Lynne Wycherley is a poet of substance and her third collection is to be welcomed. Wycherley describes herself as ‘eco’ and her poetry combines a concern for the world, or even the universe, with a strongly personal presentation of the near-at-hand. This mixture of ‘far and near’ is reflected in the first poem which holds in balance ‘two joys/ the warmth in your eyes/the sea’s largesse,/ its gift of/ unbearable brightness.’ ‘Largesse’ conveys not only the generosity but also the immensity of the ocean. Wycherley is interested in the natural world and in the science which explains it, but her approach is humanistic and historical, as she imagines Isaac Newton in The Apple-tree, Woolthorpe and In Search of Isaac and Karl Jansky in He Listens to the Song Beyond the Sun.
An awareness of the conflict between science and nature or technology and the human is evident in a number of poems. In The Apple-tree, Woolthorpe, Newton’s apple-tree asserts its point of view against the aridity of theory: ‘the spring sun dressed me// in its dazzle and the zenith/burned through my branches,/god-gaps where the white stars grow’. Perhaps the poem also acknowledges the shifting of paradigms from medieval to modern, from a universe explained by God to one explained by science. Path to Dungeness is a more obvious conflict of ‘two worlds’, setting the marsh and its wildlife against the threat of the nuclear reactors. The tendency to portentousness is counterbalanced by the natural detail: ‘white sashed garganey’, ‘green-orange teal’, ‘red reeds’, colours which contrast with the ‘grey drums’ of the reactors on the skyline. Wycherley is at her best as the poet of landscape. She acknowledges John Clare and shares with that poet the naturalist’s exactitude. Unlike Clare, however, she goes on to meditate on what she observes and she places herself not only in the landscape, but also in history, relating herself to figures of the past such as Clare, Newton, Constable and Annora, the holy woman.
Wycherley’s poetry has always revealed her as a writer of scholarship and a range which is reflected not only in her subject matter but also in her vocabulary. When I first came across her work I was enchanted by her pursuit of the exact word, the word which most exactly names what is being called into being in the poem. We could argue that the most exact names are proper nouns, but that these are only successful in communicating meaning to those who already know the identity behind the names. I struggled with ‘fulvous’, ‘flavine’ and ‘samisen’. On the whole, I agree with John Lucas’ defence of language that challenges (Acumen 68). On the other hand, one would not wish to see abstruse vocabulary become a mannerism.
The most important influence in the whole collection is, of course, that of Wycherley’s mother whose illness and death are described in the title sequence which forms the second section of the book. It is very difficult to criticise these deeply felt poems; they commemorate and pay tribute. The poems which I found most effective were those which went back to the poet’s childhood, mining the vein of nostalgia. In Opals the evocation of the past through a fragment of a Tom Jones’ song, a reference to a Nastase Wimbledon and to the indulgence in ‘brandycream cake for two’ is particularly effective. The poem conveys successfully the loss of childhood and the irrevocable nature of the past which is brought home when a parent dies. However, the theme of grief and loss is a particularly popular one in contemporary poetry. Such poems do not always communicate; reading them can sometimes feel like walking through a graveyard, noting the inscriptions on gravestones of people you don’t know. Although poetry is rooted in the personal, it also needs to transcend the personal and I wasn’t convinced that this was always happening.
Nevertheless, these poems are essential to the structure of the text, with the other poems finding their place in relation to them. The opening and closing poems of the entire collection are also concerned with the poet’s mother, indicating that her life and death provide the framework for the book. In the final poem, she asks ‘How can I/ thank you for all you’ve given?’ The implication is that the poetry itself is part of that gift.
Kathleen McPhilemy teaches English at Oxford FE College. Her latest poetry collection is The Lion in the Forest (Katabasis, London 2004).
Poppy in a Storm-struck Field by Lynne Wycherley, Shoestring (Nottingham 2009). Pbk. 66 pages. £9.