This is one of my favourite contemporary poems.

I met David Wright many years ago, in the Lake District, at a conference of the Society of Medical Writers (he’s a doctor).
The Society had held a competition, and David was a prize winner – I think not for this particular poem, though it’s so good that it would have stood out in any competition.

I’ve read ‘Returning’ many times, and it never fails to give me a sense of serenity. David knows what he’s talking about, and he finds a perfect (and unexpected) way to express it. The poem has a free form, yet it also has a natural rhythm which perfectly suits the breath and heartbeat mentioned in the poem.

It seemed to me that the poem might please many readers, and also comfort many, if – as seems natural – they sometimes worry about dying. So here it is, with many thanks to David for kindly allowing me to post it. I hope you will enjoy it as much as I do.

RETURNING

Yes, I have seen death – many times:
on curtained wards and in attic
bedrooms, to the roll of trolleys
across linoed floors and to the soft
tap of branches on thin windows.

And every time, the question:
why so different, this pause
between one beat and the next that
is not a pause? After all, the heart
hangs a thousand times each day.

But now that, for you, death
is near, no longer waiting for a
distant date, but prowls instead
the diary in your jacket pocket,
you ask a different question.

I can reassure you. There is no
pain, no distress, no hungriness
for breath. Yes, I have seen these
things of course, many times,
but they are birth, not death.

Birth is the struggle, birth that flings
us into harshness, light and noise;
death is an easing, a sigh, a setting free,
it is the waves’ foam streaming through
the sand returning to the sea.

– David J. Wright

Carcanet’s New Poetries series is rightly respected as a showcase of exciting talents of varying kinds. The latest volume was launched yesterday and I want to call attention to a fine new poet whose work has excited me a lot. And – STOP PRESS – her full-length book Missel Child is now available from Carcanet: just go to  http://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9781847772183

I’ve been reading Helen Tookey’s work with growing admiration. Her quiet, precise poems have a genuine eeriness – a spooky quality that I’ve met with nowhere else in recent poetry. I think it comes from the fact that she has interests in both archaeology and psychology, but knows intuitively that they aren’t separate – that when we dig up the past it’s our own roots we are looking at; and when we explore the dark corners of our personal psyche, we’re also daring to open up the hidden aspects of our culture and society.

‘At Burscough,Lancashire’ is a case in point. Here it is (with permission):

At Burscough, Lancashire

Lancashire’s Martin Mere was the largest lake in England when it was first drained, to reclaim the land for farming, in 1697.

Out on the ghost lake, what’s lost

is everywhere: murmuring in names

on the map, tasted in salt winds

that scour the topsoil, westerlies

that wrenched out oaks and pines, buried now

in choked black ranks, heads towards the east.

Cloudshadows ripple the grasses as the seines

rippled over the mere by night, fishervoices calling

across dark water. Underfoot, the flatlands’

black coffers lie rich with the drowned.

The poem is about a lake that’s no longer there. Helen Tookey uses its absence to evoke the landscape (a strange, nondescript no-man’s-land) in vivid, sensuous detail but also with semantic depth, so that the placenames on the map recalling the lost mere merge into the sound of the wind, and the trees which still turn up now as fossilised bog oak and the like become disturbingly evocative of mass human graves. Ruminating on the loss of the mere, she writes, by implication, an elegy for the communities that lived and worked there and have now, like the lake, gone with hardly a trace. She also hints at the other cultural obliterations which have stained past centuries. The ‘choked black ranks’ recall ethnic cleansing, forced migration, mass starvation. And the simple fact that, over the centuries, many people, fishers and other, must have drowned in the lake and been forgotten. Even money is there, faintly, with the substitution of ‘coffers’ for the expected ‘coffins’.

But it’s all held together by a consciousness which sees in a context of myth. The ‘fisher voices calling/across dark water’ are voices from the other side of the river – Styx or Lethe – that separates the dead from the living. These are the souls of the dead that might call to us in sleep. Could it even be that they are fishing for us? The choice choice of ‘flatlands’ is deft also – and again a neat substitution, because we would expect ‘wetlands’ (indeed, the remnants of Martin Mere are now a bird sanctuary run by the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust). Not just a neat label for the nondescript alluvial west-Lancashire landscape, it suggests a flat earth that might tilt up one day and show worrying things underneath. For the mathematically aware it also recalls Edwin Abbott’s 1884 Flatland, a brilliant Lewis-Carroll style fantasy which enables even the simplest person to understand the amazing nature of spatial dimensions.

Helen’s poem shows us just how many dimensions an absent lake and a depopulated landscape can have. And she tells us about it in such deceptively gentle and musical tones, hovering on the edge of blank verse, but always staying flexible, floating between four stresses and five – ‘rippling’ and ‘murmuring’ as the poem says. It’s like listening to a lullaby that soothes and seduces with its beauty; but just might give you nightmares.