Rockingham Press (Ware 2018), Pbk 64pp. £9.99.
Isabel Bermudez was born in Columbia and came to England as a child. She has worked as a film maker, teacher and language tutor and her poetry has been widely published in magazines and frequently commended in competitions. This is her third book of verse. The first, Extranjeros, reflected her South American background whilst the title of the second, Small Disturbances suggests the delicacy and understatement characteristic of her style. Critics of her previous work have noted its traffic between cultures and personal histories and her linguistic precision and craft.
Sanctuary has a cover illustration of an interior but the title poem is a delightful study of a snail, its home carried on its back, its habitat a shady wilderness. The natural world is the background for most of the book and plants, animals and, especially, birds – swans, gulls, larks, wagtails, wrens, cockerels, cormorants, house martins, yellow-hammers – are delineated with exquisitely observed detail. Yet they have a resonance beyond their own particularities.
Vivid similes allow the reader to engage with flora and fauna. Sheep’s wool caught on twigs and wire is ‘the colour of dirty snow’, whilst dog-rose petals litter the ground ‘as if a bride has passed by’, and a wild fern springs back like ‘a Christmas tree, unwrapped from plastic’. However, the similes can be fraught with disturbing associations: for instance, butterflies flutter down ‘like sheaves of propaganda leaflets from an army helicopter’. Sometimes the metaphor is key to the deeper undercurrent of the poem, as in ‘The Swans’, a poem set in Germany, where the birds are ‘white ballast, luffing in formation’, coming in to land ‘like the last of an old madness’.
Time is a major preoccupation of the poet, in the form of seasons, birthdays and generations. In ‘Birthday’ the wren and the sight of the flower honesty mark the season on the turn, honesty representing what is on the wane, having ‘grown a little ragged at the edges/where the wind’s been at it’, whilst the rain ‘is winter light haunting the spring’. The wren is the new season and its ‘jazz riff upon us once again’ reminds of previous springs: ‘memory on a sprocket’. The seasons are marked in their moment and in their passing. ‘Spring’ concludes: ‘Apple blossom, cherry, cow parsley and the elder,/we watch it come, we see it go’. In ‘Rain’ the poet marvels at ‘light by the bucketful’, ‘drawn up from autumn’s well’ and ‘shoring up winter’s night’. The passage of time through days, weeks and years within marriage is played out as a form of language class exercise in ‘What did you do today? Yesterday?’ with its ‘slow sifting of tenses that makes of time/a second language’.
The natural and human worlds run parallel and the correspondences between them are both effective poetic conceits and profoundly suggestive. Bermudez celebrates chance encounters in the city and characters who are always something of a mystery. So ‘Cormorant’ hovers between evoking the eponymous sea bird and the Newcastle father, Frank. A curry plant is both the peaky herb and an unnamed elderly frail survivor of triple cancers. The woman in ‘On the Croydon Tram’, who seems like ‘sorrow’s elder sister, pinched and lined’, talks with ghosts as she passes the cemetery and ‘empties every cupboard of her mind’ to herself and fellow passengers. They have all ‘seen her before, or someone like her’. In ‘The Peacock Feather Seller’ the man at Oxford Circus with an immaculate white kurta is serene in his patient waiting for customers, ‘stillness at the epicentre’. His business is ‘the weighing of time’ and in this he offers what cannot be bought.
Such serenity, balance, insight is the essence of Sanctuary. It can be summed up by ‘Autumn Equinox’ where the water poured past the lid of a jug represents the poise of the season, the blurring of past and future. Glass and water are in a ‘quiet marriage’ through which the world seems sharper and held ‘to the mirror/of the still, clear mind’. Such a moment held, suspended, is also a fitting metaphor for poetry itself – and this book is full of fine examples.
Kathryn Southworth is the former Vice Principal of Newman University College, Birmingham. She now lives in London. Her poems have been published in magazines and anthologies and her collection Someone was Here is forthcoming from Indigo Dreams in 2018.