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\u2018The Man Who Wasn\u2019t Ever Here\u2019 begins with a useful scene-setting in prose, and a mystery \u2013 perhaps two.\u00a0 Thomas Ovans, the poet\u2019s grandfather, was born in County Leitrim, moved to Middlesbrough to work in the shipyards and married a local woman, went to sea as a ship\u2019s engineer (becoming friendly with Nellie Melba on board) then died when his ship struck a mine in the Indian Ocean.\u00a0 With a few additional facts \u2013 he was from the same area as one of the leaders of the Easter Rising, for instance \u2013 and an overview of the poet\u2019s year-long genealogical research, we embark on a remarkable act of imaginative recreation, and then encounter the second mystery: unnumbered pages.\u00a0 An arc, yes \u2013 the death register, reports of the sinking, a butcher\u2019s-daughter bride; all told, a life lived from back to front, with postscript poems charting its ripples into the poet\u2019s own.\u00a0 But none of the trusty way-markers of an ordinary poetic journey.<\/p>\n
For, over the span of nineteen poems, Bartholomew-Biggs unearths an extraordinary life.\u00a0 In the near-absence of documents, it is one which revels in concrete detail \u2013 from the \u2018Marine Death Register\u2019, its \u201cold sweats \u2026 grimly fending off the final quayside\u201d, to \u201cmines\/among the slobbering of waves\/whose thick wet lips concealed spiked tongues\u201d (\u2018Official Recognition 1919\u2019), his grandfather \u2013 sunk \u2013 \u201ca dozen lung-tight ladders from good air\u201d (\u2018Died from Scalds\u2019) to his first emergence from the country, \u201ccity streets \u2026 loom[ing] up at him like rocks\u201d (\u2018Baptism Record\u2019).<\/p>\n
Nor are these markers of departure, relationship or destination simply slipped in as free-floating colour, bulking up a thin historical record; each serves in its own way as a fixed point on the trail, looking forwards and back, illuminating the corners of a life lost to history.\u00a0 That early quayside, for instance, is picked up again as a dog marooned by the shipwreck, \u201csaved and reached Bombay before its master.\/It was at the quay to greet him\u201d (\u2018Press Reports\u2019).\u00a0 Here the physical separation of land and water serves as a bright counterpoint to its earlier, stark image of the border between life and death.\u00a0 Similarly, Bartholomew-Biggs\u2019 figuring of family history as a sealed bottle, the poet poised with \u201ca corkscrew in my fist\u201d \u2013 \u201cWill the bottle\/hold fine wine or just a scribbled message?\u201d (\u2018Birthright\u2019) \u2013 reoccurs at the end of the book, but deliberately fails to answer its own question, eschewing easy readings:<\/p>\n
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Our bottled epitaphs will splash<\/p>\n
and bob away from where we vanished<\/p>\n
then wash unsmashed on distant shingle<\/p>\n
to disappoint beachcombing vagrants<\/p>\n
who always find<\/p>\n
our trampled lives are quite undrinkable.<\/p>\n
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(\u2018Protest Song\u2019)<\/p>\n
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Yet the poet is perhaps too harsh with this conclusion.\u00a0 Salty, sweet, harsh or heart-warming, they are always drinkable, always worth finding at the end of a trail of footprints in the sand.\u00a0 At the book\u2019s end, too, we understand the lack of pagination.\u00a0 In capturing the precise marks of a life well-lived, Bartholomew-Biggs charts his grandfather\u2019s progress far better than any sequence of numbers.\u00a0 We remember the spiky mines, the burning air and superheated steam, but also \u201cwhat small celebrity\/accompanies the return\/of the man who wasn\u2019t ever here\u201d.<\/p>\n
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James Roderick Burns<\/strong> regularly reviews for London Grip, and has just published his third short-form collection, ‘The Worksongs of the Worms’.\u00a0 He is the editor of ‘A Gathering Darkness: Thirteen Classic English Ghost Stories’ (2016)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n