Harry Owen is an interesting man and I’d recommend visiting his website and getting to know him better.  Having left England in 2008 for South Africa, where he now lives, this, his fourth collection, represents some of his early responses to life in a country he tells us friends described to him as such a dangerous place, although, as the poems demonstrate, his own view of his new home is rather different:  … for all its many problems, South Africa is one of the world’s most stunningly beautiful and genuinely miraculous places.

I lived an expatriate life myself for a good many years and know from experience that there are a number of ways in which the challenge of other cultures may be approached.  While the most obvious (not a choice I’d recommend) is to decide that wherever you’re living is really England under another name, the more sensible course is to accept that, as a new arrival, a degree of humility, acceptance of the status quo, obedience to the law and a  willingness to learn are called for.  I say this because “Questions to ask in South Africa”, the first poem in the collection, makes exactly the same point and, in doing so, raises large questions.  When, it asks, do things become too much?  When do you / start to begrudge it, feel you’ve been taken / for a ride?  Owen is referring to what a new arrival in a foreign land might perceive as the ridiculous unreasonableness of daily life, but in pursuing such questions, he offers responses which are surely pertinent in an age of global mass migration:  Why do you sense / your heart solidifying, congealing / like a crust into what you’d rather not / be: / the cost of a breakfast, a chicken / a conscience or a soul?  As a citizen of a country living through troubled times, I’d like to pursue these questions;  as a reviewer, I’ll resist the temptation and leave it to the poet:  What happens now?  What happens now?

There are fifty-five poems in “Non Dog”, too many to do justice to and not all equally effective.  Some, though, “Here and There (1) / i. Snowdrops”, for example, lodge powerfully in the mind:

So this is what we watched
on the nine o’clock news –
machetes, black smoke of blazing tyres,
tribal thump of drums, spears,
Michael Buerk’s shocked BBC integrity,
the isn’t it dreadful of a safe distance:

blood, blood rinsed white as snowdrops
in middle England’s grass …

Not that the comfort zones of English hypocrisy are Owen’s only target, as we see in “Timbuktu (after Ahmed Baba)”:

Write this down:

I, a man, know how to escape the marketplace.
We are not slaves or other merchandise,
including salt, even of the earth.

When judgement comes, watch the scholars’ ink
measuring itself against the blood of martyrs
and observe how much weightier it is.

Write this down.

These two poems have real bite.  They are direct and reach beyond the personal to the importantly universal in ways which I find compelling.  Owen does have a lighter, more romantic side, though, and shows it in poems such as “Abbie, on finding a bat in her bra” and “rhetoricity”.  Indeed, the range of his poetry, its accessibility and openness, are among the noteworthy aspects of the collection.  He writes with honesty, directness and humour about the world as he finds it, the sameness of all things; / the difference, because, as he says in “Clockwork”, I inhabit the world’s skin.