{"id":431,"date":"2011-11-04T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-11-04T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ink.verticalplus.co.uk\/archive\/?p=431"},"modified":"2020-12-09T14:38:54","modified_gmt":"2020-12-09T14:38:54","slug":"angela-topping-reviews-enchantment-by-david-morley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/angela-topping-reviews-enchantment-by-david-morley\/","title":{"rendered":"Angela Topping reviews 'Enchantment' by David Morley"},"content":{"rendered":"

Enchantment<\/span><\/a> by David Morley, Carcanet, \u00a39.95, 84pp. <\/span>

This book is aptly titled: it certainly does bring the reader under Morley\u2019s spell. The first poem is an elegy for Nicholas Farrar Hughes (Plath\u2019s son). Morley recounts a simple and beautiful memory of going for a walk with Nick, in which he befriends two horses. Morley\u2019s reputation as an eco-poet is well deserved for this one line alone:<\/span>

        where leaf-worlds welled from all the wood\u2019s wands.<\/span>

This is such an elegant and visual line. The alliteration works really well with the imagery, such as \u2018wands\u2019 which is a perfect description of the young whippy branches but with the added resonance of magic which wants to conjure Nicholas up and relive the moment of his happiness. \u2018Welled\u2019 is a lovely word as the young branches are moist and full of sap, with the added resonance of tears filling the eyes, and \u2018leaf-worlds\u2019 recalls Blake\u2019s \u2018to see the world in a grain of sand\u2019.  The next poem, \u2018Dragonflies\u2019 contains dazzling language to match these insects, through skilled deployment of internal rhyme to the imagery of \u2018sparking ornaments\u2019. Each poem in this water sequence opens out into the next one. And these poems are as clear as water, so clear primary school children would enjoy them and be charmed by them. I am with Orwell on the notion that good writing is like a pane of glass, and like Keats in the pursuit of \u2018negative capability\u2019. Morley shows us beauty we can focus on, rather than us watching him seeing the beauty. That is a mark of the truly great poet. <\/span>

\u2018The Lucy Poem\u2019 is a remarkable imagining of the life and thoughts of a human ancestor, dubbed \u2018Lucy\u2019 for the light shed on our past , but more scientifically Australopithecus afarensis who lived 3.2 million years BC. Intellectually Morley\u2019s research is admirable, but the poem connects with us on a deeper level. We see the planet as it was in the past through Lucy\u2019s eyes, and its beauty is strange and startling:<\/span>

        <\/span>
         when those mountains<\/span>
        bloomed from underworld lodes<\/span>
        springing geladas led their fat<\/span>
        appetites to the snow-caps<\/span>
        muscled like woolly gods;<\/span>

The poem follows Lucy as she takes a walk through the terrain, and the poem\u2019s short, springing lines and long stanzas perfectly suit this narrative, because each line makes a stride and each stanza break a change in landscape. Lucy is on a quest for water, and she finds it through the sense of hearing. This makes a satisfying close to the poem. Even if Morley had not taken an epigraph from Wordsworth for this collection, the link with that great Romantic poet is unavoidable through the name Lucy. <\/span>

\u2018Chorus\u2019 celebrates the birth of a son to the Morley family. The joyous tone is achieved by using Whitmanesque long lines of observation, focusing on bird song and bird behaviours. It is best described as a hymn to morning. As society becomes increasingly secular, poems like this and \u2018The Lucy Poem\u2019 reach out to everyone and provide spiritual sustenance without religious agenda, as does \u2018Proserpina\u2019. Morley does not seek to be obscure; everything we need to know is in the poem, such as the reference to Ruskin: <\/span>

                    \u2026 to attend as Ruskin did<\/span>
        to Malham Cove when the stones of the brook were softer<\/span>
        with moss than any silken pillow;<\/span>

And I love the assonance and consonance of the phrase \u2018silken pillow\u2019 which creates the tactile sense of the softness through the repetition of the l sounds.  <\/span>

Morley also draws on Romany heritage to remake traditional stories, for example \u2018Hedgehurst\u2019 in which he gives a voice to a half human half hedgehog youth from a traveller children\u2019s story. This long poem holds the reader because of the freshness of the language, the aptness of the metaphor and the music of carefully orchestrated sounds: <\/span>

        Whose is this scorned skin?<\/span>
        What weather rouses me<\/span>
        to lag my limbs with lichen<\/span>
        to fold fresh thatch around me? <\/span>

There are a number of Romany poems in this collection, forming a core section. All repay reading aloud and all are spellbinding. I can\u2019t help thinking of John Clare and his fascination with the \u2018Gypsies\u2019 from whom he learned fiddle tunes. Morley gives the reader a powerful insight into a culture which is often secretive and closed. The circus sequence, \u2018A Lit Circle\u2019, gives voice to many of the circus entertainers such as Zhivakos the Horseman and Mashkar the Magician. Morley\u2019s language glitters and delights, when he captures the excitement of the performances tempered by the sorrows of the travelling life and the inevitable changes which will threaten this world of magic and bravado. This language is enhanced by the inclusion of Romany words which lend their own music and exoticism to this gliding, gilded poetry. <\/span>

Morley includes unobtrusive notes in the back of the collection, which acknowledge his source material and help the reader to access information. Although this is a complex book in many ways, and the third in a series, I find the poems have just the right amount of challenge for the reader. Morley is a quiet poet whose work is to be savoured and mulled over, by a fireside on a winter\u2019s night or swinging in a hammock in the midst of the natural treasures which he interweaves throughout his work.  \\Ever inventive, yet true to himself, Morley is a marvellous poet.<\/span>


<\/font><\/p>\n

….reviewed by Angela Topping
<\/font><\/div>\n

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

Enchantment by David Morley, Carcanet, \u00a39.95, 84pp. This book is aptly titled: it certainly does bring the reader under Morley\u2019s spell. The first poem is an elegy for Nicholas Farrar Hughes (Plath\u2019s son). Morley recounts a simple and beautiful memory of going for a walk with Nick, in which he befriends two horses. Morley\u2019s reputation […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"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-431","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/431","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\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=431"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/431\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23764,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/431\/revisions\/23764"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=431"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=431"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=431"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}