A writing career of a mere ten years resulted in an unswervingly worthwhile body of work, of which this collection, put together by her daughter Felicity with Rosemary Norman and Jenny Vuglar (poets with whom Rock had a close association) is representative.
This book brings together previously uncollected poems, including the very last ones she wrote, and a selection from a Hearing Eye pamphlet Is It Now? that appeared in 2006 after the author’s first experience of cancer. It includes moving poems on the writer’s immediate family and her ancestors, on the experience of illness and hospitalisation, on the prospect of death. Particularly original however are those that draw on her abiding preoccupation with landscape, geology, and history. Many contemporary poets feel a desire – even an obligation – to make a link between scientific knowledge and poetic understanding: Rock may well have researched in the library as well as in the landscape but the historical and geological facts she found seem so totally integrated into her perceptions that she could effortlessly employ them as metaphors. ‘Field Trip’ for instance, compares a millennial event – rock being broken and moved by glaciers to populate a slope with limestone pillars and odd-shaped blocks – with the swift re-stocking of a farmer’s field with cattle in 2001 after the foot and mouth disease cull. While ‘Field Trip’ inserts a contemporary event into geological time, ‘A Death Assemblage’ focuses on the finding of a 1914-18 mass grave but has as title the geologists’ term for the heaping together, in the course of large earth movements, of stones from disparate places. The skeletons found may be of Germans as well as British. ‘The Third Who Walks With Us’ seems at first to be simply a poem about a ramble on the North Downs Way but through the image of the phantom companion (reported by Antarctic explorers) it becomes a startling comment on living with a donated organ; ‘The donor, whoever he was, leaps stiles with you...having given all that the dead can give.’ Though the – always self-effacing – voice of most of the poems is Rock’s own, she was also adept at expressing herself through a fictional persona; three short dramatic monologues, ‘Sea Change’, ‘The Beach at Trouville’ and ‘The Turkey’s Song’, I found surprising to the point of shock. And I was left with the sense of something having been said that could not possibly have been conveyed in any other way. An equivalent dramatic charge is carried by poems such as ‘Years Later, Mewslade Bay’, ‘Crawl Space’ and ‘Land’. Here the writer enters lightheartedly – or perhaps, foolhardily – into an experience that turns out to be sobering. Wanting to get more than the ‘theme park history’ of lead mining she arranges to go down a disused mine (‘Crawl Space ‘) and ends up having to manoeuvre herself almost flat through an evernarrowing, dripping, dark tunnel – learning in the process what no book could ever teach one about the reality of this occupation. The poem ends with an all too recognisable – and recognised – retreat into rationalisation; ‘Light at the end of the tunnel. I catch myself/ in platitudes. After all,/ they must have been used to it.’ If there is one thing that can be said about Rock’s poems, however, it is that are devoid of platitudes. ‘A Tenth of Hydrogen’, which rounds off the book, characteristically links scientific theory with personal experience, setting the latter in a time-span of millennia. Its rumination on the fate of the individual encapsulates the notion that ‘a tenth of all bodies/ contains….. a gas passed down five thousand million years ....’ The point – that we are all connected in a chain of existence animated by totally impersonal elements – is made with as light a touch as the final image: [it] flies off…. a mote to settle on the eyelashes of the child following… A Tenth of Hydrogen is available from the publisher:
Corundum Press, 83 Montrose Avenue, Leamington Spa, Warwickshire CV32 7DR or can be ordered from bookshops (ISBN 978-0-9539815-4-0).
Mary Michaels’ poetry collection The Shape of the Rock was published by Sea Cow (London 2003) and her latest collection is Caret Mark (Hearing Eye, London 2008). reviews In ‘The Dry Salvages’ from his great poem, Four Quartets T.S. Eliot wrote:
Reviewed: A Tenth of Hydrogen by Daphne Rock, Corundum Press (Leamington Spa 2011), 74 pages, £7.99.