Many of the poems in this collection, rather than looking outwards as the title implies, are a focusing inwards – a series of close observations of those things which make us human, and sometimes just of things themselves – as in the title poem.
However, High’s focus meanders in and out like the tides he describes in some of his poems: one minute focusing in on the details of a person or a relationship and the next minute his vision widening out to encompass a larger landscape (as in the sequence To Look for America). High is able to successfully zoom his attention in on tiny concrete details, such as the sticking plaster on the dead woman’s face (Sticking Plaster) and to also achieve more expansive description giving a very real sense of place:
“ Transporters spaced along the freeway
carry horizontal forests like drainpipes:
chaffed and raw they creak against the chains.”
(California)
High’s strengths though, are very definitely in his very physical description as in In the Chapel of Rest:
“…Your corpse appears
not dense, but fragile, delicately processed
like the chewed-up wood that wasps might leave;
a laminated shell of empty cells…”
or Sticking Plaster:
“…it was not the cracked thorax
split open, like a beetle, between the flat grey folds
of her breasts, not this which stuck: nor
the cindered lungs, lifted from the cavity,
scooped on a steel dish…”
and in the more personal poems about his father. These poems speak directly to the reader in a way that some of the less personal ones do not. The poem In the Chapel of Rest, for example, has a raw honesty that goes straight to the heart and a subtle deftness in the handling of language. These poems are not raw emotional outpourings but controlled accomplished and poignant responses to a heart-breaking natural process that we will all have to deal with at some point in our lives. High manages to find a sad beauty in the harshness of death: “Papery, your face is now an unlit lantern…” This is beautiful writing and I wanted more of it.
I got the impression throughout the collection that High was exploring relationships: relationships with partners and family, and the relationships that people have with the world around them. I felt the presence of the sea throughout the collection too – sometimes actually in the poems, but at other times a hint or an echo of it just beyond reach.
High likes to write in form and does it well – there are several terza rimas, at least one sonnet and he seems to generally favour two or three line stanzas, which suit the subject matter, as well as playing around with the shape of the text on the page. Some of the rhymed poems however, I felt were less successful in that in some places the rhyme scheme seemed to go awry or didn’t quite work. When a writer sets up a definite scheme at the beginning of a poem the reader can feel somewhat cheated if it goes to pot further on.
For me the least successful poems in the collection are those where High attempts to second guess how someone else might feel – the sequence Construction Site for instance. There are parts of this sequence that worked really well: there are some lovely descriptions; I liked the use of terminology within the sequence; and my favourite moment in the sequence was the comparison that High makes between machinery and the sea in The Machine Minder – both in description and the way that this particular section is physically set out on the page in the pattern of waves. My quibble with this section though comes at the end where the author imagines what the machine minder might feel. This I found somewhat unconvincing. It is very hard to put yourself into the mind of someone else and the writing teacher perched on my shoulder was chirping ‘write about what you know’. That said, High has obviously spent time around construction sites or done a lot of research – I wanted to either hear ‘his’ voice or the ‘actual voices’ of the workers. The sequence put me in mind a little of what Alice Oswald did with Dart, although what she achieved (and what is lacking in this sequence), was to really get under the skin and inside the voice the people. He does give a great evocation of the place though and I would love to see some of these ideas expanded and developed into a larger sequence. I imagine that given a large amount of time and energy there could be a series as powerful as Dart to be had.
The other low point for me was the poem early on in the collection about relationships (Fellow-Farer) which seemed somewhat unconvincing or lacking in something. I felt I wanted more from the poems in terms of emotional connection with the subject matter and I am not sure that any woman would be flattered to hear that she contains all his ex-partners! That said I felt that the collection strengthened as it went on, like a kettle slowly coming to the boil.
I won’t finish this review on a negative though because as I have said before there is some beautiful writing in here. High is able to focus in on his subject matter with the eye of a surgeon and the language of an artist. The series about his late father is particularly compelling. I shall look forward to reading more of his work or hearing him read.
The Range-Finder’s Field Glasses by Graham High is published by Oversteps Books, 2011