resent that. It is a fairly short novel, which perhaps is the one concession.

It is set in the neighbourhood of York in the year 1066. Kata, a 15-year-old girl living in the village of Riccall, is finding life dull, and longs for more interesting times. “Is this all there is? Kata thought. Ploughing and planting, and weeding, haymaking, harvesting… Round and round and round.”

Things are of course about to get infinitely more interesting, because Harald Hardrada has landed with an army and is about to claim the kingdom. He has with him an illegitimate son called Tor (not an historical character) the same age as Kata. While Tor is scouting for the Norwegian army, he and Kata happen to meet, and fall in love on sight. This is obviously inconvenient, given the circumstances, and Tor, who has no previous experience of war, was already conflicted by having watched his father’s troops burn Scarborough:

“Before long, Tor could hear timber crackling and spitting, the roar and updraught of flames blazing, sucking and whistling. He could see men and women and children running away from their huts and shacks; he thought of the old people inside them, unable to escape.

“I’ve come to help these people”, the king shouted to his son. “I’ve no quarrel with them. No wish to hurt them. But if they resist me… Well, the word will soon spread. This is a warning.”

Hardrada, in fact, is your archetypal warmonger, convinced of his own rightness and justifying his actions as such men always do; these days he would be talking about collateral damage. Tor, scouting incognito among the locals, gets to know them as individuals. He also comes to realise how racially mixed their community actually is, and how the war will fracture it.  Nevertheless, his loyalty to, and admiration for, his fearsome father are equally strong in him.

Kata’s conflict, in the end, is less between her love for Tor and her feelings for her people than between a longing for novelty and adventure and a wish to escape the turmoil unfolding in her world. This crystallizes around a convent she visits in York:

 “Everything within seemed so peaceful and straightforward, while the world without was so uncertain and dangerous, and yet … yet so alive.

I want to be within, she thought, but I need to be without. Both.”

While I know women in Saxon times had more agency than later under the Normans, I did wonder if a girl, and one of Kata’s age, would do, or contemplate, quite so much journeying on her own. Enabling girls to do interesting things is always a problem for historical fiction writers, and unless they use the old trope of disguising their heroines as boys, their only option is probably to make them rather more self-reliant and determined than the norm – Kata, unlike Tor, is an orphan, another classic way of giving fictional children more agency.

The love-at-first-sight story is no more unlikely than Romeo and Juliet, and their feelings are quite credibly and sympathetically drawn. But for me the main focus of the story was the effect of war on ordinary people. The vengeful racial violence that erupts in York against Scandinavians who have lived peacefully side by side with English neighbours for decades, the burning and looting of essential winter stores, the ruin of a tranquil landscape. When the headman of her village predicts where the battle will take place, Kata asks what is really the novel’s crucial question:

“The earls, they’ll draw up somewhere around here”, he added. That’s my guess.”

Kata stared at the scrub to her left, and the boggy water meadows across the river, and the sweet water, now running so softly, ribbed with blood light from the lowering sun.

“Do they have to?” she asked.

“Inspired by Humphries’s reworkings and in keeping with my established approach, I chose to write poems ‘after’ Dafydd rather than translations – not changing the setting or period but aiming to bridge the imaginative gap between his world and that of the modern English-speaking reader.”

Those readers who were enchanted by Matthew Francis’s collection The Mabinogi (and it would be a dull reader who was not) have another pleasure looming, in these versions of the mediaeval Welsh poet Dafydd ab Gwilym. In the absorbing Introduction, Francis explains why, before he came across the reworkings of the American poet Rolfe Humphries, more literal, faithful translations had left him with a sense of something wanting:

“They present the poet as a historical oddity, someone we have to make allowances for, imagining what his poems would be like if we were the sort of people for whom he originally wrote, speaking his language and sharing his culture. They are not so much poems as placeholders indicating what the poems were for other readers in other times.”

This resonated with me, because it was just what happened to me when reading translations of Aristophanes. Most British translators of him were good enough at indicating what he was to Athenian readers in the fifth century BC, but what they never did was make him sound remotely funny. Not until I discovered the equally scholarly but less reverent US translators - Dudley Fitts, Richmond Lattimore, Douglass Parker and William Arrowsmith - did it dawn on me why Athenian audiences might have been splitting their sides laughing.

In The Mabinogi, Francis treated the old legends not as sacred texts to be revered (a sure way to kill them) but as stories that were told aloud, added to, twisted according to need and developed a life of their own in the telling – which was why they came so alive in his versions. In The Green Month, he takes the key to the original poems to be Dafydd’s own personality – humorous, self-mocking, fascinated by nature and keenly observant of it, fascinated also by sex and unusually honest about it, fascinated above all by words and the craft of writing. By making this man come alive, Francis can get inside the skin of the poems, as he does in “Fox”, which is both a brilliant sketch of a fox and Dafydd’s rueful admission of his own sexual obsessions:

     Then watch out, hens! The gentleman in the gamey coat
     has a nose for feathered flesh. Men may chase him
     for fifty furlongs, but he’ll be back
     sniffing around your bedroom.
     I know how he feels.

This verse also demonstrates how Francis chose to tackle the poems technically. Dafydd was a very formal poet, and while wisely not attempting to reproduce cynghanedd in a language not designed for it, Francis felt some formal constraint was necessary and chose this 5-line “tapering syllabic stanza in which each line is shorter than the one before”.  It imposes economy, the more so as the poem progresses, and the result is a considerable shortening of some of Dafydd’s longer and more discursive forays into description and metaphor. It produces a poem which is “a snapshot of one of Dafydd’s themes, concentrating on the most striking images and ideas”.

A sort of distilled Dafydd, then.  And often very effective. In the lines from “Hay”, complaining about the rain:

      I must be seven-eighths water now
     as the rest of the world is
     this sodden evening

there is the immediacy that Francis missed from earlier translations, the sense that this fed-up, rained-on man was like ourselves.  In “Geese”, the lines “I told her I ached from my journey/ and other things” are not just indicative of Dafydd’s sexual obsession but a convincing approximation of a voice; one feels that is how he would have said it.

These poems struck me as being very true to Dafydd’s obsessive inventiveness with imagery – the “tattered sheet of snow”, the fogbound man “smothered in fleece, a tick in the weather’s wool” – also to his keen observation of the natural world and to his self-mocking humour. They are also, as one would expect from a combination of Dafydd ab Gwilym and Matthew Francis, hugely entertaining poems in their own right. Just as the American translators fixed on the one thing that really matters about Aristophanes, ie how and why he is funny, so Francis’s “snapshots” have focused on what mattered about Dafydd.

T

“Object permanence”, as the notes explain, is “the understanding that objects can continue to exist even when we cannot perceive them”. This collection delineates various people, including the author, via objects, places and moments that have been important in their lives. This is as good a way as any to bring characters to life, provided the writer chooses the right details, and Berkeley proves very acute at it. In “Behold This Woman”, a long list of details gives a vivid picture of a somewhat intimidating woman, “hair upswept in a fury”, who might be the speaker’s mother, but perhaps even more impressive in this regard is the poem, short enough to quote in full, “Bendinck’s Bittermints”:

     He was not a man for confectionery
     but my father loved the way the spartan shell
     cracked against the tongue to yield
     an inner sweet asperity. A small
     box would last all January.
      A second mint, he said,
     would taste the same, so why
     would you eat another straight away?

The same sharpness of observation surfaces in her forensically accurate rendering of remembered adult expressions: “And the wind comes up/ All the Way from the Urals” (Gibraltar Point) and attitudes: “Save the string because you never know/ when you’ll next need string”.

Memories of childhood, various temporary jobs, incidents, people, all combine to build up a kind of autobiography. Artistic influences figure too, The end of “Darning”, “Between my fingertip and thumb/ the needle fits. The thimble finger steadies it” acknowledges its debt to Heaney, and though “Places I have slept”, according to the notes, “’ owes its inspiration to ‘Sleeping’ by Raymond Carver.”, I did wonder too if Tracey Emin’s famous bed was not somewhere at the back of the poet’s mind.

There is a certain humour in these echoes, especially that of William Carlos Williams,

     you won’t
     forgive me

     I have eaten
     the last tomato

and indeed an acerbic humour has always been characteristic of this poet’s work, as in “Coin of the realm”:

     She’s looking right, into the future
     where her bareheaded son will be crowned,
     looking left, into the past. She wears a crown
     (or is it tiara?) because without it
     she’d just be a woman, but the king
     is a King, bareheaded on coins
     and, like all depictions of monarchs,
     shown for simplicity’s sake
      neatly cut off at the neck.

By its nature, this is a collection full of personal references, but that need not, and does not, render it inaccessible, because they are mostly the kind of references to which a reader can easily relate, or substitute his or her own memories for those of the poet – we have nearly all, in childhood, been on a trip to the seaside like the one in “Gibraltar Point”, that did not live up to expectations. The one poem where I did feel I didn’t really know what was going on was “Monday at Kettle’s Yard”. I was hoping to find a reference to this in the notes, but in vain.

Mostly, she works in free verse, but when she feels a poem belongs in a form, she handles it deftly. “Breaking news” is a villanelle, appropriately for a poem in which “ it’s all happening again”, and “Missing”, again aptly for its subject, is a lipogram omitting one letter of the alphabet in each stanza. This must be a fearsomely complicated thing not just to do, but to get a decent poem out of, and testifies to considerable technical skill.

The longest poem in the collection is “The bowser”, about a disused water-tank around which childhood memories cluster and whose decay mirrors changes in the wider world. In one italicised section it speaks, like an object in an Anglo-Saxon riddle poem, recalling its past.  Then the poem segues into a long lament for all that the object and its falling out of use stands for:

     O stubborn tank of stale water
     o lumpen iron emptiness
     o grim beacon of loyalty and decay
     of foundries in west midlands
     young men trained in technical drawing
      taps and gaskets
     baffles and wheelhead valves

Again this format echoes place-laments through from Anglo-Saxon times to the nineteenth century, though they tend to concern ruined halls, mansions and abbeys. But this poem is none the less powerful and evocative for memorialising a water-tank. This is a collection notable for its keen observation; the poet had various jobs when younger, but judging by her eye for the telling details in all of them, she was always at heart a writer.

The book may be obtained from this address.

This is very much a themed collection; its genesis was empty nest syndrome resulting from the departure of a daughter to university, but as is generally the way, one emotional preoccupation leads on to others, memories of the mother’s own youth and past relationships.  The words “mother” and “daughter”, though, remain central throughout.

The sense of the daughter’s absence is sharply evoked in poems like “the winter the murders stopped”:

     i miss hearing the creak of my daughter’s bedframe
     in the middle of the night, miss being summoned
     for glasses of water she could easily
     get herself, and now my house is filled
     with spiders, since there is
     no one here afraid of them

Memories of this daughter as a child

     as soon as you could walk you had the inclination
     to bolt and there was i, forever yanking you back
     on your reins (“the bolter”)

mingle with memories of the narrator’s own childhood sleepwalking: “i was an escape artist in a pair of fluffy pink slippers.” (“escape artist”). Indeed escape, of a kind, is also central to the poems, in that many of the remembered or imagined relationships in the collection end in failed contact. The idyll of “drowning on a stranger’s couch”, in which two people seem to be fulfilling each other’s emotional needs, ends with

     you will never
     write the letter you vow you will write when you eventually
     return home to wales a few weeks later, the
     thank you to the stranger who misses
     being a mother, from the girl who misses being a daughter.

And in “glasgow”, what looked like the start of a promising friendship also ends with the parties each going their own way:

     on one of your days off you took the bus
    into glasgow and brought me back a stuffed polar bear that i still have.
    and then one morning,
    some weeks after the bear,
    i heard from one of the housekeepers
    you’d caught that same bus
    in the dead of night, rode out to some other hotel in some other country,
    onto some other adventure. you left me alone

If this sounds despondent, that is not how the collection comes across, because there is quite a lot of wry humour in the voice, also a recognition that one cannot own people, nor keep them for ever – the daughter “is not lost, she is free” (“i didn’t call gillian Anderson”), and “the person next to me is not mine either, not really,/ because people never are, are they?” (escape artist”).

Some things about the poet’s technique will by now be evident; she doesn’t feel everything needs to be left-hand justified and is happy to use all the white space on the page, which is always rather a pleasure to me as a reader. And she works only in lower case, which some readers will not like so much, but it does seem to suit the conversational, informal tone of these poems. She also, at least in this collection, works mostly in the first person (occasionally in the second, when addressing the daughter). There are hazards in the “I” voice, notably the danger of sounding self-absorbed and sentimental. I think she mostly avoids this through the use of humour, though the last two lines of “the bolter” do strike me as not only predictable but a bit saccharine in tone. Mostly, though, she manages her endings well, making them memorable without looking contrived or sought-for. Indeed the last three lines of the last poem, which I won’t spoil by quoting, undercut the emotion of the collection in a way that raises a wry smile.

This is one of those collections inspired by Covid, but in an odd way. The author, though of Jewish descent, had not learned Hebrew as a child, nor especially missed it, but “the imposed solitude and feelings of collective dread in those strange times prompted an urge to reclaim something of my heritage and explore my identity. My parents were both dead by this time and the vacuum of lockdown made me long for community and a renewed continuity with the past.”

Hence a renewed engagement with learning the language. But Rose, besides being a poet, is a translator, and soon became interested in the language for its own sake rather than just as a source of personal memories. “When I did more research into the letters, I became fascinated by their different layers of meaning and the further I delved into the symbolism of each letter, the more interested I became.”  And so we have a sequence of poems in response to each of the 22 Hebrew letters. It also, as befits a project concerned with heritage, includes images of religious objects which had significance for her forebears.

It is obvious from the first, title, poem how conscious she is of the history and physical reality of language; the way its shapes evolved from pictures and from being carved into stone (“Aleph Bet” is of course the ancestor of “alphabet”):

      rapped right to left, hammer
     and chisel tap-dancing
     thought into endurance,
     tablet dust a halo rising.

She is conscious too of shape, the shape that sounds make of a mouth and their own shape on the page

     this letter is a hard kiss
    of sound, a pursing of lips […]

     This is the sign,
     in shape and meaning,
     for a house, its door open,
     beckoning always
      (Bet)

Our letters are a lot further removed from pictograms than those of the Hebrew alphabet.  Though C and G are our closest equivalents of the Greek gamma and Hebrew gimmel, neither much resembles a camel with an outstretched neck, as gimmel does. The recognisablility of the pictograms enables us to see what was important to the people who invented these ways of visually representing sounds: a tent, a riding animal, water. They also lend themselves to imagery: mem can mean water, but also a womb, since water is the source of life. All these layers of meaning (somewhat reminiscent of the readings of Philip Pullman’s alethiometer) naturally fascinate a linguist like Rose, and of course for all those fortunate enough not to be monoglots, there is also the fascination of their accidental resemblance to the words of another language:

      One
     of the elemental mothers—
     aleph, mem, shin: air, water, fire—primordial
     mem keeps mum,
     clamp of lips at teat,
     a murmur of mam, mummy, am, immi,
     names like mementos
     recalling the mmm
     of comfort and home.
      (Mem)

There is of course a personal relevance to this, which surfaces elsewhere:

      this letter
     is forced between lip
     and teeth, delivering
     the vim in words
     like lev, heart, avi,
     my dad, hav, give, ahava,
     love
      (Vet)

Ultimately though, if I had to define the overarching theme of this collection, it would be neither Judaism nor a sense of personal identity and heritage, but the nature of language. How and why it develops, how it works physically, how it shapes our thoughts. The notes at the end, explaining more about the individual letters, will be fascinating to anyone with an interest in linguistics. And there are times in the poems when the wordplay begins to echo George Herbert, convinced that two words do not sound alike by pure accident:

      Repentance
     may yet ring changes
     to convert a pauper,
     rash, and rasha, a rascal,
     to rosh, head, the skull
     a crown, righteous as one
     throwing stones
      (Resh)

Apart from a couple of slightly unexpected near-contemporary images in “Shin” – “fingers split like Spock/for a tripartite salute” – and “Dalet” – “the blinking 404/error of existence” – there is only one definite reference to a contemporary event: covid, in “Kaf/Khaf”. But the last poem, “Unknown”, concerns a letter traditionally said to be missing from the alphabet and whose eventual revelation will set all wrongs right:

      this is the missing shape
     that will mend the place
     of hurt where grief plumes
     like a city of debris rent
     with sirens

It is implied that we don’t yet even know how to make the sound of this letter; it might be palatal or labial, but if we ever find out,

      it will rise in thanksgiving
     from our depths and press
     its utterance to the cheek
     of the child who sleeps
     through the night’s silence.

Which last outcome we can all agree would be highly desirable, though it currently seems most unlikely. This is a sequence which would appeal to anyone interested in heritage and identity, but above all in language.

Tony Curtis has now been active in poetry for some 50 years, and as might perhaps be expected, this collection is very retrospective, sometimes elegiac, in tone. There are many childhood reminiscences, tributes to departed friends like Dannie Abse, Helen Dunmore and Glyn Jones, and poems centring on the history of Carmarthenshire, where Curtis grew up. To quote (in translation) the Welsh poet J T Jones, a man in old age is drawn to the scenes of his youth, “to walk in the places where he used to run”.  But Curtis has also been a much-travelled man, and this is reflected in poems set in the US and Europe.

In poems like “Visiting the Big Man”, the elegiac tone is very pronounced:

     We looked across the fields
     for what had gone
     and what we’d never see again.

     That would have been the last time
     I saw him, or maybe the time
     before the last time.

Those three “time” line endings strike like hammers, or the tick of a clock, emphasising both the passing of time and the fallibility of memory.

But though the poet is necessarily conscious of mortality (even, in “Further instructions”, leaving guidance for the disposal of his ashes), elegiac does not have to mean unremitting gloom, and these memories are mostly positive. There is keenly observed nature,

     Sparrows bicker in the bankside bramble (“The Guardian”),

and the “Bosherston Pike”,

     angling through the lily roots,
     Razor teeth and steel-clasp jaws
     Cruising the pools like a U-Boat in the shadows.

There are intriguing “characters” from the past, like Jimmy Wilde and Anne James. There is also the present, in the form of grandchildren and, still, new experiences:

     stare up through the huge pines and meet
     a sky that comes down to greet us

     with its diamonds closer,
     bright and sharp and beyond number,
     met as if for the first time. (“Yosemite”).

Having said that, there is undoubtedly a dark streak running through the collection, perhaps best exemplified in the often ambiguous and mood-changing endings of some poems. From that of “Railroad – “blood and dreams. Everything we need/ it seems” to the sinister double meaning in the last line of “In the Duomo, Siracusa”:

      out of the body in death, that motherly caress,
     the waiting over, knowing your depth
     and it’s taking you in.

“Scrolling Down”, a list poem which is his one concession to the internet age, didn’t really work for me; it highlights the random nature of news stories and the way they manage to equate the vital and the trivial, but we all knew that. There are, inevitably in a retrospective like this, a great many personal references, especially to friends and acquaintances. I know from experience that this can sometimes irk readers (or maybe it’s just reviewers), but it really shouldn’t, as long as the writer has managed to find the universal in the particular. We have all lost friends and relatives; all found inspiration in odd corners of history, and we should be able to mentally substitute the names in our own experience for those in the poem. I was reminded a couple of times of a review of one of my own collections, which opined that it wouldn’t please any reader who was “not interested in history”. I think that is true of this collection too, but then I can’t actually imagine what such a person would be doing reading any kind of a book.