Katherine Towers, The Remedies (Picador)Not all reviews of new poetry books immediately persuade me to order the volume under discussion- I wish more did- but The Observer's Poetry Book of the Month was this, Katherine Towers' second collection, and immediately did.
While I was at it, I thought I'd find myself a copy of her first book, The Floating Man, from six years ago, and, quite usefully, that arrived first, giving me a few days to catch up with the story so far. I was not surprised too see the Picador mainstays, Don Paterson (editor) and Sean O'Brien acknowledged in the credits there, not only because I'd expect to admire work that owed any debt to their 'influence' but also because, in places, I thought, or liked to think, I noticed a correspondance of mannerism, attitude or style with those of the old maestros.
The first book is dominated by musical themes with Pianola and Double Concerto (specifically the Bach) particularly memorable. I suspected a recurrent facility in the last lines of poems that looked as if it had become a habit that was hard to break. Not a bad thing but once one has done something sucessfully a few times it must be difficult to find a better way out of a poem. Just stop sometimes might be an answer.
The Remedies begins with The Roses, a compact and lyrical idea beautifully realized, that promised plenty more. But so far, at least, the second book seems less substantial than the first. The remedies are flowers in a section of poems on the characters of plants as cures, often somehow in seemingly contradictory ways as if contrariness or opposites are the best remedies for any malady.
One could say that these poems are tangible expressions of the intangible, that the words are given space to breathe on the page or that their ironies are gentle but the book never quite delivers on the promises or expectations one could have brought with one from the first.
Katherine is not the first and presumably won't be the last to take the surrealism of Gerard de Nerval taking his lobster for walks as a theme but she achieves much when transcending the ordinary into a mild surrealism of her own.
Iceberg Season is a fine poem in which,
They drift along the aisles
of the sound with creaks and growls
seeking a warmth that will finish them.
The Chaffinch is one poem that brings forward the best features of the first collection; The Window and Bluebells,
They can do nothing except look
down at the earth, which is not a mirror,
are good poems, too, but are mainly evidence that there is more to be expected from Katherine Towers' poetry, that it is to be hoped that it's not six years until the third book, which is where one hopes she will convince us that she belongs alongside the better poets at work in Britain at the moment, which is where she is so often hinting that she might.
