'Poems that tell a story'

I have greatly enjoyed reading and thinking about these 12 poems. I am impressed by the range and originality of responses to the idea of inscape; and by the ingenious poetic techniques used to convey movement. The subject matter of some of the poems took me by surprise. Only two of them concern animals; and three of them are about stationary objects.

I came to the exercise with a strong preconception about the 'best' kind of inscape poetry, and was expecting lyric poems focusing closely on visual and acoustic impressions, without any surrounding context or narrative. (I admire the steady, eye-on-the object-animal poetry of Lawrence and Hughes). I was therefore intrigued by the number of poems that tell or suggest a story. It is difficult to handle narrative effectively in 16 lines of verse, but it can be concisely conveyed through snapshot techniques and skilful elision, as these poems show.

Hawk by Diana Adams

Hook-nosed bandit, dazed
red shouldering the ledge.
His imprint still fresh
and oily on my window.
Huge wings strung wide
smack at the glass; a full breast
of feathers impresses in pane.
Glass is deceitful.
Now he watches -
black knives of wings
so still. Moon Drinker
A Real Mouse Eater, I'll take you
dress and undress in feathers, be your
slender hostess, breathe your rodent
breath. Maybe we could grow old
and not betray each other.

This a compelling inscape poem. The hawk's power comes across in terse, mostly monosyllabic phrases, handled with dramatic immediacy: "Huge wings strung wide/ smack at the glass". Note the skillful use of short lines, and the chilling suspense conveyed through enjambment: "Now he watches-/ black knives of wings/ so still". Up till the line "Glass is deceitful" the reader is held by the physical presence of the bird, but thereafter the perspective shifts onto the speaker's state of mind. The poem puzzles with its erotic implications, and the effect is enigmatic, disturbing. I am reminded of the poems of Hughes and Plath. I don't quite like "in pane" (is a pun intended? If so it distracts,), but otherwise this is impressive writing, tightly controlled.

Violin by Sheila Black

You must use the body - its curves,
its hollows, the spring of the sound, which
brings back what is absent, what has
been and is now gone, fading. Cat-gut,
fret, the busy machinery of longing,
which takes its strength from the
presence of absence, the body's darkness,
the wood carved out, thinned and
made to flex. There is a pain at the
source of it - so easily broken, this tree
without a heart, the sap dried to amber
patina. Only in the sound can you
hear it move, the veins in the blood of
the body that is no more. The bow pulled
along the taut strings, a pitch that
is all but unbearable.

A violin does not itself 'move', but is moved by the player, and it also 'moves' those who listen to it. The poem plays implicitly on several connotations of movement - "Only in the sound can you hear it move"- and makes us indirectly aware of the parallel between playing an instrument and making a poem. There is a craftsman-like feel to the language - "Cat-gut,/ fret, the busy machinery of longing" - and a love of the violin as a physical body, with its "curves" and "hollows". The poet has very exactly caught the feel of mellowed wood - "carved out, thinned and made to flex". Some of the line-endings are a little weak: it is stronger to end on distinctive nouns and adjectives such as "curves", "longing" and "amber" than on conjunctions. Otherwise I like everything here, except "the presence of absence", where the violin as a physical object gets lost in abstract nouns. "A poem should not mean/ But be" said Archibald MacLeish; and for the most part 'Violin' follows that prescription exactly.

Fog by Helen Cadbury

Earth-sweat, sea-breath,
hangs about, cold-shouldering street corners,
disconsolate, untouchable,
smothers horizons, pockets whole villages,
sprays dirty thumb-smudge graffiti
on city walls, in ditches,
spits chill onto the woollen scarves of citizens,
who shrink into their coats, avert their gaze
until the cloud-fall sighs and heaves itself away
- a slow unfathomable fade -
to hide in low valleys and the shadows of churches,
waiting to muster when the day's back is turned.

It is difficult to write about the movement of fog without thinking either of the opening of Dickens's Bleak House, or the fog-cat in Eliot's 'The Love-song of J.Alfred Prufrock'. But this simple, 12-line description is remarkably free of those particular influences. It begins with two arresting spondees, "Earth-sweat, sea-breath" - compound nouns, reminiscent of Hopkins. Then it unfolds slowly in a single sentence of free verse, spreading across the page in longer and longer lines, to mimic the engulfing gloom. The verbs are well-chosen to convey the active, versatile movement of the fog - "smothers", "pockets", "sprays", "spits", "heaves". "Cold-shouldering" is clever, and exactly right.

Lizard by Martha Close

Each morning, strobed in the flicker of the kitchen light
It speeds a steep slalom up the wall above the sink,
This fir-cone fat one dislodges dust and air and
Its firm tail flails a hectic pulse to its lair behind the fridge.

Then once, deep in a bag of biscuits that I ate without a plate
I saw it seeing me. Its defiant, guiltless,
Sugar-sated eyes are dry; fearless, but unblinking still.
In its throat a muddy vein throbs through watery skin,
As it gulps and grips and sets to squirm.

Its unwitting trespass sickens me, makes me take tongs
And lift, still bagged, the lumbering live-ness.
Feel it clutch and heave and fight. Does it howl as I toboggan it,
Bag and biscuits all, down the long garbage slide?

This is a terrific poem, written by someone with sharp powers of observation, who has either an affinity with DH Lawrence and Ted Hughes, or an acquaintance with their poems about animals. I once spent a day trying to write about a lizard, and got nowhere near the accuracy of this inscape, which focuses on physical details, seen close-up: "Its firm tail flails a hectic pulse"; "In its throat a muddy vein throbs through watery skin". I love the sound-patterns in the poem: the alliterative trio of 's' sounds in 'speeds a steep slalom'; the pairs of 'g' and 's' sounds in 'gulps and grips and sets to squirm.' Is the writer thinking of Lawrence's snake, when he describes the lizard's "unwitting trespass" and its undignified tobogganing down the garbage slide? There is no spelling-out of the speaker's guilt, as there is in 'Snake'. But the phrase "lumbering live-ness" and the question "Does it howl?" leave us disturbed by this sudden, violent rejection of a creature whose habits have been so patiently observed.

Patience by John Curry

In balance, purposeful, precise, you race
with deft and sudden steps, keep just behind

the leader for half a lap, to feel his pace
then burst. Helter-skelter, your limbs and lungs

and heart are tiring fast; you reach the line -
and now you've won. But you say little hung

on winning. I watch your face, sinewy
in thought, relax and grin. Always like this,

you man of action, whose days made such
events as led to me, and me to borrow

your story. One thing I don't have to guess.
Still in your chair, white haired; I watch

your steady eyes, blue as the open sea
and flecked with the patience of coral.

This poem is well shaped around a temporal hiatus, turning on the ageing of a youthful, energetic runner into an old man. Does it concern a father-son relationship? The not-quite-spelled-out clues give subtlety: we are intrigued by the idea that the speaker is "borrowing" his subject's story; that there is still much left to "guess". Even things the speaker "doesn't have to guess" leave us guessing. The old man's mysterious calm is captured in his "steady eyes" with their "patience of coral". The un-rhyming couplets are well-managed, and the enjambed line endings make the poem flow. There is nothing showy in this poem, full of careful observation, which gets a little patchy and prosaic in the middle but builds to a strong ending.

Spiral Staircase of the Old Hotel by David Jalajel

It breathes, this staircase, when a breeze ruffles
its latticework. It spins lightheaded

from terrace to terrace, not tenable for walking on,
but displayed for the sheer spectacle

it creates, for the roving eye it entices upwards
with all its interlacing steps. There are ages

of history written into its wrought iron -
its smelting in some smoky Victorian forge,

its polishing by perfumed hands and the sweaty palms
of over-eager lodgers, odors of scandal reeking

like whiskey from its dust, the fall to the death
of one fine lady descending in haste to her lover,

who dared with glamorous intent to glide upon
its shivering bones when a breeze called from below.

I was surprised and delighted to read this lovely staircase poem. Whoever heard of a staircase breathing? And yet that verb is exactly right for the airy dance this poem takes us on, teasing us with its delicate artistry, much as the staircase leads the eye upwards in "interlacing steps". The un-rhyming couplets are perfect for the subject matter: visually suggesting stairs, and creating a light, aerated texture to the verse. The second half of the poem, beginning "There are ages/ of history written into its wrought iron", is different in kind from the first, offering fanciful surmises about the people who made the staircase, and the hotel occupants who have used it. I would have liked the whole poem to be along the lines of the first three couplets.

How to photograph the heart by Christine Klocek-Lim

You remember how the lens squeezed
unimportant details into stillness:
the essential trail of rain down glass,
the plummet of autumn-dead leaves,
your grandfather's last blink when
the breath moved on.
Your startled hands compressed
the shutter when you realized: this is it,
this is the last movement he will take
away from the silent fall of morphine,
beyond the soft gasp of the nurse,
past the sick, slow thud of your heart
moving in the luminous silence.

The title of this poem gives us a foretaste of ambiguity: we are not sure if "the heart" means a bodily organ, or the seat of affection. The poet takes a double snapshot, as one person's heart stops and the other's continues. The subject matter is handled with skill and a tight control over feeling. The painstaking inventory of "unimportant" movements through lines three-four leads us almost unawares to the momentous significance of "your grandfather's last blink/ when his breath moved on". And at lines 11-13 we have a sequence of carefully constructed phrases, grouped so as to echo each other - "the silent fall of morphine", "the soft gasp of the nurse", the "slow thud of your heart". The cold lucidity of the writing works to stunning effect. It is as though the mind is replaying this moment again and again in slow motion: freezing it into a balanced composition, as would a skilled photographer.

Succulent by Rachael Lloyd

There's a god perched on my windowsill.

He's full of promise and love's sore oath
Oh he's pink-tipped to the lip with it.
He bargains with sailboats, plans voyages.
He's Zephyrus hoping for Flora
And pussy eared.

When I am away
He takes his daytime dance
Upon my kitchen floor, trailing soil, flirting
With sunlight and always searching for wind
In the arid desert heat, trapped
by double glazing.

There's a panda on my windowsill who thinks he's a god.

The panda is one of the cactus species, and is quite commonly kept as a house-plant. I nearly wrote 'house-pet', because the familiar name for the plant is 'pussy ears', and the poem plays beautifully with the name and with the animal associations. I am not sure this is an inscape - who would recognize that the thing described is a cactus, without the title? - but it is a lovely poem, full of movement and metamorphosis. I like the bold opening, making comically inflated claims for the powers of this small stationary plant; and I like the sense that 'pussy ears' is pent-up behind double glazing, restless and frisky. The poem is interesting formally, with its opening and closing lines so strongly marked out, framing the panda (as if on the window-sill). This is lively, experimental writing, ingenious in its linguistic playfulness.

Saturn V by Henry Moon

ignition ... then the roar and din of ship  undocking
wreaks shock and awe at stationary  wonder,
time frozen in inferno, dust and insects  rocking
and rolling in dazed force fields, the ground  under
the skyscraper mass gradually  revealing
itself centimetre by slow  centimetre ...
pure fission: such a burst of concentrated  power
for so small a space covered. bystanders sit,  reeling
from the force distilled by this ivory  tower
not a metre distant from terra  firma
yet climbing imperceptibly toward its  goal.
hours pass. the crowd's appreciative  murmur
brings us down to earth. intensity  unraveling,
calling to mind the lucid abdication of  control
that precedes our own space  traveling
in saturn five that bears us to saint  peter ...

This is poetry of spectacle. There is a real attempt to grapple with sheer energy and momentum, as well as with the mind-boggling idea of motion through space. The poem is most successful in the two lines beginning "pure fission ...". It was a bold move to use end-rhyme, and to include so many feminine line endings: the lilting gentleness of "ship undocking"/ "insects rocking" is unexpected, creating a slow-motion effect. I looked for a regular rhyme-scheme but could not find it. Phrases I found weak were "gradually revealing" and "climbing imperceptibly". I am not clear what the poet gains by omitting capital letters, since the sentences are punctuated. Nor am I entirely sure if the caesura before the final word in each line is intended, or an accident in formatting. Fortuitous or otherwise, it highlights the falling rhythm of each line.

Visiting the pottery by Clare Shedden

Hesitantly, her mother indicates a very sensible tea service.
A stroke of blue under the porcelain
of her ear darkens. Her forehead is a fretwork.
In the jaw a clink of bone china. Pink glaze bleeds
through skin. Her glare is magnesium.

Then gradually the varnish of her eyes
brittles in the flare, the gaze scumbles,
shifts to anywhere but here. She turns away,
her hair a slumped lattice.

Later, I watch her spinning grey silk
to globes. Each finger sparks as she whirls
into the wheel, flying clear to light a vacuum.
Her lips describe a perfect rim.

This is an inscape in exactly the sense that Hopkins meant it, for everything in the appearance and actions of the potter declares that her vocation is her identity: "What I do is me; for that I came". The transformation of the woman into porcelain has a fascinating, uncanny power. The details in this poem are crisply observed; and the conceit is intricately sustained throughout. (I am reminded of some of Craig Raine's early Martian poems.) I love the word "scumbles" and the image of hair as "a slumped lattice". There is a tremendous sense of energy and skill in "each finger sparks as she whirls/ into the wheel2. I wondered at first about the extra line at the beginning of the first stanza, but I see now that it roots fantasy in the real world and provides a clever contrast.

Arthur by Sarah Sloat

Winters in the garage, concrete walls
go two shades dimmer, and it's freezing
in this, his chosen desert. No matter. Wind will always spit dust
around our bones, and he can type
in mittens open at the curving seam
to keep the fingers free. I used to wonder what he lived for
at the city's edge, where
gemstoned businessmen lean on horns,
eyes closed till evening. This morning, between paragraphs,
it's clear: the peal of an axe on the wood block,
his face taut with effort, making
as if to shout.

Of all the poems, I find this the most enigmatic. The relationship of speaker to subject is left unexplored. The circumstances of the subject are clearly important, doing much more than setting the scene, but they are only half spelt out. Arthur lives an austere life, yet he clearly has something the "gemstoned businessmen" do not have - the freedom to be himself, to pursue his writing "in this his chosen desert". The inscape towards which the poem leads, in the final stanza, is striking: he is chopping wood, his face "taut with effort", and there is something fierce or protesting in his attitude. The sound of the axe is like the peal of a bell. The trueness of his aim and the cleanness of the sound together convey all that the speaker admires in this figure. Each stanza represents the stage in an unfolding thought, and the poem slips almost casually from one stage to another. Everything about the poem is at once charged with significance and understated, intriguing the reader with its strange elisions. 'Between paragraphs' would make a good alternative title.

Falling from the Frost by Hazel Wilcox

It is never still, this without form
which wanders beneath stone
without lifting, or shifting. The
teasing trickle in a bosom crevice,
the tingle jingle on a roof tin, free
falling like a bird outside its wing,

until the auburn rushes of undressed
brushes tangle the very path it pleats,
and the winter scores an unmatched tour
of snowy ample flecks so sweet, so unstill,
the brawny look and feel of a weathered
vain undressing.

The opening lines are arresting in their obliqueness and lyric beauty. Is this a poem about melting frost, or time, or process? A mysterious entity "without form" is tracked though 12 lines of pure sound, as though movement itself were being caught on the page. Note the internal and slant rhymes - "lifting" and "shifting", "tingle jingle", "rushes" and "brushes", "scores" and "tour", "pleats" and "sweet" - which keep our ear attentive, listening for a delicate patter like rain drops. The reader responds primarily to the sound-system of this poem, inhabiting its linguistic medium with no expectation of strict referentiality. The free, associative quality of the writing makes a remarkable poem, close to music.

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