The Leaping Year by Jeffrey Turner

New poems are like buses, for want of a better simile. I don't see any for months and then four recent booklets turn up at once.

The point of the Chestnut Press is not only the poetry. He carefully invites only poets that he wants to to provide poems for his editions on fine, hand-made paper in choice typefaces. I'm not even sure it's possible to buy them, such is the art for art's sake ethos of the project. Would that a few others were quite so devoted to their craft.

The Leaping Year consists of one 18-line poem and, of course, it's not going to be any old filler. It has to be worthy of the paper it's on so it's not one of those marginal poems that some collections include, lucky to make the cut in order to bulk it out and make the others look better.

It's not possible to read it quickly. Its meditative pulse won't let you. Its long lines vary in length, giving the impression of a formal discipline that is only actually in its adagio cadences. That is both more natural and more convincing than having to work at achieving a set metre, making the poet a slave to their chosen strictures. Not that the naturalness has necessarily come easily. I strongly suspect that Jeff Turner works hard at appearing so relaxed in print.

The music is subtle, like the rhyme on the first line ending's 'hare' and the 'unprepared' that comes soon after in line 2. The line of thought works its way from scepticism, through gentle disapprobation for 'those who should know better' - which is poets- and 'the folly of expectation' to the certainty of seasonal renewal, not unlike the R.S. Thomas masterpiece, Song at the Year's Turning. To its credit, the poem also in some ways brought to mind Stars Moving Westwards in a Winter Garden by Julia Copus which rarely goes unmentioned here when there's reason to mention it.

It might seem profligate to go to such lengths to put one poem in print and anything sub-standard would immediately look absurd but our attention is duly focussed. We don't even have to decide which poem we like best. I am re-assured that there is still fine poetry being written. I might not know where to look for it but by now I'm lucky enough to know people who show it, or even give it, to me.