by Lisa Williams

How the Bicycle Shone: New and Selected Poems, Gillian Allnutt
Spacecraft Voyager 1: New and Selected Poems, Alice Oswald

from The Cincinnati Review, Summer 2009

When Graywolf's anthology New British Poetry came out a few years ago, I was struck by what the editors call the "relaxed and innovative" ways of employing meter and rhyme. Two of the featured poets, Gillian Allnutt and Alice Oswald, stood out to me. The work of both builds on a rich heritage of folk ballad, nursery rhyme, and other song forms, and yet their poetry is not archaic. On the contrary, they have a freshness, strangeness, and modernity that leaves many poets behind. Both women published new-and-selected collections in 2007. It is a special pleasure for me—now familiar with their work through individual volumes—to see their poetry more widely available.

Born in London, Gillian Allnutt published her first book of poems, unglamorously titled Spitting the Pips Out, in 1981. The new volume, How the Bicycle Shone, selects work from her first four books and includes in total three others: Lintel, Sojourner, and a spare new collection, Wolf Light.

Allnutt's poems are like nothing I've seen—concentrated lyrics that demonstrate an unfailing ear and a disciplined perception. They are uncanny without being gimmicky, charged with suggestion while remaining adamantly rooted in the ordinary things of this world, and musical without falling into expected patterns. Her rhythms and rhymes are idiosyncratic but steeped in the tradition of ballad, nursery rhyme, and song. They also reflect more rugged poetic origins—Anglo-Saxon, Welsh, Chaucer and Hopkins, for example—with alliteration and other striking sound effects. In her most recent work, I detect an increasing severity, evident in sparser, more concentrated stanzas and lines. But even as Allnutt peels her poems down to the bone, she retains the more pointed sound effects mentioned earlier. In short, she's doing some of the most exciting, original work of any contemporary poet.

"Deaf Fishergirl," from her third book (Nantucket and the Angel, 1994), is a dense earlier poem that demonstrates Allnutt's adherence to the concrete and the ordinary—in image, language, and metaphor—as well as the distinctive sound of her lines and a characteristic haunting understatement. The accentuals, repetition, and alliteration add rich texture to the details of the speaker's soundless world. Here is the poem in its entirety:

It's complicated, like the inside of my brother's boat.
Sound breaks off abruptly at the edge of me.
The world stops short. The sea frets
stone. It frets and laps the step where I stand waiting
for my brother's boat. I think the sea turns
everything to sand. Its salt eats wood and thought.
But laughter is a spiral and the path that climbs the hill
in Bible pictures and the brittle empty basket
waiting with me. Laughter's coiled and cooped like rope.
In cottages and in the smoke-house it is clammy. Here
the air caresses me or cuts me to the quick. And clouds come
from the edge of sea one day, the edge of hills another,
or they come in with the nets. And once
when I was seven I was listening to the light on water, listening
to the sparkle of the light on stones
and waiting for my brother.

The speaker's (and the poet's) challenge here is to describe her world in terms we understand—"laughter" in particular must be imaged out, since it can't be heard, and ineffables like "thought" and "light" must be given synesthetic correspondences. This is something Allnutt is concerned with throughout her work: in the simplest terms, to make objects in someone else's world resonate with ideas and emotions, and to do so with poignant understatement. She gets better at this with each book.

As Allnutt reveals people and relationships by describing, with peculiar intensity, the things around them (or left behind), she avoids the flatness that imagistic poems can fall prey to; this may be where her interest in rhyme, rhythm, and the old song forms makes a difference. A more condensed poem that exhibits all of these is "Sarah's Laughter." Here is the first half of the poem:

Sarah's laughter's sudden, like a hurdle, like an old loud crow
that comes out of the blue.

The graceful men at the makeshift table—
there, in the shade of the tree, in the heat of the day, in Bethel—

look up from the all too tender veal,
the buttermilk, the three small

cakes of meal she's made them. For her husband
Abraham, she's sifted, shaped them in her old dry hand.

With this biblical story, there's a focus on the realistic rather than the mythic, which makes the scene vivid and immediate. Slight changes in vowels ("crow"/"blue," "table"/"Bethel," "veal"/"small," "husband"/"dry hand") give the poem Allnutt's typical slant rhymes. Its rhythms derive from both literary and popular traditions: an anapestic rhythm associated with ballads, nursery rhymes, and the like (seen in the fourth line above) is modulated with largely iambic rhythms. Internal rhyme, assonance, and consonance are greatly in evidence.

"Misericord," from the same volume, shows even more striking use of sound. A kind of evolving monorhyme is something Allnutt does a lot of: she varies vowel sounds slightly while retaining terminal consonance so that an entire poem is slant-rhymed with itself. Here is the first two-thirds of the poem:

He borrows an old tweed coat with toggles.
He takes himself off to the cathedral.
He's going to look at gargoyles.
But first he kneels.
God he says she's impenetrable.
Someone is hoovering the carpet in the choirstalls.
There is mud there dropped from the hem of the Bishop's stole.
He imagines himself without wings wearing a torn orange overall.
He learns he has ears like wells.
Only a Tibetan or an archangel can hear a school
Of overtones take off like pterodactyls
Out of mud and misericord. O Hell
He says aloud. O Hassocks He is seasick with the lovely swell ...

Can I claim "hoovering" as my new favorite verb? And who else would have slant-rhymed "choirstalls," "gargoyles," "pterodactyls," and "overalls"? Allnutt has words of a wide variety and derivation at her fingertips. Here are just a few of the gems I jotted down: fettle, colliery, woad, pother, roodscreen, laidly, wendletrap, drumlin, sark, lough, and, not to be limited to those beauties, batmobile and spam. Her wordhoard is to be savored and admired.

Allnutt's subjects are various, and her imagination wide. Women—familial, historical, and mythic—continually engage her, with a special focus on mothers and grandmothers. Poems touching on war and its accompanying hardships are also prevalent. "The Swastika Spoon" is a good example. In the notes, we are told that Allnutt's father's regiment helped liberate Belsen, and she explores her associations by focusing on a spoon that he brought home, which was used by his family for decades after. Here is the whole poem:

Because from the bathroom window he saw the Crystal Palace burn.

Because the war did happen.

My father came home from the burning of Belsen

with bits of it under his skin and the bowl of his heart in his hands

that would never be the same again, not ever his own again.

Because of that burning down.

And, in his pocket, proudly, the souvenir spoon.

Of light tin, slowly the bowl of it has worn down.

Barely is it a spoon.

The best of my life has been stirring the Bisto in.

And was Jerusalem.

Because.

Of my father in me there has been no burning down.

Writing about family and familial inheritance is risky, but Allnutt does not fall prey to sentimentality, partly because objects like the spoon above serve as the locus for memory.

Some poems in Wolf Light, the new volume at the end of How the Bicycle Shone, are about death, illness, and loss. Allnutt is aware of the risks inherent in those subjects, too, and even acknowledges them, as in "Easter 2004, Winchester":

I walk with the bald day of her burial,
A holdall.
In the hotels it is April.
I walk with Neruda who'd like to lend me a bold long line, unsuitable.
I am abashed, that my mother—still.
I walk as if with her beyond the old cathedral
Wall—
As if with her, a parish church, a chandlery, on wheels.

The evolving monorhyme is evident, but what is remarkable is how naturally it appears to emerge from the language of the poem. "Above Barningham" describes suffering in more detail, while retaining a mediating music:

Alone, the moor-long afternoon.

A long time now, my mother's eaten nothing.

Ulcers of the mouth and meditation
burn.

What can come of heather, of the haul of being here,
of the air?

Bee, at an angle, a small aeroplane.
At an angle to her.

The poem describes its subject with a harsh realism, yet there is still much to engage the ear. And that sad detachment at the end of the poem—the "Bee ... At an angle to her"—says so much more than any direct statement of grieving. It's a tiny gesture, but a brilliant, resounding one.

If Allnutt has pared her poems to a skeletal music, Alice Oswald's work tends toward more lushness and elaboration. Spacecraft Voyager 1 gathers poems from Oswald's first book, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile (1996), and her most recent book, Woods etc. (2005), and includes the entire book-length poem Dart (2002) and four new poems. A gardener who lives and works in Dartington, Devon, Oswald writes about gardening and growing things generally as well as mud, sky, stone, woods, birds, wind, rivers, the sea, and the moon (there is also a poem about Voyager 1, hence the title). Her poems are magical: lyrically clear, in the manner of John Clare and the old ballads, yet infused with idiosyncratic, modern phrasing and ideas that, in most instances, avoid preciousness.

Like Allnutt, Oswald is "innovative" and "relaxed" with her rhyme and meter, though more of the latter. Where Allnutt is a highly disciplined and deliberate writer—her modulations from more rollicking anapestic to smoother iambic rhythms reflecting shifts in thought and intention within an overall precise, even austere, aesthetic—Oswald is less controlled. She is fond of pentameter and of the sonnet, and there's a whimsical, footloose quality to her use of them. Her syntax and line breaks are often dynamic and enjambed. She also tends to prefer more accentual rhythms, those of the ballad stanza in particular. To my mind, her attraction to the old song forms seems to enable her poetical flow, so to speak. A sonnet, "Wedding," from The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile, is a good example of her style:

From time to time our love is like a sail
and when the sail begins to alternate
from tack to tack, it's like a swallowtail
and when the swallow flies it's like a coat;
and if the coat is yours, it has a tear
like a wide mouth and when the mouth begins
to draw the wind, it's like a trumpeter
and when the trumpet blows, it blows like millions ...
and this, my love, when millions come and go
beyond the need of us, is like a trick;
and when the trick begins, it's like a toe
tip-toeing on a rope, which is like luck;
and when the luck begins, it's like a wedding,
which is like love, which is like everything.

Much of the poem is playful—it could be read to a child. But the introduction of the coat's "tear/ like a wide mouth" lends a shot of strangeness and violence that avoids preciousness. "April" is another one-sentence poem with even more enjambment and a good dose of assonance and bracing sound. Here are the first ten lines:

The sheer grip and the push of it—growth gets
a footledge in the loosest stems, it takes
the litterings of weeds and clocks them round;
your eyeballs bud and alter and you can't
step twice in the same foot—I know a road,
the curve throws it one way and another;
somebody slipped the gears and bucketed slowly
into the hawthorns and his car took root
and in its bonnet now, amazing flowers
appear and fade and quiddify the month.

The poem is mostly pentameter, with jolts and bucks along the way, and the constant enjambment gives it a very different feel from Allnutt's work, especially from Allnutt's later, more pared down poems, in which every phrase and rhythm seems so carefully placed.

With Oswald's dreamy images and her taste for popular rhythms, she risks sounding too lovely and playful, even cute. Her use of terms like "soul," "kisses," "flower," "love," and even such twilight imagery (reminiscent of the nineteenth century) as "moon," "frost," "night," "sea," and so on (terms also prevalent in the old ballads), might displease some modern readers, but her poems are different from almost anything being written today; their lack of academic pretension is refreshing, and they aren't as naive as they may first appear. As Elizabeth Bishop made clear with two deceptively childlike poems, "Insomnia" and "Visits to St. Elizabeth's," such simplicity and musicality can be employed for deeper, more mysterious ends. The six-stanza poem "Seabird's Blessing," written in plainspoken accentual trimeter, is an example. It begins

We are crowds of seabirds,
makers of many angles,
workers that unpick a web
of the air's threads and tangles.

Pray for us when we fight
the wind one to one;
let not that shuddering strength
smash the cross of the wing-bone.

O God the featherer
lift us if we fall;
preserve the frenzy in our mouths,
the yellow star in the eyeball.

The poem contains something of the clarity, dreaminess, and violence of the old ballads. But that third stanza reminds me of Blake; something wilder and more modern creeps in. Here is the last stanza:

Pray for us this weird
bare place—we are screaming
O sky count us not as nothing
O sea count us not as nothing

The sonnet "Wood Not Yet Out" from Woods etc. recalls the work of another great, strange Romantic that I hear behind some of Oswald's work, John Clare, especially in its loose syntax, spacious imagery, and vulnerable, forthright speaker. Here are its last six lines:

once in, you hardly notice as you move,
the wood keeps lifting up its hope, I love
to stand among the last trees listening down
to the releasing branches where I've been—
the rain, thinking I've gone, crackles the air
and calls by name the leaves that aren't yet there

As in Allnutt's, there's a wealth of alliteration, consonance, and assonance in Oswald's work. Note these lines from ''A Greyhound in the Evening after a Long Day of Rain":

With a task and a rake,
with a clay-slow boot and a yellow mack,
I bolted for shelter under the black strake dripping of timber

Or these, from a later poem, "Moon Hymn":

I will give you one glimpse
a glimpse of the moon's grievance
whose appearance is all pocks and points
that look like frost-glints

But Oswald is not limited to overt musicality, and indeed can be just as good with a more spare, less metrical mode. Here she is in some lines from one of my favorite later poems, "Field," which reminds me a bit of Stevens's "The Snow Man":

Easternight, the mind's midwinter

I stood in the big field behind the house
at the centre of all visible darkness

a brick of earth, a block of sky,
there lay the world, wedged
between its premise and its conclusion

Oswald grew up in a river region, and her poems about bodies of water are some of her strongest. Her most famous water poem is the book-length Dart, for which she spent three years researching the river. The poem draws upon all sorts of rhetoric—recorded speech and conversations, archaism and dialect, descriptive prose, and stories told from different perspectives. It's a fascinating, important combination of narratives about the region. One of its best sections, in my opinion, is a group of five twelve-line stanzas, all ending with the same line. Here's part of one:

someone stood shouting inarticulate
descriptions of a shape that came and went
all night under the soft malevolent
rotating rain. and woke twice in a state
of ecstasy to hear his shout
sink like a feather falls, not quite
in full possession of its weight.

Spacecraft Voyager 1 ends with four new poems, including the remarkable long poem "Dunt." Described as "a poem for a nearly dried up river," "Dunt" is written in a repetitive, halting, utterly mesmerizing slant-rhymed stop-and-start pattern. Its subject is the river, but its central figure is the archaic, disintegrating effigy of a Roman water nymph in a glass case who is trying to "summon" the river's flow. The poem's narrator stops and starts throughout the poem, which features a good deal of slant rhyme on one sound ("bone"/"stone"/ "down"/"again," etc.):

Very small and damaged and quite dry,
a Roman Waternyrnph made of bone
tries to summon a river out of limestone.

Very eroded faded,
her left arm missing and both legs from the knee down,
a Roman Waternyrnph made of bone
tries to summon a river out of limestone.

Exhausted, utterly worn down,
A Roman Waternymph made of bone
being the last known speaker of her language,
she tries to summon a river out of limestone.

Little distant sound of dry grass. Try again.

The effigy/woman here could be seen as an image for the poet—or anyone struggling to speak—as well as the river. Broken, dilapidated, failing, but also symbolic, she represents the longing for utterance and flow, and stubbornly continues her efforts along these lines as the river itself slows and dries up:

Little hobbling tripping of a nearly dried up river
not really moving through the fields,
having had the gleam taken out of it
to the point where it resembles twilight.
Little grumbling shivering last ditch attempt at a river
more nettles than water. Try again.

Very speechless, very broken old woman,
her left arm missing and both legs from the knee down,
she tries to summon a river out of limestone.

A fine example of the innovative, relaxed use of rhyme and meter I discussed earlier, "Dunt" is Oswald's own musical invention, drawing from the traditions of song, poetry, and ordinary speech (as well as the river). These are all intertwined in a poem whose form is not imposed on its subject matter but rather emerges out of it. Such improvisation could only come from a poet who brings together literary and oral poetic traditions, and who, like Allnutt, values interesting and syncopated departures from established patterns.

About the Author
Lisa Williams has poems forthcoming in Virginia Quarterly Review, Missouri Review, and Orion. Her second book of poems, Woman Reading to the Sea (W. W. Norton, 2008), won the Barnard Women Poets Prize. Her first book is The Hammered Dulcimer (Utah State University Press, 1998). Awarded the Rome Prize in Literature in 2004, she is associate professor of English at Centre College.

The Cincinnati Review
University of Cincinnati

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