David Cooke reviews Bromley and Little

A Guided Tour of the Ice House is a long overdue full length collection from Carole Bromley. Her two previous Smith/Doorstep pamphlets, Unscheduled Halt, 2005, and Skylight, 2009, were both winners in The Poetry Business Book and Pamphlet Competition.   She also has an impressive track record in many high profile poetry competitions, including first prize in the 2005 Bridport Competition for her poem  ‘The Lovers’ which is collected here. Bromley is clearly a class act whose work is well crafted and consistent. However, her debut collection shows that there is more to her work than technical proficiency. Whilst her title poem is certainly a tour de force, it is also paradigmatic of the way her imagination works and her ability to see beneath the surface of things. At first the tone is bluff and matter of fact: ‘Please mind your heads, ladies and gents, / and button your coats. We will be underground / longer than you think.’ Soon, however, we are drawn more deeply into its weirdly discomfiting world:

While you’re down here adjust the lamp
on your head. Notice how, at the edges,
the ice turns soft and how, in the middle,
leaves are caught and mayflies and even
the tail-feathers of a swan.

By the time we imagine that the ‘tour’ is drawing to its close an increasingly ominous note is sounded: ‘You might be thinking too how odd it is / the secret passageway is sealed…’ A self-assured performance in which she successfully highlights her talents, it is immediately followed by ‘Unscheduled Halt’ a brief poem which shows how effortlessly she can capture a deeply personal moment: ‘The night pricked with stars. / A stopped train. Midnight.  A new moon.’ ‘In Another Life’ is also a delicately rendered poem in which ‘emotion’ is ‘recollected in tranquillity’: ‘I would have liked to take you to Pyramid Lake. / If you went there you’d understand why.’ The memory is then slowly pieced together until eventually the absent loved one is introduced to complete the scene:

I love to imagine you there in your green shirt
Lighting a cigarette, the quick, brave flare of it in the dark.

The majority of Bromley’s poems deal with familiar domestic themes and relationships:  a wife and her husband, parents and children, growing up, bereavement, all of which  might lead some to dismiss her work as having nothing new to offer. However, this would be a mistake. In the ever more populous field of contemporary verse, where lesser talents might feel the need to strive and strain for a degree of ‘originality’, Bromley sheds a wise and wryly humorous light on subject matter that we can all identify with. In ‘A Man Thing’ a wife fails to get the point of fishing and is then shocked on the way home by ‘your bloodied hands / giving it some throttle’. In ‘Desperate Measures’ we see a mother ‘dancing / to Venus in Blue Jeans across the kitchen tiles’ as she attempts to placate a child for whom ‘Sleep did not appeal.’ The seeming omniscience of fathers is evoked in ‘Dads’ but is then subverted in the poem’s final lines:

But they did not know what to say
when the boy who said you were beautiful
no longer wanted to know.

There is also a poignancy in Bromley’s acceptance of the ageing process. In ‘Stepping Out’ she begins by examining ‘My poor old legs / criss-crossed // by spidery red veins…’ However, when her husband kisses her in a certain spot it takes her back to an earlier self: ‘I’m striding, leggy, // twenty-one, towards you / in that dress.’ Finally, mention must be made of several deeply moving poems written in memory of her father. In ‘The First Time’ he returns as a ghost ‘rattling the locks / of the French windows; / / he didn’t know about the bolt / I’d had fitted since he died…’ ‘The Morning  My Father Died’ is a convincing portrait of someone for whom the reality of bereavement is sinking in whilst they are dealing with the banalities of social intercourse:

I think my father may have died,

I said, as if trying out the words,
I couldn’t remember whether you take sugar.
The talking stopped. They looked at me.
I swept some pastry crumbs up with my hand,
slowly pushed down the plunger.

What makes Bromley’s poems so appealing is not only their truth to real lived experience but her wonderful way with imagery as here in ‘Skylight’ where a wife is lying awake in bed while her husband sleeps like ‘a baby / who’s taken a swig from the nurse’s bottle’:

Anyway how could I sleep tonight?
I lie in what’s left of the bed
like a jigsaw piece in the wrong puzzle
and watch the stars who don’t care
staring back from another millennium.
They’ve seen it all before.

In ‘Bockhampton’ we catch a glimpse of Thomas Hardy’s first wife, Emma, ‘with her hats like collapsing / birthday cakes.’ In ‘Fifties Kitchen’ the cheeriness of a work-free Sunday is convincingly evoked: ‘On the window-sill even the wasps sing / in their raspberry-flavoured graves.’ The wit and intelligence which underpin this particular image is highlighted again in the extended metaphor of ‘Lovers’, her prize-winnning Bridport poem based on Magritte’s painting, in which she captures that sense of risk mixed with exhilaration which is experienced in the early stages of a relationship:

Once the veils were on the laughter stopped,
now we were a blind bridal couple
feeling our way.

Rooting, fumble-mouthed for dry kisses
under a white shroud. Not like kissing eyes closed.
It was more than that and stranger.

He was a stranger, I was a stranger.

Poignant, wise, and sometimes deeply affecting, A Guided Tour of the Ice House is collection which can be warmly recommended.  Carole Bromley is a poet to buy, keep and return to.

The Snow Globe is a substantial new chapbook of some 30 poems by Pippa Little who was a Gregory Award winner in 1984. However, in spite of this early recognition, she seems, until recently, to have published relatively infrequently. An earlier collection, The Spar Box, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, while her second collection, Foray: Border Reiver Women, was published in 2008 as a result of her winning the Biscuit Poetry Competition.  A further collection, Overwintering, is now scheduled for publication by Carcanet in 2012. Born in Tanzania, Little returned as a child to Scotland where she grew up. Following this trajectory, the poems in The Snow Globe are divided into four sections: The Africa Chest, Another Life Called Scotland, The Snow Globe and The Deer Larder. In the opening poem ‘Fatouma’ we are offered fleeting glimpses into some of the poet’s earliest memories:

You lift and lower me
into bath-water, ocean-water,
swaddle me in towels, between your knees.
Sucking my thumb, I drowse
in your lap, ear to your heartbeat.

From these lines we sense immediately Little’s strengths as a poet. The intimacy between child and servant is conveyed beautifully, enhanced by cadences which mimic the lapping of water.  That this is a poet whose ear is finely attuned can be heard in the interplay between the liquid sounds and labials in the first three lines. It is a poetry which demands to be read aloud and savoured. The child’s sense of loss on leaving Africa is captured in ‘The Africa Chest’, where the long delayed arrival of the chest brings only disappointment:

A tumble of stuff, dulled by flat north light.
We poked and pulled, my sister and me, looking for clues,
but the dolls’ limbs and the animals
broke my heart.

In ‘Trick of my Eye’, the child slowly comes to terms with a new world and its new colours: ‘From the upstairs kitchen window / I see yellow fields. Black pines / and beyond both a strip of North Sea.’ Throughout the remaining sections Little examines the various connotations of that elusive and emotive word ‘home’, seeing it as a place, people, a mythology and a history. In ‘Fear of Heights’ she evokes the relationship between a child, her father and ‘the world you made for me.’ In ‘Yes’, the child and her father are again out together, ‘giving your mother a rest’, though the poem’s sense of affirmation comes unstuck on their return: ‘And in her sleet-smeared face the Yes!  was lost, / somehow I knew I’d never find it / even if I went looking.’ ‘However, beyond the immediate family there is a wider world of ‘gloopy vowels’, ‘sea haar’ and ‘wee bisoms’.  ‘Newburgh Raincoats’ is a wonderful celebration of all things dank and dour:

We wear our Newburgh raincoats’
dreich indecision of khaki or grey,
belted them tightly,
pulled up our knee socks so they meet the hem
but still cold slinks in and under. It’s still
raining inside the car, a nicotine-fine mist.

In the second half of the collection the poet casts her net more widely. Ironically, the poem ‘Home’ is about a homeless old couple who ‘choose a new place each night, / their snow queen’s train of sheets and quilts behind them.’ ‘Billy Blin’s Shoes’ and ‘The Clootie Well’ are inspired by folklore, while other poems such as the St Salvator Sisters and ‘Whaligoe Steps’ evoke specific places and their history as if in updated versions of the Gaelic tradition of  dinnseanchas. Finally, in these powerful lines from ‘The Deer Larder’ the notion of ‘home’ is again evoked, but against the tragic backdrop of the Highland Clearances’:

Across the water, hearth fires
put out with factor’s piss, a village entire
gralloched so clean
its lintels clot in the moss
soft, boneless.
McCaig asked who owns the land
in this country of stones piled up
and stones torn down, whose
scrawn home is this?

Although The Snow Globe is published in the modest format of a pamphlet, it has the emotional weight of a full collection. It has a sense of purpose and a unity that is more than the sum of its parts. The poems it contains are intense, mysterious and musical. I will certainly be looking out for more of this poet’s work.