Review of The Tin Lodes by Andy Brown and Marc Woodward, pub. Indigo Dreams Publishing 2020
A stream
a sprinkling
from separate sources
Here’s a collection of poems co-authored by two poets living on opposite sides of the River Teign. It begins in the region of the river, then radiates out to other waters both national and international. It is as interested in the banks as the water, and in the lives lived out on them:
The ferry plies its trade across the harbour;
small queues grow and vanish on opposing shores.
A frequent technique in the early poems is to blur time periods, as if the river holds them all in its memory at once:
a conclave of waders watch a Bronze Age
fisherman navigate his coracle
over to a niche in the rocks. He chants
his hunting prayer and parts a veil
of seaweed to reveal cormorant squabs
awaiting a parent and fish for their gullets.
Downstream the overflow pipe lets slip
its secret, jarring song into the sea.
This collapsing of time happens too in the central “Tin Lodes” sequence, where the old stannary chimneys become
weathered coastal sentries in spring sunshine
that could have been the ruins of Mycenae
and in coinages like “Mr Pytheas, the Marseilles merchant” for Pytheas of Massilia, the first to trade in Cornish tin for the Roman empire.
The vocabulary of these poems is often specialised: obviously place-names and species-names are important and sometimes become incantatory; the languages of trades, like tin-mining, and of botany and geology also figure heavily. Mostly this just makes things more interesting, though there are times when it sounds a bit too much like a scientific article - at the second mention of “kaolinitic”, it did strike me that this was probably a word you could only get away with once in a book of poems. There are also a great many dialect words - there’s a glossary at the back, which is just as well. This isn’t quite the same as writing in dialect, which would also involve grammar and sentence structure; it’s more the replacement of individual standard English words with dialect equivalents. Again, this is mostly fine but occasionally looks overdone, as if the words were being searched for. Actually, in one short poem, “The Dark Acre”, they clearly have been: the poem reads like an exercise in replacing all the standard nouns and most of the adjectives. This poem is in a short sequence called “Tributaries” and I would guess the idea is to illustrate how local cultures merge and broaden, like the tributaries of a river, eventually flowing into a supra-national ocean.
Another aim would seem to be to show what rivers, oceans, waters in general, have meant to people over the centuries: trade, communication, barriers, danger, escape. The final poem, “My River”, spends most of its time telling us what it is not; not “Alice Oswald’s Dart, or Wordsworth’s Thames,/or Raymond Carver’s river that he loved”. The implication being that everyone has his or her own river, their own path to the ocean, a suggestion reinforced by the poem that impressed itself on me most strongly, “Beach Huts”. In this, an old lady has gone missing, or at least not been seen for some time. “Police believed she’d gone to Birmingham”, that most land-locked of cities, but in spring, when facilities are cleaned out and renovated, it turns out that she has found a better place to die, in a beach hut, presumably looking out to sea, her fist “locked around the key”.
As Melville observed, water has a powerful pull on us: "Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life”. For me, the poems work best when they foreground this atavistic fascination. There are moments when I could wish to be less conscious of the research; facts and information, intriguing as they often are, sometimes drown out the sound of the river for me. But moments, too, when it comes through very clearly:
Now, into this brackish reach
the tide is running. Sliding through underwater grass,
current tracers in the blind depth,
I can sense them - the eels are coming…