Review by Tracey Foster of "Spring Cannot Be Cancelled: David Hockney in Normandy" by Martin Gayford

At least they can't cancel Spring was a refrain coined by David Hockney in 2020 when he found himself locked down in Normandy, surrounded by his newly acquired orchard.

Gayford, who is the art critic for the Spectator, had a long relationship with Hockney that went back over 45 years. Having previously written two books together, History of Pictures and Secret Knowledge, the pair were in constant communication before the outbreak of Covid-19. Sharing images, thoughts, connections via emails and post, the impact of lockdown was to become a focus during the subsequent isolation of the artist in his new studio, a converted barn. To use Hockney’s favourite word, they had a good natter. The premise of this book is to explore that period and the outpouring of landscapes that came from confinement, whilst making connections between other artworks and theories and the fragility of the human race. While we were condemned to sofa surfing, team meetings, home schooling and baking bread, Hockney and Gayford looked closely at our relationship with nature and the art of sitting still and noticing every detail about us.

We have lost touch with nature, rather foolishly as we are part of it, not outside it. This in time will be over and then what?

This chimes with the mood of the period, when we quit our confines for daily walks and began to turn to nature for relief. Finding solace in the sunsets, wellness in our woodlands, we, like Hockney, looked at the details around us. Back when the mortality of our existence was a daily bulletin, Hockney was aware of his presence and role as an observer and recorder of life. 

I've witnessed quite a few changes in the art world and you know, most artists are going to be forgotten. That's their fate. It might be mine too. 

The landscapes he drew with pencil, paintbrush and iPad were simple marks and dots of colour but conveyed the freshness of nature unfurling in a time of great immobility. The inevitably of Spring, nature's great drive to procreate and live, was a reminder of our raison d'etre when we needed it most. 

This book is a great commentary on the lockdown of 2020, seen through the eyes of two people. Their conversations and discussions traverse art, opera, food, postcards and fairy tales. This is a roundabout ride of ideas and ideology, focusing on themes close to the artist’s heart: colour, shade, time, perspective, water and nature with reference to those who influenced him most, Van Gogh, Monet, Picasso, Hokusai and Rembrandt. The book is punctuated throughout with glorious images that pay homage to the skill of the mark maker and a visual history of time, weather and viewpoints.

I last saw a Hockney retrospective in 2012 at the Royal Academy of Arts, A Bigger Picture. Although I was aware of his large portraits, California pools and Wolds landscapes, it was his pencil sketches that fascinated me most. His draftsman skills are imbued with sensitivity as he layers up marks to create texture and depth. This was at the forefront when I read this book. The Normandy iPad sketches he created with a bespoke painting app use similar marks and movement to convey the cherry blossoms, riverbeds and pathways surrounding the farm.

Hockney finally left his Normandy studio at the end of 2024 and moved back to London. Failing health in his late eighties has drawn him closer to amenities and available health care. A prolific artist who has worked every day since turning sixteen, and who painted the mantra Get up and start work straight away on his bedroom chest of drawers, is not due to stop work soon. We can only wait to see what becomes his next muse. 

Everybody's looking at the same picture, but they don't see the same thing. We see with memory. 

About the reviewer
After a long career as an Art and Design teacher, Tracey Foster wanted to refocus her creative energies into writing poetry and prose. After helping others find inspiration in the world around us, she took an MA course in Creative Writing at Leicester University and has not looked back. She finds inspiration in the past and the events that shape us. Previous work has been published by Comma Press, Ayaskala, Alternateroute, Fish Barrel Review, The Haiku Foundation, Mausoleum Press, Bus Poetry Magazine, Wayward Literature, Cold Moon Journal, Madswirl, Five Fleas, the Arts Council and she writes on her own blog site The Small Sublime found here.

Review by Gary Day of "The Silence" by Gillian Clarke

 

Charles Simic said that ‘poetry is a translation of the silence.’ Gillian Clarke’s collection goes a step further. It is not a translation of ‘the silence,’ whatever that may be, but an evocation of soundlessness. The world was a noisy place until Covid struck and then everything seemed to go quiet for a long time. But it was only the human world that was hushed: nature’s music continued, the wind in the trees, the songs of birds, the hiss of rain, the bark of a fox. ‘Listen’ Clarke enjoins, ‘water tells its rosary.’

The linking of natural phenomena and religious ritual is central to the volume. To that extent it brings to life Blake’s dictum that ‘everything that lives is holy.’ The reader is returned to ‘Eden before the Fall.’ Along with this restoration comes a liturgical conception of time. The first section of the collection is organised according to the canonical hours, Matins, Lauds, Prime and so on. These were times of prayer but the poems are not addressed to a creator. They are an account of daily activities and observations tinged with an awareness of the devastation of Covid. ‘We settle close, / Seek sweet diversion from the day, / Its pestilence, its wars, the daily toll, the dead.’ In times of plague, small things become precious: the ‘psalm’ of an owl, ‘the turning of a page.’

Silence is not always desirable, especially if it has been imposed. But those whose voices have been suppressed, particularly in Welsh history, find some some sort of restitution in poems like ‘Llywelyn’s Daughter’ and ‘FForest.’ Finding the balance between silence and speech in the face of great events or small incidents is the shaping force of this collection. Stunning imagery - ‘chalice of gold overflows / with a cupful of snow’ - made me feel as if I were in an art gallery while the recurrence of certain phrases creates a sense of unity as well as an incantatory effect. This superb volume gets pride of place on my poetry shelf. 

About the reviewer
Gary Day is a retired English lecturer and the author of several critical works including Literary Criticism: A New History and The Story of Drama. His debut poetry collection, The Glass Roof Falls as Rain, will be published by Holland Park Press.

Review by Colin Dardis of "Murmurations" by Clare Dwyer

The poems in Murmurations are culled from a notebook that Dwyer kept during the pandemic, written across each wave of the Coronavirus pandemic as they hit England. Forced to shield during each lockdown, cut off from the the normalities of children, grandchildren and life beyond her house, Dwyer turned to other areas of focus to dwell upon. There are three main themes at play throughout the collection: the comfort immediately found in her own garden; the wonders of space; and the sense of family, keenly missed throughout each wave. These three themes in themselves may not seem like natural bedfellows, but Dwyer balances her attention skilfully across them.

It is perhaps in the poems of the garden and of nature that Murmurations succeeds the most: not like the keen botanical slant of Michael Longley or Jean Bleakney perhaps, but more the sheer awe and childlike fascination closer to that of Mary Oliver. In the opening poem, 'Solace of a Small Bird: Wren,' the observer marks the passage of the day by the comings and goings of the bird:

           I count each one and smile,
           it is enough,
           despite these tremors
           which shake the world

This sets the mood for the book: to find solace, comfort and even entertainment in what we already have at our possession, when shut off from the rest of the world. Tickseed, acorns, birds, fern, crane flies and more are all part of Dwyer's line-up, with delight found in each.

Dwyer also takes us outside of Earth, to imagine scenes set in the allure of deep space, with reflection on meteor showers and the Hubble telescope. 'Last Letter from Mars' gives voice to the Mars Rover, close to the end of its mission: 'I am tired, my battery is low, | A storm is coming.' Here is a hint of death, and with so much of it ubiquitous on Earth, even Mars can't escape a death of sorts. Elsewhere, Dwyer conjures up the image of 'this small blue planet | caught safe within the Heliosphere' ('Star Map'), and one can't help but think that in the middle of a persistent pandemic, the use of the word 'safe' can only be ironic.

The opening of the poem 'mineshelf' neatly manages to weave the subjects of family and space together, giving a new twist to a common image seen in space exploration:

          That moment, when the module
          separates from the mothership,
          embarks on its own journey
          is akin to that moment
          when a child
          has self-recognition

Dwyer has moments of such Brautigan-esque inventiveness dotted through the book: people who 'fossilise at an early age,' the fall of post through a letterbox like 'a rapid flutter ... of sparrows,' crows picking moss off a roof to line their nests with, and using their feathers as payment. At times, however, there is an over-reliance on abstractions: the vision of meteors filled the observer with 'awe and delight,' a person and their dog return home from a walk 'curiously satisfied'; there is the insomniac's plea for sleep to 'catch my soul.'

None of these abstractions let the reader into what the speaker is really feeling, which is a shame, as Dwyer does display the ability to evoke empathy and affinity elsewhere. 'To the Other Side of Truro' charts the local landscape seen on a journey to visit family, beholding a sequence of natural marvels; and yet, when the destination is reached, granddaughters run outside in greeting 'and still, | we cannot hold each other.' The absence of a daughter is felt as 'a hard knot of loss | behind by breastbone.' Seasons change, yet Dwyer feels as if she is 'caught in amber,' absurdly preserved through the inertia of lockdowns.

 All of this takes the reader back to their own sense of longing and isolation felt through lockdown, being cut off from loved ones, and the key poem of the collection, 'The Wood-wide Web.' There is little direct address to the pandemic within Murmurations; in fact, the first mention of the C-word, 'Covid,' isn't until over thirty poems deep. But here, we see the tying together of family, togetherness distance and the impact of the pandemic in one clever extended metaphor:

           Across the woodland
           deep underground
           mycelium in intricate webs
           gossip to the trees,
           who is sick,
           who is threatened.
           The trees take care
           of their vulnerable.

Within the realm of post-pandemic literature, there is this awareness of the need for others, but there is also anger. In 'Reading Home,' there is mention of 'countless deaths | and the fall of Troy.' It doesn't take a great leap of imagination and reinvention to see 'Troy' as 'Tory.' 'A Murder of Crows' (again, the hint of death found in the collective noun) gleefully wishes for the downfall of Boris Johnson. The sense of anger though is subtle, not overwrought, and Dwyer does well not to let it distract from her main themes.

In 'Skeins,' a shrewdly constructed poem of overlapping sentences, we find the clash of escapism (the comforts of nature and family, the gazing into space) with reality: people in body-bags, overworked nurses, grief. It's a good exhibition piece for the whole of the book. Dwyer may not always push and stretch language as much as other poets, but she is comfortable in letting the subject matter speak for itself, to be that mirror held up to the world, which we all need while still reeling from the impact of Covid. And despite the lingering sense of death, there is much warmth in these poems.

About the Reviewer
Colin Dardis is a neurodivergent writer, editor and sound artist from Northern Ireland. His most recent book is Apocrypha: Collected Early Poems (Cyberwit, 2022). His work, largely influenced by his experiences with depression and Asperger's, has been published widely throughout Ireland, the UK and USA. 

You can read more about Murmurations by Clare Dwyer on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Sue Mackrell of "Whose hand would you like to hold ..." by Patricia McCarthy

Patricia McCarthy’s poignantly titled chapbook, written during the first lockdown, invites us to ‘Draw the curtains, light the candle.’ It is ‘Time to sit as the Brontes did,’ she says, ‘Fight off the attacker’ and write. She tells us: ‘Emily will scribble – /with yours – her secrets, fast as she can.’ The predator stalking the Brontes was tuberculosis. For us, Covid 19 has forced us into introspection, to explore the ‘geography of the heart, ‘... deciphering more / about your selves than ever you knew.’ McCarthy asks us to ‘Reflect on those stolen moments / of grace; re-live them despite your skin-hunger,' to ‘think whose hand you would like / to hold one last time, then press softly to your lips.’ 

A thematic link in this cycle of poems is past epidemics, plagues, and pestilences, a seeking of causes and cures. The poet describes her own experience of polio, an evocative portrayal of a 1950s childhood watched from a sick bed, recalling images of ‘tiny faces peering, as if from Advent calendars, from communal iron lungs.’ 

The course of the lockdown in these poems is charted in the heavens; in March, Venus is ‘bright as a searchlight / over all our lives.’  In times past three ‘super-moons’ in as many months would be a sure sign of planetary maleficence; 'influenza' comes from medieval Latin, meaning ‘influence of the stars.’ Ancient Native American names for the moon are invoked, the ‘worm moon,’ when the earth is warm enough for worms to become active and begin the growth season, the ‘pink moon’ when wild ground phlox of that colour is in bloom. The poems are woven together with children’s rhymes, old country sayings, and ancient oracles. Natural phenomena are interpreted as auguries – flights of swallows, skeins of geese, oak branches offer portents of the future.

McCarthy writes of a close relationship with horses, observing how they can survive the brutality of humans, and understand death better than us. A deep connectedness to the natural world gives authenticity to the poems in this chapbook;  flowers blooming and fading mark the passing of spring into summer, from the primroses and daffodils of March, to June wedding roses ‘with no bride to wander under their perfumed roof,’  through to the first of the Michaelmas daisies. 

There is deep sympathy for those denied their solace, ‘Terrible to get the sun only by balancing / an arm or a leg on a window- ledge.’ McCarthy remembers those in care homes, ’The forgotten ones who have forgotten themselves: / see them stare out behind barred windows.’ She  writes with tenderness about her mother, 'suddenly I am you, / our bones knit together, wrapped / in all our ages in waiting rooms,'  an aunt ‘dialling random numbers like life lines,’ a sister ‘newly widowed’ in France. These are deeply personal poems but they resonate, ignite a shiver of recognition from experience or from stories heard on the radio or television, read in newspapers or on the internet. She writes, too, of domestic abuse, for which lockdown provided perfect conditions. ‘Many tales untold not for the telling / within four walls, no escape ...’ Cases of sibling abuse have escalated; the story of Cinderella is recalled: 'She never reported them, only too aware / they would have the last word ...' 

The end of lockdown is tentative, ‘See they return, one and by one they cross Westminster Bridge, not quite yet / undone by death ...’ and then ‘ the criss-cross of pollutant jet-trail tells / of a sky-spoilt world gone back on itself.’ But there is also a sense of comfort; in an earlier  poem McCarthy writes of the loss of childhood faith in Easter liturgies, of  ‘swapping naves for woodland paths,’ wondering instead if ‘his heart [is] beating in every tree ... his pulse in throats of nightingales.’ Here she writes it is ‘Best to rely on the anima mundi which has / no language, but is Love feathered with Peace.’ Its ‘Grace’ she writes ‘will not let those who died alone seem, / amongst Michaelmas daisies, to leave no trace. / All the farewells that could not be said, / are on the backs of swallows, ...Mine amongst them, for my father, spiral into a chorus of Creation psalms.’ 

In the final poem we are encouraged to ‘Draw back the curtains, snuff out the candle / and let Rilke’s angels clean misted windows / with their wings.’ But there is a warning – the angels ‘call out / Fear and Fear not. The look on their faces is terrible.’ 

Covid had not yet finished with us, still hasn’t finished with us. We are back again in March, still hunkering down, drawing strength from writing and from story-telling, as those who wrote the Decameron ‘reeled off tales / to avoid epidemics of fear in a plague.’ In the first lockdown McCarthy expressed what seemed then such a vain hope that a vaccine ‘simple as the one then found’ for polio, ‘dissolved / on a sugar cube,’ would be discovered. Miraculously, her wish has been fulfilled.  

About the reviewer

Sue Mackrell’s ‘Lockdown’ poem will shortly appear on the Words for the Wild poetry website. Her poetry has been published online and in print anthologies and journals, most recently in Agenda Poetry, Ekphrastic Review, and Bloody Amazing (Dragon Yaffle 2020). She has an MA (Distinction) in Creative Writing from Loughborough University, where she was a part-time lecturer for several years. Now retired, she has taught and facilitated Creative Writing workshops in Higher and Further Education, schools, museums, art galleries, hospitals, and with ex offenders.

Review by Cate West of "The Plague" by Albert Camus

Published in 1947 and sold out all over town in spring 2020, it was worth re-reading The Plague simply to appreciate, not only how well written, but how psychologically accurate is Camus’s depict of lockdown mentality. As an allegory of the Occupation, The Plague represents an imaginative feat that ticks off marker after marker of the stages of an infected community in siege - disbelief, denial, paranoia, fear, accommodation, ennui. 

The daily routine of life, punctuated only by funerals and weather, continues, with its fatal need for human contact and its dreams of escape - intoxicating but ultimately abortive. The description of an illicit night swim in the ocean ‘for friendship’s sake’ took me wild swimming when restrictions permitted, and it was every bit as relieving an interlude as Camus described. ‘For a few minutes they swam on with equal stroke and equal strength, alone, far from the world, finally free of the town and the plague.’

About the reviewer
Cate West trained in Fine Art and graduated with an MA in Creative Writing from Manchester Metropolitan University in 2019. She was shortlisted for York Festival of Writing’s Friday Night Live Competition and long listed for Mslexia’s Novel Competition in 2019. Cate teaches Creative Writing and is passionate about outsider narratives. She lives and works in the Midlands. Publications: ‘The Blue Pool’ in The Invisible Collection, ed. Nicholas Royle (Nightjar Press, 2020); ‘Imbolc,’ Lunate, January 2021.

Review by Cathi Rae of "Arrival at Elsewhere," Curated by Carl Griffin

At the end of March 2020, when the world closed down, artists and writers I knew fell into two camps: there were those, faced with very real concerns about their livelihoods, struggling to home-school and manage their fears for themselves or family members who found themselves unable to make any creative response to our new world order, and then there were the others who found themselves writing or creating obsessively, trying to record the events and their personal responses. As someone who was firmly in the second camp, I was excited to read this pandemic collection, and it’s not quite what you might expect, described by the curator, Carl Griffin as “a book length poem, [where] poets from across the world speak in one voice in response to 2020’s life-changing pandemic.” Poets submitted via a world-wide open submission which requested personal and nuanced responses to the initial few months of lockdown.

Poets included range from the well-known and established to new and unpublished voices, who each submitted complete pieces. Fragments from each were then taken and woven together into one complete book-length poem which touches on many of the experiences lived by us all in 2020.

So, there are many  beautiful, poignant and nuanced descriptions of the silence, the growing attention to nature and gardens, loneliness, fear of the future and managing ourselves in world where many of our compass points are missing. The many different voices have  been skilfully edited to create an extraordinarily effective and moving long poem, an effect that stays with you long after you have read it. It is  one  of the most interesting poetic responses to 2020 that  I have read.

If that’s not enough to pique your interest, sales of this book go to support NHS Charities Together.

 

About the reviewer
Cathi Rae is currently a PhD student  at the University of Leicester. A selection of her own pandemic writing was published in UnDividing Lines, in Autumn 2020. You can read a review of her pamphlet, Your Cleaner Hates You and Other Poems, here.