Book Review: 5 - A Poetry Anthology By Helen Bowell, Prerana Kumar, Eva Lewis, Laura Potts, Ruth Yates

It is a mistake, probably, to seek consonance in the work of several poets whose contributions to Poetry Business’ latest anthology are nothing if not eclectic. Yet there are contiguous stylistic threads in this fine, slim volume, whose presence may or may not be a consequence of the judicious application of editorial inference. Since most of us are given instinctively to the combing out of knots, it is satisfying to find verisimilitude in such a disparate selection of poems, even where the likeness is otherwise residual.

Two poems that respond to pictorial art and artists – Helen Bowell’s ‘If You Can Go to Hell for Lust’ and Ruth Yates’ ‘To Charles Altamont Doyle’ – approach their respective subjects from obtuse angles. Yates’ apostrophic dialogue with the alcoholic, depressive, and later psychotic, illustrator is a heavily ironic take on Doyle’s committal to a Scots asylum. Striving to defend himself against an incarceration he is at pains to understand – the poem is preceded by an open, defensive letter to the authorities – the paintings and illustrations Doyle created to corroborate his own sanity had the effect of affirming the opposite in the minds of those with the power to liberate him. Yates’ reading of this slight but individually crushing moment in history is perceptively wrought, in portents of turbulence and lunacy; the reader can almost hear the door slamming shut behind Doyle:

‘So what are they looking at? When a man looks for madness,
he finds it, just like when you seek anything eventually it arrives:
a rainbow or a big storm, a horse rearing up or two ravens flying’.

Helen Bowell’s narrator yields entirely to the vision of hell depicted by Hieronymus Bosch, as though she herself were similarly incarcerated. Embedded in the picaresque nightmare of a Bosch canvas, Bowell’s poem – an address to the anthropomorphic freak-show whose various dispositions and contortions vexed the Renaissance religious imagination so thoroughly – is a gem of animated concision, as authentically heightened a visitation as to encourage a feeling of being present in a grand satire, orchestrated to undermine the florid hysterias of divine punishment:

‘Will you hide with me in this tight red cone?
Will you carry me on your back when I’m trapped in a clam?
Take me into the trees.
Place a ball in my mouth with your beak.
I am facing the biggest fish of my life.’

A joy to relish in a seductive forest of metaphors, their use of language is hypnotic, as sensitive to the delicacy of sound as Dylan Thomas...

Bowell is good at inverting the telescope of perception: the first prose-poem of this collection is a paean to fecundity, a ‘biography’ of a tree rendered in the fitting guise of a woman. That the tree’s beauty and fulsome utility are reduced to an anatomy of human usefulness circumscribes its otherwise beneficent purpose, and in doing so, makes of the analogous connection a consonance of subservience. The final descent through an aperture of myth sustains the narrator’s devil’s advocacy of delusional paternalism: ‘Her branches / have driven out the spirits of the old year, and have symbolised purity, / love and fertility, impregnating many cows.’ (‘Short Biog’) Bowell’s view is intriguingly evanescent, as if uncertainty might best be resolved in binary exegesis: the loaded and luscious Nêspera, like the bittersweet kumquat of Tony Harrison, is given a philosophical reading in the titular poem in languidly speculative couplets, whose shortened lines impute indecisiveness.

And a rich tapestry of myth, of sensory perception and of inheritance is tested to the point of exquisite resolution in the work of Prerana Kumar. Kumar’s poems are soaked in an Indian heritage; as attentive to the surrounding natural world and as subtly ornamental in style as almost to ironise the darker shadows with which they are infected. A remarkable hybridisation of fleshly exuberance in the manner of Fitzgerald’s translation of the Rubaiyat, and the self-lacerating melancholia of heredity, Kumar’s verses are formally complex, but lusciously wrought. A joy to relish in a seductive forest of metaphors, their use of language is hypnotic, as sensitive to the delicacy of sound as Dylan Thomas:

‘Let her believe her bones remain bird-hollow
in this wind that smells of rosemilk,
let her hear the grinding of cardamom,
a sparrowed lullaby humming the weeds’. (‘I Rewind the Second My Mother’s Girlhood Breaks’)

The received effect is oddly liberating, a confusion of time and place as manifested in the disordered perception of a holiday park with childlike unreason for insight...

This is beautiful writing, as sensually alert to the landscape of the Deccan plateau, as, elsewhere, it is intrinsically shadowed by the presence of darknesses both real and imagined. The ironically-titled ‘Atonement’ rests on a knife-edge of memory, where the terrain’s otherwise fulsome detail is necessarily overwhelmed by an inheritance of violence that seeps into the corners of the present in wanton figures of blood:

‘your mama crying please,
please into her hands while from the dingy gut
of the house, her husband swung a smirk
of a knife against a week-old leg
of lamb’.

Adopting the figurative mantle of memory in the guise of its associative purlieus, Eva Lewis’ strange and compelling ‘Three Erasure Poems’ share feint commerce with Bowell’s ‘Short Biog’. But here, the washed-out haunts of an earlier existence become emblems of pain, whose markers are renegotiated to bear the mental demands of a tortured backward glance. Lewis’ sleight-of-hand is concisely engineered to incorporate bitterness and a torpid landscape in the same breath, and by suggestion. The received effect is oddly liberating, a confusion of time and place as manifested in the disordered perception of a holiday park with childlike unreason for insight:

‘Being fascinated by her naked riots.
And scared because London wasn’t answering
her phone. I normally answer the vending machine
and return with change.’ (‘Memories I Ruin / Three Erasure Poems’ #1)

Were experience not so sharply defined behind the peeling façade, the poems might resemble the recalibrated perceptions of Craig Raine’s Martian sequence. The suppuration of memory into the foreground, the leeching of biography, may, as it appears to be for Kumar, an existential compulsion, with little guarantee of catharsis. Lewis’ exegetic ‘A Cave Waters Shadows’, whose lineation withers as the poem progresses, is an arrestingly honest articulation of grief and identity. Leaning into synaesthesia as though headwinds embattled the senses, the narrator’s internalised pain resurges in colours and irruptions: ‘A blister saturated into a dome’, and later, ‘Insomnia identifies / as purple. The sun a welt raised // into a boulder.’

Laura Potts’ energetic rhythms and unabashed use of rhyme yields a refreshing shot in the arm against the backdrop of such aggrieved introspection, not least in the stoical, defiant, celebratory quatrains of ‘The Picture in Ireland’, whose apostrophic addressee – ‘kid’, in context – might be a wholly imagined figure caught in the very real drama of the ‘Troubles’. Potts’ sense of the inner music of time and transition breathes the irony of life into a species of elegy, claiming the unassailable higher ground of colour, hope and vigour for a young man dead before his time, and affixing his energy in the aether. The boy who ‘laughed and cursed and spat the cleric’s / sermons to the last’, is transfixed, cast in another kind of light:

‘I waved, and mouthed a broken vowel which you would never see.
And saw you in the longest light, where you will always be.’

And again, in the superlative ‘Yesterday’s Child’, a poem of absence and loss expertly compressed into two quintains, the steady interchange of anapaests and iambics gives momentum to a rising tide of metaphors whose purpose moves from the visceral to the moribund, as though to deliver a semantic gear-shift and mire the closing lines in a welter of alliterative and distinctly Tennysonian grief:

‘For the years between us are wide as a child,

and the tears as wet as a wound’.

The simplicity of Ruth Yates’ poems is studied; their direct, often monosyllabic, approach is betrayed by a vision that skews thematic development towards displacement, strange concatenations or conflations of location, and ‘reappearances’ of antecedents in the livery of a museum tableau. From the oddly affecting presence, on the wrong school day, of a girl whose scholarly life is circumscribed by her mental challenges - ‘All the windows in the classroom / looked out on to better things’ (‘School on Saturday’), to the transfiguration of characters in a pristine Alpine landscape (‘Mountaintops’), Yates’ insinuation of interpolated narratives invigorates underlying themes:

‘Oh! When I stepped off the plane
she was an archangel and folded
me in her arms. She stood tall, her hair
all the way down her back’. (‘Mountaintops’)

If only offering the briefest of tasters, the high quality of the poems in this anthology is remarkably consistent throughout.


New Poets List 5: A Poetry Anthology By Helen Bowell, Prerana Kumar, Eva Lewis, Laura Potts, Ruth Yates is published by Smith|Doorstop Books (2024).

More information here.