![\"Fen](\"http:\/\/www.williambedford.co.uk\/images\/fen-dancing.jpg\")
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\nThis 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\u2019t see. It felt like speeding through a region that was tangled and obscure. .<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
In the title poem a first person narrator hears a farrier talking about a celebration that\u2019s part of the rural calendar.<\/p>\n
.…an evening of dancing<\/em> Bedford isn\u2019t a poet who nostalgically harks back to some bygone idyll. The gathering that\u2019s being evoked took place just before hostilities broke out in 1914. But who\u2019s speaking<\/em> The surface plainness of this writing is deceptive. William Bedford\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n In \u2018The Railway Station at Stamford\u2019 Bedford pays homage to Edward Thomas\u2019s Adlestrop. The Sunlicht Still on Me\u2019 is inspired by Hugh MacDiarmid\u2019s elegy, \u2018At My Father’s Grave.\u2019 As writers we may see poets of the past as our artistic forbears. Yet if we wish to acknowledge \u2013publically – our debt to the greatest of them, our own work can appear relatively slight by contrast.<\/p>\n But William Bedford judiciously saves the best till last. \u2018Midsummer Party\u2019 \u2013 a free version of a passage from Ovid\u2019s Amores \u2013 is a lustful, edgy bitchfest of a poem in which past and present are fused to magnificent effect.<\/p>\n That\u2019s when we\u2019ll find our moment: in the library.<\/em> Reviewing can be a chancy business. But I\u2019m fortunate to have received this collection.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
\nwhen you cannot tell the fen from the dance<\/em><\/p>\n
\nDespite an apparently straightforward alternation between the farrier\u2019s words and the listener\u2019s thoughts, the piece has an elusive, almost ghostly quality.<\/p>\n
\nI cannot say<\/em><\/p>\n
\nWe look upon each ither noo like hills\u2028Across a valley. I’m nae mair your son.<\/p>\n
\n\u00a0\u00a0 or the paternoster lifts; in the secretary\u2019s office;<\/em>
\ngods forbid the departmental lavatories, they\u2019re a disgrace<\/em>
\n\u00a0 even for educated men. We\u2019ll just have to take our chance…<\/em><\/p>\n