I have been looking forward to this book, Kathryn Simmonds' second book of poems, ever since reading her first. It seemed to me that her poems were pitched at exactly the right level between seriousness and lightness, formality and informality and well up towards the accessible end of the accessible/inaccesible scale.
These poems are relaxed more than anything else, which is not to say careless or slapdash. Their attitudes and structures could have been the result of long and painstaking work. But the villanelle, The Great Divide, doesn't insist on the recurrence of two whole lines throughout but varies them and To her Unconscious suitably brings back phrases or half-lines that make its form a cousin of the sestina. Perhaps it was going to be one once but I doubt it since Simmods' forms are not usually as fixed or rigorous as that although they are there. And that is a good thing.
What is best about her work is the facility for phrase-making that keeps them coming vividly and captivatingly throughout.
the giant weed plant
waves to me like fallen royalty.
And there is the brilliant, shuffled picture book of dream.
Although, of course, one can admire poems for technical excellence or admirable achievements like these without necessarily sympathizing with what they say, I'm sure it is unavoidable that one's favourites are those that express something one finds common ground with or does something one approves of. 'Favourite' is usually preferable to 'best' and they are by no means always the same thing.
In Apocryphal, there is a world-weary acceptance of the ordinary in the face of events that are not only apocryphal but majorly apocalyptic, but
The end of time, ah yes, it slips the mind,
there's only so much wisdom can be flung at it. Only so many quips.
Here it comes
in is ten-league boots
trampling all over our honorary degrees.
I'm not really a big fan of this way of spreading lines across a page like that any more but it doesn't matter, there is a lot in the off-hand attitude to the ultimate moment and not the least of it is contained in the 'honorary degrees' which are so much vainglorious pomp.
There are more immediate concerns and if Kathryn Simmonds is somehow lapsed in her religious observance - and Sunday Morning reports that she gets more done now she's stopped praying - then it is to the benefit of a more domestic way of life in which larger questions will have to look after themselves,
Oh God, we should amend our lives,
all of us who sleep in rented beds and deafen
at the mention of a pension plan;
all of us who've lived our best days
in the imagination's potting shed.
If any one thing establishes a divide between poems by men and those by women in the old question, it must be that nearly all poems about childbirth and babies are written by women and it isn't a subject I'm entirely taken up by but whereas others have failed to convince me, Julia Copus did a couple of years ago and Kathryn is good on the subject here, too, and so it can be a matter of poetry over subject matter. But Kathryn's section of poems here on the 'life coach' make me wonder if those are the poems that come over better at a live reading.
But this has been a book worth waiting for, for Simmonds' grounded common sense, acknowledgement of a sort of empirical limit of where to stop, as in the jolly, Audenesque song, Experience,
Give up what is lost if you can't fish it back
Just keep walking. And that's all I know, my dear.