Shoestring Press (Nottingham 2015). Pbk. 141 pages. £12.
Angela Kirby was born in rural Lancashire in 1932, one of eight children in a Catholic family. She has been a garden designer, chef and journalist, whilst producing fiction, poetry and five children. She also, twice, won BBC Wildlife Poet of the Year. Her emotional range is wide, from jaunty to downbeat, from exuberant to poignant. She inhabits many characters and voices as a story-teller with a deft narrative turn and gift for surprise endings, her language moving easily from liturgical Latin to colloquial and regional English.
Beneath the skill and control of her technique, there is a consistency of theme and emotional resonance which is grounded in her childhood. The title poem embodies this. It evokes through the precise details of Navy Cut cigarettes, proving dough, and the mother singing ‘Smoke gets in your eyes’, an innocent idyll which seemed set to last forever. Then, ‘in the days after’ come the emblems of its loss in the Second World War: ‘always we wake to sirens, sandbags/and refugees’ and to the ‘clipped tones’ of the wireless announcer: ‘Dunkirk, D-Day, Dresden’. The innocent golden past is no sooner evoked than invaded by the pollution of experience. So in ‘Threlkell’s Bull’ the jubilee fete is followed by a father being gored to death by a bull. As the altar boys intone the words of the liturgy, ‘to God who gives joy to my youth’, the words are undercut by the Dies Irae of the dead man’s requiem and the poet asks, ‘and where now is the joy? Where is it?’
The comforting rhythms of religion and ritual persist through these poems but they are always signs of loss. In ‘Black Ice’ Our Lady of the Seven Dolours is a relic both for the speaker and the dying woman of their shared lost faith. ‘Going Home’ is about approaching death: literally, the poet’s return home to see her dying father and metaphorically, her revisiting of faith from a humanist perspective. She adopts his language, saying, ‘It’s time the angels came for you/and oh how I wish your angels now, /the comfort their enfolding wings/might bring’ to this ‘beloved difficult/old man, my blind and angry father’.
Death is everywhere in this book and faced directly, sometimes with brutal realism. So, for instance, in the poem on her brother’s death, ‘David’, the speaker watches the monitors at his hospital bedside, thinking, ‘Forgive me, for I will mourn you later, /all that I want right now for both of us/is to be out of here and away’. In ‘Mr. Irresistible’ she treats the subject with sensuous and grim black comedy. The persistent lover who ‘will not take no/for an answer’, turns out to be death, the ‘only faithful lover’.
Memories persist in language, places and objects. So Kirby recreates her childhood experience of feeding the cows with the call ‘Hey oop! Hey oop!’ and, in ‘Brindle Revisited’, although little remains of her childhood home, the very absences recall how it was: ‘the Eagle range bakes no more bread’, ‘slate shelves hold neither cakes nor cream’. Yet the Cumbrian mountains remain and ‘the lapwings call and circle still’. Indeed, through change runs a continuity, not only of nature but of memory and family. So in ‘Time Machine’ the movement of heel and treadle on the gold-scrolled singer recalls at once the poet’s mother’s mother, whose machine it was, the mother making the poet’s first communion dress and her own daughter sewing her wedding dress.
Despite the elegiac overtone, these poems celebrate life and the human body. So in ‘Lark Rise at Brancaster’ people are ‘borne up/in ravishment, ferocious bliss’ by the larks. In the wry and erotic ‘Tying his feet’ the poet becomes a type of Leda, swept up by the swan whose smell ‘sent me wild’, until it becomes a too demanding lover and is summarily trussed up and delivered to the RSPB. Passion is never far away: even the stranger with an unhappy face has breasts so beautiful that someone will kiss her ‘down-turned mouth/back into laughter’. In Kirby’s poetry passion and laughter redeem us.
Kathryn Southworth is the former Vice-Principal of Newman University College, Birmingham. She now lives in London in Camden Town.