Denise Bennett - Christmas Poems

 Denise Bennett, Christmas Poems (Bee Bole Press)

It was actually a monthly bank statement I was expecting in the post this morning and I was looking forward to further confirmation that I am successfully living within my slender means. Quite gorgeously, really, what arrived instead was this unexpected early festive bonus of a selection of the poems Denise has been putting in with her Christmas cards over the last twenty years or more.

As far as Christmas goes, I don't usually do much more than suits me, not much of which is Christian, and in the past the cards I've sent have been at times in support of the T. Rex Action Group that used to maintain the shrine to Marc Bolan on Barnes Common or featured a rather better known poet than me, Geoffrey Chaucer, whan that ye Christmasse card issued bye ye olde gouvernemente departement that both of us, and Robbie Burns, did worke for, featured him. This year, as it happens, I'm acknowledging a significant amount of Jewish DNA rather than religious observance. All of which is only by way of saying what a fine spread of diverse ways there are of marking the shortest day, the depth of winter and how, despite the many challenges there have been to liberal values, tolerance and common sense in recent years, we can all take a moment or two to overcome our trivial differences.

I don't accept much of the traditional Christmas story but I'm as happy for those who enjoy it as I am for my kindly Bangladeshi next door neighbours to have their Ramadan. But I am very interested in poetry, specifically when it excels itself and does something extraordinary with words.

The poems Denise presents here offer a sense of the fragility of life and its 'flimsy' bric-a-brac, both in the 'glitter-cards/from Woolworths' and the 'air-mails' from across the Atlantic in Paper Chains, which is a poem more subtly held together by its loose associations than might first be apparent. 'Angel's wings' occur 'touched by' in Legend of the Christmas Rose and 'in the brush of' in The Light and, if personally I find against angels as being inadmissable evidence, I also find that poetry has no rules or such laws and they succeed, or fail, on their own terms.

A successful villanelle isn't easy to achieve - and I'd know because I've tried and often failed - but Nativity works.

There is a recurrent idea of love and warmth in a cold time which is all very much a part of the deep humanity expressed in Denise's poems. But, beyond any of that, the 'shawl of snow' in That Night was good but what I want most of all from poetry is something extra-ordinary. I'm sure we all do.

And 'then it happened', in Robin's Song, as wonderfully as it did for Diana Ross and the Supremes, with,

a bright, soprano star, sings in the sky; 

 

and that 'soprano', when no mass of burning gas in outer space could ever be sensibly categorized as such, is where 'poetry' happens, taking language beyond itself and doing so much more than it was ordinarily designed to do. 

On a day that has unexpectedly delivered other reasons for excitement, that one word that achieves so much has resonated and 'poetry', however often it might not be quite as special as it claims to be, absolutely proves itself.