{"id":2712,"date":"2012-06-16T07:45:56","date_gmt":"2012-06-16T07:45:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ink.verticalplus.co.uk\/archive\/?p=2712"},"modified":"2020-12-09T14:36:58","modified_gmt":"2020-12-09T14:36:58","slug":"david-cooke-reviews-peter-daniels-and-roy-marshall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/david-cooke-reviews-peter-daniels-and-roy-marshall\/","title":{"rendered":"David Cooke Reviews Peter Daniels and Roy Marshall"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bringing together poems written over a period of more than twenty years, Counting Eggs <\/em>is Peter Daniels\u2019 first full length <\/em>collection <\/em>which he has now published at the age of fifty seven.\u00a0 However, Daniels is no late starter. Since the early nineteen nineties he has been honing his craft and had some conspicuous successes. He has won first prize in both the Arvon and the TLS Poetry Competitions and been a winner in the Poetry Business Competition.\u00a0 Moreover, many of the poems included in Counting Eggs<\/em> have appeared down the years in various pamphlets from Smith\/Doorstep, Vennel, Mulfran and Happenstance.<\/p>\n

The collection opens with \u2018The Pump\u2019, Daniels\u2019 2010 TLS prize-winning poem. Understated, colloquial, and reminiscent of Philip Larkin, there is something very appealing about its blend of discursiveness and precise observation:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

After piped water, the pump becomes redundant,<\/p>\n

the handle chained down at the side: at rest, if you like\u2026<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

It\u2019s what they call \u201cthe vernacular\u201d.<\/p>\n

Flowers in tubs do brighten it up, the pump<\/p>\n

redone in white, the name of the foundry and the date<\/p>\n

picked out in black.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Successfully evoking the actuality of an object, the poem also memorializes the stoicism of those whose lives were in many ways tougher than ours: \u2018now the redundant pump can stand for \/ all the strength it took the kitchen girl to crank it \/ and crank it till the steely water came at last.\u2019<\/p>\n

However, if in \u2018The Pump\u2019 Daniels might be thought by some to be indulging in a typically English sense of nostalgia, this soon changes with \u2018The Jar\u2019, the poem which immediately follows it. Again the tone is matter of fact: \u2018Covered with raspberries bigger than any raspberries, \/ the vacuum-sealed lid is a hard lid to open, \/ but using knees and much clenching, in the end \/ I wrench it free.\u2019 Then the protagonist is shocked to discover that an unidentified creature has been living in the jar. \u00a0Although the incident has been traumatic for the shopper it is the creature who ends up dead. Moreover, any anthropocentric view of the incident is undermined when the protagonist acknowledges a responsibility to keep the creature \u2018alive \/ in its environment \u2013 whole raspberry preserve.\u2019 A similar theme is outlined in \u2018Insects\u2019 where first of all the existence of insects is more or less denied, or at least \u2018existence\u2019 as it is understood by humans. The argument is then developed in terms which are very funny and increasingly surreal:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Hardware wholesalers<\/p>\n

in Birmingham have<\/p>\n

big propylene<\/p>\n

bins of them in racks.<\/p>\n

Women in Singapore<\/p>\n

are going blind assembling them.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know why we should<\/p>\n

put up with them at all.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

A less ironic exploration of man\u2019s relationship with the natural world and one of Daniel\u2019s most sustained pieces is \u2018Shoreditch Orchid\u2019, a poem which was a double prize winner in the 2008 Arvon Competition and the Ted Hughes Prize for Environmental Poetry.\u00a0 Surviving after some catastrophe, the delicate flower symbolizes both the beauty and the resilience of the natural world as it rises from the wreckage of civilization:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

and as I kick an old kerbstone<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll find you, Shoreditch orchid, true and shy,<\/p>\n

rooting in the meadow streets<\/p>\n

through old cable, broken porcelain rivets and springs.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In other poems Daniels observes with a bemused and sardonic eye the foibles of contemporary society, both here and in the United States.\u00a0 In \u2018Dull Funeral Home\u2019 he revisits the territory of Evelyn Waugh\u2019s The Loved One; <\/em>\u2018And whenever you need it, they have time. \/ Visit for a drink with the embalmer, \/ take as long as you like.\u2019 In \u2018City Boy\u2019 and \u2018Wall Street\u2019 it is the short-sighted materialism of our values that is called into question: \u2018Life is money and the buildings are bigger here.\u2019 \u2018Mall of Mammoths\u2019, dated Minneapolis, 1992, <\/em>must presumably be rooted in some observed reality and yet it evokes a world which seems completely off-the-wall and surreal:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

They\u2019ve built the Mall of America<\/p>\n

on a prairie near the airport\u2026<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The big attraction is<\/p>\n

the whole baby mammoth, who lost his mother\u2026<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Glass tanks of fluid<\/p>\n

contain his heart and his penis, on display.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Although in some poems Daniels may have a point to make, there are others in which he has no purpose beyond capturing a moment as accurately as he can. \u2018Breakfast, Palermo\u2019, is a wonderfully precise vignette in which a smartly turned out young soldier eats with one hand a rather opulent sandwich, leaving \u2018not a speck on his trousers.\u2019 In \u2018Fountain of Arethusa, Syracuse\u2019, a striking woman in \u2018red high heels\u2026 and in a tight red cone of a skirt\u2019 stops the traffic as she licks \u2018a deep strawberry ice-cream.\u2019 \u2018Policeman, Stoke Newington\u2019 is a wittily observed portrait of a police officer going to a cash machine to extract some money which he then stows \u2018in the safest pocket in the street.\u2019<\/p>\n

Although Daniels has a sharp eye for the telling detail there is more to his work than social commentary. Like Larkin he is adept at evoking the humdrum reality of daily existence, but he also has the metaphysical panache of poets like Michael Donaghy and Paul Farley. \u2018Flying\u2019 and \u2018The Experts\u2019 are skilfully executed parables which have the astringency of certain East European poets, while \u2018At the Forest Pool\u2019 reads like a folk tale in which the protagonist, a fiddler, tries to make the connection between art and life. The pool, his oracle, tells him: \u2018Here\u2019s your life in a long scrape of the bow.\u2019 In \u2018In the Deep\u2019 the vision is even darker: \u2018Were you down in the deep \/ and they had to drag you up \/ gasping for air in the night, \/ holding yourself in the grim bucket?\u2019<\/p>\n

Peter Daniels is a poet who has bided his time before bringing out this definitive collection of his work and the wait has been worth it. Counting Eggs <\/em>is a wide-ranging and impressive collection in which a very English sensibility has been fused with an East European ostranenie<\/em>. \u00a0In Daniels\u2019 world Mr Bleaney has been reinvented as Mr Luczinski who dreams of \u2018a field of dandelions and a bluebell wood\u2019 as he rattles along on a tram that seems to be taking him nowhere. This is a collection which needs to be read carefully. Enigmatic and complex, the poems it contains offer<\/p>\n

glimpses of a reality that lies beneath the surface of things.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Gopagilla <\/em>is a debut pamphlet from the Leicestershire poet Roy Marshall.\u00a0 The third in a handsomely produced series by Crystal Clear Creators under the editorship of Jonathan Taylor, its somewhat obscure title is soon explained when the poet reveals in an epigraph that it is a word invented by his young son, \u2018who was beginning to speak\u2019: \u201cWhat did you say, baby?\u201d\u00a0 I asked. \/ \u201cGopagilla,\u201d he replied, and he meant it this time.\u2019 Adumbrating the idea of poetic creation, it also points us in the direction of one of the collection\u2019s principle themes:\u00a0 the importance of family.\u00a0 In \u2018Rose\u2019, its opening poem, we are offered a convincing portrayal of a mother and her new-born child, but one which also gives an indication of Marshall\u2019s mixed English and Italian ancestry. The wife here is an \u2018English Rose\u2019 and the balance of genes in the child is beautifully captured in the poem\u2019s final lines where we learn that he is<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

a mirror of his mother.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Their murmurs and breath<\/p>\n

float from open lips<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

his a perfect miniature<\/p>\n

of her own sleep-slackened rose.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In \u2018Dandytime\u2019 fatherhood gives the poet an opportunity to relive his own childhood: \u2018His gift to me, \/ the long forgotten tempo \/ of a boy\u2019s life, while in \u2018Ghost Walk\u2019 we catch glimpses of a young boy playfully on the rampage who wonders \u2018Who to be today: \/ \u2018Zorro, The Flasing Blade, Robin Hood?\u2019\u00a0 This is of course all very familiar territory, but handled by Marshall with a lyrical concision that is quite his own, as is his use of Northamptonshire dialect in \u2018The River Swimmers\u2019:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Across the yard we skivers skip, but as she tries to catch us<\/p>\n

to cuff, and we ort falter, stead we sturt for swaily water,<\/p>\n

to lose boots and clothes and so<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

go in; to lift a shock of tadpoles from the shallows, to sosh and turn<\/p>\n

as riving otters, at swirl, swash, spout and lather, become of us<\/p>\n

one river matter.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Other memories of childhood involve his Italian relations and his discovery of the Italian landscape, as here in \u2018Arrival\u2019: \u2018Brush of stubble on peach, kisses planted \/ by sun-dried lips, Massimo in a vest \/ and me just six, climbing \/ from a Ford Escort onto a mountain.\u2019 In \u2018Arm Wrestling with Nonno\u2019 his Italian grandfather is evoked in terms which seem almost legendary:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

My mother told me how he altered<\/p>\n

the river\u2019s course, how those muscles<\/p>\n

were forged in the icy torrent where<\/p>\n

he shifted boulders.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Other poems such as the Heaneyesque \u2018Egg\u2019 evoke that loss of innocence which is experienced when a child has to face up to the consequences of his actions: \u2018The baby bird will die\u2019 she says, \/ \u2018its mother will leave it because of your scent.\u2019 \u2018In Passing\u2019 is a exquisite lyric on a not dissimilar theme. It is brief enough to be quoted in its entirety:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Through high windows<\/p>\n

he hears a choir of children,<\/p>\n

their voices soaring:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

recalls how sweet his own voice was,<\/p>\n

how sweet he was, and cries<\/p>\n

for all the sweetness lost.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Here Marshall\u2019s minimalism and his pitch perfect cadences are reminiscent of and on a par with the work of Ian Hamilton and the early work of Hugo Williams. By and large Marshall does tend to concentrate on capturing fleeting lyrical moments. However, \u2018Hawk\u2019s Eyes\u2019, a winner in the Ledbury Poetry Competition, shows that he is capable of writing at greater length. There are also poems here which show that he\u00a0 can cast his net beyond the narrow confines of childhood memories and family history. \u2018Records on the Bones\u2019 is a fascinating poem in which we learn that in Soviet Russia underground presses printed flexi-discs of American jazz on discarded x-ray sheets. \u2018Telepathy\u2019 recalls an early romance, while at the same time it wittily reviews the recent history of telecommunications.<\/p>\n

For some time now, Roy Marshall\u2019s poems have been popping up regularly in journals. Above all they are memorable for the quality of their images.\u00a0 In \u2018No Signs Available\u2019 \u2018sparrows rip a double helix of midges.\u2019 Viewing a dead fox in \u2018Wessex Wood\u2019, we learn that \u2018death has come to steal a breath \/ from the mouth of spring,\u2019 while in \u2018Presence\u2019 the memory of the poet\u2019s father is reduced to \u2018your weather-cured shoes, still two sizes too big for me.\u2019 It is to be hoped that before too long Marshall will be able bring out a full collection of his work. It is certainly one I will be looking forward to.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Peter Daniels: Counting Eggs. <\/em>Mulfran Press. \u00a02012. ISBN: 9781907327155.\u00a0 \u00a39.00,\u00a0 available here<\/a>.
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

Roy Marshall: Gopagilla. <\/em>Crystal Clear Creators. 2012. ISBN: 978-0-955180095. \u00a34.00, available here.<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bringing together poems written over a period of more than twenty years, Counting Eggs is Peter Daniels\u2019 first full length collection which he has now published at the age of fifty seven.\u00a0 However, Daniels is no late starter. Since the early nineteen nineties he has been honing his craft and had some conspicuous successes. He […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2712","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2712","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2712"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2712\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23748,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2712\/revisions\/23748"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2712"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2712"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2712"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}