Eve Jackson and Sue Spiers

 Eve Jackson, Turning Bird; Sue Spiers, De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da 

I don't see a great deal of new poetry these days. I don't go looking for it. Perhaps I should. On the evidence of these two recent books, there's still worthwhile poetry to be had if you look in the right place or are directed to it.

Eve Jackson's Turning Bird is visual and full of birds. With her other recent book, Allotment, it suggests she makes books on a theme whereas others of us put together whatever we've done and themes may or may not emerge by themselves. Turning Bird is the collection I prefer with its sense of abundance not only in birdlife and nature but the way her language captures it, too.

In Orkney,

One swan irons the distant loch

slowly, slowly, like a mother

lost in thought.

There's a lot of technique packed into three short lines there. 

 

The title poem dispenses with the definite and indefinite object as far as it can which subliminally suggests the weird sisters and their recipe for a spell in Macbeth.  I returned to the lines,

This hand-me-down know-how genetic Braille

begins with an inbred map of trust

of how and where to unearth materials,

cache of contents that gradually build

into a cradle of unstoppable must: 

 

There's a lot to like in the book. Eve's garden, or her travels, are either blessed with more birds than mine are or she is much more alert to what's around her.

 

In De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da, Sue Spiers is more concentrated on ideas and social issues and in her way more adventurous but doesn't always do it with the same linguistic insights. She is auditory more than visual, alert to sound and silence as the epigraph to her first section here highlights. Silence and sound are less opposites than intimately related parts of each other, not least in the music cited as reference points.

In Wider When Standing,

Quiet is where we go to see ourselves,

a meditation on nothing, a negation of noise,

even if silence is recorded, the recorder

whirs, the orchestra inhales, exhales.

 

Sue doesn't flinch from much. For me, sometimes poems that are making social or political points do so at the expense of the 'poetry', though. It is not easy to have it both ways.

I don't always find it necessary to spread words across the page, abandoning traditional lineage and spacing but to finish, in A Life,

It's    the    space    you    make

 

and the space       

                                   you leave.

 

That is all of it, in all its spaced-out zen compactness and it works.

 

In this summer interim without local musicians to provide a staple diet, the local painters in their annual exhibition in the cathedral and these two poets from the area have contributed to filling what could have been a void with good work. It's been great to find how much else is going on. I'm not ungrateful.