Tom
Pickard’s Winter Migrants. Carcanet (2016)
This isn’t
a review: I want to celebrate this book because it is the most enjoyable new poetry I’ve read in a long time.
My test of
a slim poetry book (78 pages) by a single author is can I live with it
for a week? Can I read and then reread and not feel the urge to read anything else.
And then if I put it aside and come back to it, does it still hold my
attention? Most modern single author collections of poetry fail this test,
miserably.
I bought Winter Migrants as soon as it was
published and I’ve been rereading it ever since. In terms of my test it’s an
excellent book.
It’s split
into three parts: two sequences: Lark and
Merlin, and from Fiends Fell Journal
and a third section made up of individual poems.
Pickard’s
poetry has almost always been the record of one intelligence moving through
time and recording what he encounters in precise language.
a wren
perched on
a hawthorn
low enough
to skip the scalping winds,
sang a
scalpel song.
This first
poem from Lark and Merlin is a good
example of an elegantly spare, stripped-down or stripped back poetic. It belongs
to what Donald Davie once celebrated as ‘a poetry of right naming’. The poet
works to find the best word to describe the world he lives through.
When Alice
complained to Humpty Dumpty that he was making the words do too much work, he
boasted that he paid them extra for their efforts when they turned up on a Saturday
for their wages. Presumably there's a small queue at Pickard's on a Saturday and he is also paying them overtime.
While I was
rereading Winter Migrants I was also
reading Baker’s The Peregrine. Both
books have the same detailed observation of movement and light, landscapes and
their wild inhabitants. Ruskin would have approved of both writers’ honest attention to
detail. However, while Baker’s prose overloads the reader, Pickard’s poems have
the advantage that everything unnecessary has been left out. What I envy most is
his ability to capture the effects wind has and describe its movement over a
landscape. In this he’s as good if not better than Ruskin at his best, though
he also has the added advantage of brevity.
Sometimes minimalism
doesn’t leave much for the reader to do except admire the poet’s skill. The
Sequence solves this problem. Lark and
Merlin might be a record of a relationship. There’s a she/you and an I. But
the subject is absent. There’s no biographical context (factual or fictional)
to distract from the poems. And I don’t understand how this works, but the
absence of the subject creates the space which holds the sequence together.
It also
allows for the complexities of shifting power within a relationship, the confusion
as well as the celebrations:
She asked
about my heart,
Its evasive
flight;
but can I
trust her with its secrets?
and does
the merlin, in fast pursuit of its prey,
tell the
fleeing lark it is enamoured of its song?
or the
singing lark turn tail
and fly
into the falcon’s talons?
Fiends Fell Journal mixes prose with poetry. The blurb describes
it as a Haibun, but the alternation of Prose and Verse you find in medieval Welsh
and Irish texts feels more appropriate to the wild landscape. It is the record
of an intelligence moving through that landscape and taking careful note of
everything seen, felt and heard. It might sound like a strange compliment, but
it’s a very honest poetry and prose which doesn’t fudge itself by pretending to
‘poetic thoughts’. It would be easy to do the prose badly as poetic pose but he
avoids this.
The final
section of the book contains an assortment of poems on a range of subjects and
in a range of styles, from the effective satire of ‘Whining while dining oot’
which puts the boot into a certain type of regional poet, to lamenting a death,
‘Squire’; to expressions of frustration with his contemporaries, the marvellous
‘To Goad My Friggin Peers’.
At the end
the book returns to the sparser tone of its beginning with ‘At the Estuary’ and
‘Winter Migrants’ both short sequences.
Nothing
I’ve just written does real justice to the pleasure of reading Winter Migrants. Which is really what
makes Pickard stand out. He’s very very good, but he’s also entertaining and
thought provoking, and enjoyable.
He reminds
me what poetry was probably like before it was turned into a ‘pedant’s game’: it
was worth reading.
(And as a
PS. As someone who has often grumbled about the absurdity of blurbs on poetry
books, the paragraph on the back of this one is a model of how a poetry book
could be treated.)
