This collection made me think driving through the Fens in August. I was travelling along straight roads, under wide skies. But despite the open landscape, there was much I couldn’t see. It felt like speeding through a region that was tangled and obscure. .
William Bedford grew up in a remote part of Lincolnshire. There are poems here about ancestry, history, old family stories. It was like being given an opportunity to go back and look again.
In the title poem a first person narrator hears a farrier talking about a celebration that’s part of the rural calendar.
.…an evening of dancing
when you cannot tell the fen from the dance
Bedford isn’t a poet who nostalgically harks back to some bygone idyll. The gathering that’s being evoked took place just before hostilities broke out in 1914.
Despite an apparently straightforward alternation between the farrier’s words and the listener’s thoughts, the piece has an elusive, almost ghostly quality.
But who’s speaking
I cannot say
The surface plainness of this writing is deceptive. William Bedford’s poems are disorientating. They dance about, shifting in style and subject matter. He may have one foot in a familial, agricultural past, but the other is very much in a cosmopolitan, intellectual world. Many pieces are addressed to other writers, or are a poetic response to their work.
In ‘The Railway Station at Stamford’ Bedford pays homage to Edward Thomas’s Adlestrop. The Sunlicht Still on Me’ is inspired by Hugh MacDiarmid’s elegy, ‘At My Father’s Grave.’
We look upon each ither noo like hills
Across a valley. I’m nae mair your son.
As writers we may see poets of the past as our artistic forbears. Yet if we wish to acknowledge –publically – our debt to the greatest of them, our own work can appear relatively slight by contrast.
But William Bedford judiciously saves the best till last. ‘Midsummer Party’ – a free version of a passage from Ovid’s Amores – is a lustful, edgy bitchfest of a poem in which past and present are fused to magnificent effect.
That’s when we’ll find our moment: in the library.
or the paternoster lifts; in the secretary’s office;
gods forbid the departmental lavatories, they’re a disgrace
even for educated men. We’ll just have to take our chance…
Reviewing can be a chancy business. But I’m fortunate to have received this collection.
The Fen Dancing by William Bedford is published by Red Squirrel Press, 2014 £7.99 and can be ordered here