Into the Woods by Anna Robinson. Enitharmon Press (London 2014). Pbk. 95 pages. £9.99.
The wood has a powerful resonance in literature and social culture, richly and disturbingly heavy with the fears and desires of the human race, all our lost childhoods and secret nightmares. A wood can be an arcadian dream of freedom and possibility but also a wild place luring us away from what is stable and familiar to the realms of unreason and otherness. It represents what we have repressed or transcended in our ordered adult lives and what we have built over in our evolution as city dwellers. Nevertheless it survives, in our personal and urban histories, in our individual and collective unconscious, and as a creative space.
Anna Robinson was born and lives in London, has edited two poetry magazines and teaches at the University of East London. Facilitated by a Hawthornden Fellowship, this book follows her previous collection, The Finders of London, which was a paean to the city, and a pamphlet Songs from the Flats, a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice. She was Poet in Residence for Lambeth, based in the Lower Marsh, of which this book has many resonances and where it was launched. The cover illustration is a photograph, taken by the author at the corner of Morley Street and Westminster Bridge Road, of trees reflected in a puddle with double yellow lines providing a golden glow and the tarmac sparkling like sunken pebbles. Nothing could better convey the subversive liminal quality of this poetry where the city and the woods slide into each other.
The volume comprises twelve books whose titles are suggestive of a quest. From ‘The Ordinary World’, the narrator hears ‘The Call to Adventure’, undergoes an ‘Ordeal’ and is ‘Rewarded’, the final book being ‘Return with Elixir’. However, this is not a straightforward journey from city to country or present to past. The woods are built over and become a street of grey houses but the grey, like a London fog or marsh mist, both conceals and reveals the past. Nor are the characters obviously legendary, or simply particular and personal to the speaker, and it is not clear when objects are symbols, emblems or people in the poet’s own life. Who, for instance, is the ‘she’ in ‘Lily in the Snow’, who leaves no tracks, and in the poignant ‘Lily Dead’? Is the small box which appears in several poems the coffin of a dead child?
There are a number of leitmotifs which reappear in different guises in each section, like recurring lines in a villanelle. The chair, for instance, is rooted in ‘the Marsh’ of modern day Lambeth and is the starting point for the stories. It undergoes a number of appearances and transformations, eventually being recuperated in ‘Resurrecting the Chair’. Not only restored and reupholstered, it is given new life through the sacrifice of a book of stories slipped into its frame like saints’ relics in an altar. The religious reference is most explicit in the closing poem of the penultimate section, ‘Hail Mary’. Here the past is reprised and its presence confirmed: ‘There are layers of dirt under petticoats/between the wood and city’. Women of the past and present have ‘chopped woods, scrubbed/floors, black-leaded stoves, whitened hearths,/slaked dust and swept and wept’. In change is also continuity. Symbols, human and natural, are gathered together and invoked in a prayer to ‘our Mother’ and, in Mary’s traditional title, ‘England’s Glory’, the poem calls on her to ‘Light our way Home’. The old religion, too, is regenerated and recuperated.
Robinson’s Lambeth never loses its distinctness and actuality in her roam through the woods. Many readers will find contemporary landmarks and characters or activities they recognise, given added significance. Like the knitting shop in Lower Marsh in ‘Grey Street at Twilight’ with its window displays of objects ‘knitted from the softest/rarest wools’, from goats and sheep who roamed woods and foothills, each ‘named for the weather that birthed her’. When their names are recalled: ‘Fog, Evening Mist, Shower,/Drizzle, Spit’ the grey urban street appears ‘dusky duck-egg grey’. Origins are inscribed in the present and the city in all its restless mutability is endowed with the patina of enduring nature.
Kathryn Southworth is the former Vice-Principal of Newman University College, Birmingham. She now lives in London in Camden Town.