Daphne Gloag's work is new to me but I was impressed by her technical skill. She acknowledges Mimi Khalvati as a mentor and this influence can be seen in the movement of her lines and, I feel, in the images of light. Her collection, A Compression of Distances, is an affirmation of her relationship with her late husband, Peter Williamson, also a poet. This elegiac quality gives the book a unity which is reflected through the repetition of 'I said'… 'you said' in poem after poem, creating a sense of a continuing dialogue.
The poet's central concern of relating the cosmic to the personal, the 'compression of distances' is evident from the first poem, 'The geometry of space/ and the curving of galaxies./ Then think about our space,/you said, and the curve of bodies/together' and continues till the last: 'We knew/ how one word encompassed the weight/ of stone and the places where we walked/ in drifting difficult light/ and in unmeasured brightness'. These last lines balance tension and achievement; the adjectives 'drifting', 'difficult' and 'unmeasured' are a concession to the unknown and unknowable, counteracted by the serenity of the 'we' and the underpinning, unspoken 'one word', which is love.
I admire Gloag's ability to use her understanding of cosmology productively, particularly evident in the extracts from the sequence, Beginnings. In one poem she relates the discoveries of astrophysics to everyday life. Acknowledging that life became possible through irregularities in the structures of the universe, she develops this notion into a celebration not only of the particularities of the immediate physical world but also of the relationship with her husband. The poem has a dialectic framework: 'A bit of magic, you said'…The magic of facts/ I said' … 'Irregularities are life, we said'; the 'I' and the 'you' are synthesised as 'we'.
Gloag combines her scientific knowledge with her sense of wonder and magic. In Afterglow, there is a prose note which tells how telephone engineers discovered the afterglow of the big bang. The poem develops this anecdote by building connections, between the pigeons nesting in giant radio horn and pigeons on her own bird table, between the etymology of the word 'bang' and the science of the 'big bang'.
The last section of the poem is almost prosaic, but is successful because the links have been made: 'They'd blamed / the pigeon droppings unfairly, the birds/ died for nothing. / It was the cool afterglow/ of creation.' It is when the poet succeeds in building a personal connection that her poems are strongest. In Galaxy of Days, she links the concept of dark matter to a Rembrandt nativity scene and then to her own relationship. As has already been noted, images of light are recurrent and occasionally, perhaps, provide a slightly glib resolution: webs of words surrounding our galaxy of days, that bright centre held by what was closed to light.
Once, it is impressive, but I feel too many of these poems end on light or images of light. If I have any other reservations about this collection they might be to do with the absence of the middle ground. The poet deals beautifully with the vastness of space, the achievements of art and the minutiae of the personal, but there is only occasionally an acknowledgement of the struggle with the real in the public and political world, as, for example, in The children's charity concert: matter and antimatter where she contrasts the safety and privilege of grandchildren with the fate of the Kosovan children they are raising money for. The collection as a whole is a polished achievement; but while Gloag often acknowledges the difficult and the painful, these qualities are not strongly present in the work.
Nevertheless, I really liked this book, particularly the opening poem and some of those set in Italy. It may have been the fact that I first read Words and Water on an Italian beach, which made it so attractive to me. The lines of the poem convey the immensity and movement of the sea, as well as its promise. Three year old Lorenzo played in the sand, carried water to his sandcastle in a blue bucket; he would never empty the sea. The inexhaustible reserves of waves and words waited.
Kathleen McPhilemy reviews A Compression of Distances by Daphne Gloag Cinnamon Press (Blaenau Ffestiniog 2009) Pbk. 80 pages. £7.99.