The Possibility of Innocence by Nicholas Bielby. Graft Poetry, (Bradford 2019). Pbk. 90 pages. £10.50.
Two things struck me about this collection: the technical skill, even virtuosity of the poet, and a quality of achieved serenity in his writing. The poems have a wide range of topics and reference, as if the poet were reviewing his own life and interests. However, some of the most interesting pieces are where the poet resigns the voice to someone else, such as in ‘Frédéric Bazille Writes a Letter Home’, which takes a sideways look at the artist, Monet: ‘Monet is quite good at landscapes and his advice has helped me very much.’ As well as humour, there is a wry reflection on the varied success of artists who have may started out as peers: ‘Monet’s single-mindedness will drive him, one day, to achieve success. I’ll merely be a footnote to his tale.’
A poem where Bielby steps furthest away from his own identity is also one of the most successful. ‘The Legend of Adomnán and The Law of the Innocents’, a narrative poem derived from ancient Irish texts, opens dramatically with a dialogue between the eponymous abbot and his mother, who wants him to take responsibility for righting the wrongs suffered by women:
'My son,' his mother said, 'you have been tasked with freeing all the slavey women in the western world. Until you've done as asked you shall not eat or drink, but live in pain.'
Adomnán takes on the task, challenging numerous Princes to change their ways, until at last:
… did the law of Adomnán, in word and deed, give women's wrongs and rights its heed. the Law to which all Gaelic kingdoms now accede.
The poem is remarkable for its strong feminist stance and for the variety and fluency of verse forms which it uses. Bielby’s speciality is a very subtle use of rhyme. Nearly all his poems have regular, often challenging, rhyme schemes but the rhyming is often so subtle that the aural structures it creates are almost imperceptible. In ‘The Legend of Adomnán’ he starts with alternately rhymed quatrains which yield to triplets where all the rhymes end in an ‘l’ sound, rhyming or half-rhyming with ‘bell’ as Adomnán warns the Princes to change their ways towards women:
Against all men who rape and kill, I curse them with my little bell.
In the last part of the poem, the same rhyme in much shorter lines offers a view of a better future:
Then will this bell not be a knell nor call to hell. But then it shall enfranchise all, and all be well: thus saith my bell.
The admonitory effect of the bell is transformed to the joyful ringing of celebration.
I don’t know what Bielby’s religious beliefs are, though he is clearly steeped in the Christian cultural tradition. ‘A Methodist Society Group Meeting’ is a sonnet which indicates that he met his wife at a Methodist gathering. Whether or not he is still a believer, his poems interrogate the concepts of Christianity, as illustrated in the poems ‘Adam the First’ and ‘Adam the Second’. The first, which is subtitled ‘After Heine’s Adam der Erste’ presents a humanist or even Satanic perspective:
I lay my claim to absolute freedom! If I find the least thing prohibited, for me, your so-called 'Paradise' becomes a life imprisonment in Hell, antagony.
The obsolete ‘antagony’ may not be sufficiently convincing to be the last word, one instance where the quest for rhyme may have weakened the poem. The second version shows us a more reflective Adam who renounces the ‘infantile, kicking against the pricks’ of the first. This Adam seems to accept the Christian narrative as a story:
Of all the stories that we tell ourselves to make sense of experience, maybe that one comes closest to a truth,
Innocence and experience are recurrent preoccupations. The title, The Possibility of Innocence, is also the title of the penultimate poem and the phrase occurs earlier in ‘Innocence’. For Bielby, innocence is related to ‘a childhood sense of wonder’. He acknowledges that innocence cannot exist without experience and can only be recognised from an experienced point of view, so that ‘innocence’ tends to be a nostalgic memory, ‘a sense of what has been’.
These poems are the product of extensive experience but they tend to be softened by retrospection although there is pain and even guilt as in the poem ‘Meta Dudh’ which tells of a relationship destroyed by racial and cultural barriers. Bielby’s poems are regulated, disciplined and often very wise, but occasionally I found myself missing the energy of wrathfulness and excess.
Kathleen’s blog Poetry Owl is at kmcpoetry.blog