Janus, the second poetry collection from Catherine Ayres, is unusual in its structure, looking, as the title suggests, both forward and backward. The passage of time is important in this book. The contents page is arranged by date, and then a brief description of context. However the poem title appears only above the poem on the page. This arrangement immediately made me curious about the poems and how they relate to one another.
The very first line of the first – and title – poem caught my interest: ‘What might never happen, did.’ It’s January and everything is going wrong:
the cat dies, the car dies, there’s flu –
and so I carry on.
The old sofa is carried out (the new one is coming) and the poet sees it go. What remains is –
a space where I have nursed and fucked, slept
chemo off and watched a husband leave.
This poem doesn’t pull its punches, and sets the tone for a book of uncompromising honesty and resolution.
Janus is an overview of an adult life – mostly the last 15 years, but with one poem that dips all the way back towards childhood. This early poem, from 1983, comes partway into the book, and is titled ‘Oddbods’. I liked its surreality, and the vigorous, urgent sense it expresses of the leaving of childhood –
One day we will live in the tree on the hill,
hang our horse brasses from its branches
Immediately preceding it is a vigorous dialect poem, ‘Kyle’s dad berates a group of boys in my back garden’.
‘Canny clip! And afore ye start blubberin Tyler, just
mind that your lot’s from the same place as mine. Aye, ya
mam’s nan and wor nana bided beside each other up the tree
streets…’
A clever poem which also raises the challenges of education and how it moves us away from our origins. How we keep our feet on the ground, how we find our communities.
The two poems, ‘Oddbods’ and ‘Kyle’s dad’, provide an example of the vivid, probing way this poet examines the process of childhood – first from a mother perspective, then back down the years to find herself as a child.
Three poems examine lockdown during 2020 – and excellently capture the deep strangeness of that time. Observations of nature express isolation and worry: ‘the stars aren’t enough’… ‘No moon. Its face would not be enough’. And in ‘Four corners’ – ‘The irony of spring and its tiny fingers’ – a line which suddenly recalled to me that extraordinarily beautiful spring of 2020 as we all locked down and worried.
I admired the impassioned poem for June 2016 – Brexit referendum – ‘Don’t leave’. Tight rhyming in four quatrains gives the poem real momentum as it lists the small things that make a life. The title acts as a plea before each stanza: ‘Don’t leave’
the dandelion growing through concrete
the broken windows birthing stars
the puddles magicking their rainbows
the new skin smiling under scars.
Scars play a part in the years examined in Janus. In ‘October 2019 – diagnosed with breast cancer for the second time’ the poem itself is titled ‘October is Breast Cancer Awareness month’ which is followed by
and the letter says
there is something
on the mammogram
and the MRI.
This is a powerful poem, bleakly factual and medical. Here is the consultant: ‘She sighs. / You’re young/ to have no breasts.’
‘It’s Halloween./ Tonight’ says the poet, ‘I will come home/ with freshly-painted seams/ and sit in a costume/ I can’t take off’.
But over the page it’s still October 2019 and here is a poem about walking to Dunstanburgh castle. The poet is taken out of herself, and yet aware of all the effort that takes. ‘To reach you I must balance tipped/ land with sea…’ And the poem ends: ‘Your towers clutch the air like drowning/ hands, flags and fires gone. Still here.’
Intriguingly (I spent a lot of time thinking about how these poems are ordered), this poem is followed by ‘When I say I think about you every day’, which is dated ‘November 2018 – thinking of a friend who’s sad’. Here the poem turns on a small repetition, following from the title:
I mean sometimes I fold into an owl
and scalp our furred hearts clean, I mean look up,
you’re luminous.
There’s a generosity about this collection, laid right alongside the vulnerability that Ayres chooses to share with us. Her imagery is vivid and life-affirming within carefully crafted poetry that muses over the shape of our lives. Here are poems lifted from the everyday, considered and made meaningful.
Janus is available from Indigo Dreams Publishing (£10)
Jean Atkin’s third full collection High Nowhere is was published last year by IDP. Previous publications include How Time is in Fields (IDP); The Bicycles of Ice and Salt (IDP) and Fan-peckled (Fair Acre Press). She is a poet in education and community. www.jeanatkin.com