It was August

when we saw the man

with an iguana on his shoulder

walk up from the wharf.

No mirage –

the huge lizard

unblinking

in outlandish light

while downwind

the lions at Colchester zoo

were fed lumps of ice

flavoured with blood.

The mood created over these brief lines is exemplary. The seemingly amusing sight – the man with the iguana on his shoulder – is then questioned by the clever anti-question (“No mirage”) and made strange by the use of “outlandish” to describe the light, as if it is indeed all a mirage. The quick change to the lions in the zoo before the sudden stop is symptomatic of Stainer’s style. The act of benevolence – zoo keepers keeping the lions cool by feeding them bloodied lumps of ice – is very simply coerced into a dark, unsettling final image. This impact is lessened the second time the poem is read, but it is then that the strangeness of the poem really comes into play, when you are left to wonder at how such simple descriptive language created that sensation.

The epigraph to the book, by Simone Weil, is “There is only one fault, incapacity to feed on light”, and such feeding is evident in all of the poems, both in their use of colour, of forms of light, and in the dogged value Stainer clearly puts on the concept of light as uplifting, as the antithesis to the darker periods in our lives. There is “bladed light”, “irrepressible light”, “a particle of light”, “the darkness of light”, “the history of light”. There is “insolent light” in a poem called ‘Borrowed Light’. There is lots of sunlight, moonlight, daylight, twilight, winter light, white light and blue light. One might think this repetition is a weakness, but light is Stainer’s tool, both in writing and in coming to terms with grief. The moving poem for her daughter, where she writes, “I use them—/the colours of grief,/like the mirror/in the cat’s eye/to throw back/ the single topaz at your throat”, is called ‘Afterlight’.

There are also a number of poems based on paintings, that art form which most feeds on light. Yet these are examined for what they can’t do, which is remove themselves from the static:

He painted simply

her awareness of being painted

But we, who must make

things happen

see the silver leash

race through her fingers

the squirrel’s reflex,

grace of electrons.

                                    (‘Lady with a squirrel’ (after Holbein))

This is different from typical ekphrasis, for it confronts the painting directly, and confronts its inadequacies as a medium. It is the most open statement of a poetic that Stainer allows in this book – what can a poem make happen? This quiet, slightly surprising, dialogue with Auden is a recurring theme, in her favouring of the old masters – Holbein, Titian, Michelangelo, Durer – and explicitly in the poem called ‘About Suffering’.

These poems are in fact a complex meditation on grief, subtle and tender, that yield many surprises, although not necessarily on the first reading. It must be noted that Stainer guides our reading by stating explicitly on the book jacket that these poems are “the record out of long fallow after the death of my daughter”. Many readers will find themselves wanting more to grab hold of when confronted with these incessantly elusive short poems. When I have come across some of these new poems in journals – their shortness and surety making them leap off the page – they seemed more charged, more surreal, than when collected here. Perhaps Crossing the Snowline is best dipped into for the single moment of inspiration than interrogated for a unifying gel.

In Long-Haul Travellers, Sheenagh Pugh plays quietly at the reaches of poetry. She explores a variety of unusual myths and histories, always in a subdued, non-exclamatory manner. ‘Hundreds of Ships’ is an example of her trick of building up a series of clauses to great effect:

They say it’s the long winter that leans its weight

on the heart; the drone of wind that interferes

with the tuning.  And they say it’s ingrained:

there was an uncle, haunted by the masts

of sunken ships in the harbour; only he

could see them, that forest of raised arms

waving for help, until one day he went

himself to see what they wanted.

The tone and pacing here, and the sense of recent loss coupled with a certain stoic optimism, is similar to many of Pugh’s poems, especially her finely turned sonnets. In these her rhyming is clever, but not overtly, as if, again, she doesn’t want to announce the form to the world (there are times when some zesty Muldoonian word-play would have added a little punch). There are some surprises. ‘Paul Hunter at the Welsh Open, 1996’, a simple, winning description of the young golfer at seventeen, who was “the talk, the next thing coming,/the sport’s new face”, and ends “That day, he had ten years to live”, has a lovely companion piece in the excellent ‘Victor’, about a slave made free in Roman Britain, who also dies young: “And the XX: such a short way to write/twenty years…”.  Pugh seems comforted by the valour of these young men, by their similarities, separated by centuries:

                                    so fortunate,

the glow of triumph on him, this rising star

who’d won his freedom and his master’s love,

wearing his youth like armour. Ave, Victor.

This historical concern is best illustrated in her long poem, ‘Murat Reis’, a sequence mapping the journeys of the eponymous explorer. It highlights a preoccupation with the places where history interacts or interferes with fiction, and vice versa: “His name was Janszoon, Jansen, Jansz, perhaps;/could be from Haarlem, could be forty-four”. This uncertainty feeds into the explorer’s life itself as each stage of his journey takes him further from his origins and he is constantly self-transformed and mythologized: “Englishmen, not getting the hang/of foreign speech, call him Matthew Rice://it amuses him to hear stories/of Matthew the English renegade.” It is an interesting, thought-provoking treatise on memory, change and loss, let down slightly by the occasional method of scattering words and lines across the page, which didn’t have the effect the style seeks or warrants. Pugh does hit this on the head, however, in ‘What It Means’, where the placing of the words and the ‘white space’ between them works perfectly to suddenly slow down or speed up the rhythm. Her choice of line length and line breaks in poems such as ‘Adwaitya’ and ‘Golden Boy’, however, is confusing, and not a little distracting. The images would perhaps have benefited from the breathing space of a longer line.

Michael O'Neill, in the poem ‘Gloss’, dedicated to the critic and editor Alan Ross, writes (presumably quoting Ross), “‘too much cleverness/in poetry today—give me/one good lyric by Spender, something that comes/out of deep feeling’”. Both O’Neill’s first collection The Stripped Bed (1990), and now, after a long gestation, Wheel, could take this quote as an epigraph. This is a double edged sword. O'Neill, not unlike Spender, is acutely self-questioning throughout this collection; there is no denying that he writes out of “deep feeling”, the poems slowly ruminating on the everyday lifted into the realm of the philosophical. But the castigation of “cleverness” does raise alarm bells.

As the title suggests, the poems spiral, outwardly, inwardly and full circle between various streams of consciousness. This is often made explicit, such as in ‘Dawn’, where if “a camera trained on him performed/a 360 degrees shot, he and the river//would seem to tilt and spin towards the sky”. But it is best exhibited in the poem ‘Moments’, which opens with the unusual idea that “Keith Douglas found in killing a knack or a skill,/a damnable grace that sent grace packing” and spreads out into theories of soldiers, poets and soldier-poets, then athletes (“their actions belong, like those of sniper and poet,//to no one’s republic”), Olympiads, nations rising from the ashes, until the stadium “draws history, for a second, into its wake”, before the denouement and the understated punch line: “the tracksuit slipped back on like a wry knowledge.”

The wheeling style does, however, sometimes result in avenues being navigated then abandoned. O’Neill believes in things being left unsaid (more than two thirds of the poems contain ellipsis), which is important for the philosophical tone of his poems but is perhaps utilized too often, leaving too many gaps in the narrative. His writing can feel at times old-fashioned, with an incredibly conservative tone, and I found his style overbearing, the machinery of the form working sometimes too obviously. In his translations or versions of other poems, such as ‘Dawn’ after Cardarelli, and ‘Infinity’ after Leopardi, his style is much looser, less hindered, it seems, by his own presence in what he writes. These pieces are amongst the most beautiful in the collection:

                         And hearing the wind

gust through this windbreak, I compare

infinite silence

with the wind’s voice; and what haunts me

is the eternal,

and the dead seasons, and the present season,

its life, and the sound of it. In this fashion,

the mind drowns in immensity;

and it’s good to be lost in such a sea.

                                                                        (from ‘Infinity’)