Urban/Rural Remains of a Future City, Zoe Skoulding, (64pp, £7.99, Seren) Messenger. New and Selected Poems 1976-2006, Ellen Bryant Voigt (238pp, £8.99, Norton)
	An epigraph from Blixa Bargeld foreshadows the poems in Zoe Skoulding's book: 'the new temples are already cracked / future ruins'. And on the face of it, 'future ruins' are what she gives us, not only naming 'Building Site', but also enacting on the page the unfinished and chaotic business of such places: Between the buildings trees reach down to languages of soil and worms, leaves gloss argots of glass and steel I've great admiration for writers who, as Zoe Skoulding does here, address a single theme throughout a book. I enjoy the way in which various 'zones' of a city are suggested to her as titles by a particular source - Ivan Chtcheglov's manifesto translated by Christopher Gray as Formula for a New City. 'The Sinister Quarter', 'The Death Quarter', 'The Useful Quarter': it must have been great fun inventing these poems. In this last Needing Packets of nails adhesive grout it's here we come to shop fronts the same now for thirty years blistered letters spelling out the family name sheets of wood hammered on the counter where the formica wore off from the weight of advice Fun too, to invent shapes for such poems: 'Tower' is a tall, thin poem with small balconies; 'The Old Walls' is a solid poem, coursed like brickwork. Five 'Columns' are a solid block of text running down (or I should say up?) the centre of the page. And entertaining also, to generate poems by navigating a place with the 'wrong' map to hand, as in 'Forest with A to Z of Cardiff': I bring gridlock with me and the forest falls in line between nowhere and nowhere But the poems address more than an urban landscape; they also reference their own making, as in this slice out of the third of the 'Columns' headlines grow a point size fiction holds us in alignment our views are justified despite uneven spacing leaves fall If cities are constructed from bricks, poems are constructed from words - and this parallel is elegantly made in 'Reconstruction', a poem which appears to be talking about re-building when it opens The days you forget how the bricks were piled up all over again, their edges just where they were before as if nothing had happened but by the third stanza has shifted to words, using form in a house-that-Jack-built way to reconstruct the poem - and add extensions stanza by stanza: The words fell down and nobody knew what happened to the places that bricks were not the edges of. Making them again meant bricking up the way things were before, so that nothing could ever be different.
	I admire these poems more and more as I appreciate their manoeuvres and ambiguities. This is in a completely different way from how I respond to Ellen Bryant Voigt's writing in Messenger. The opening poem 'The Hen' (from 1976), describing a chicken being killed, itself points to that difference. Of the decapitated and pulsing body, she writes ...I knew it was this that held life, gave life and not the head with its hard contemplative eye. - so I'll say it was with a contemplative eye that I was reading Remains of a Future City, whereas Messenger gets me in the pulsing body. Of course I'd expect to be drawn to poems with a rural setting, poems about fields and farmers and animals, and there are plenty of these for me to enjoy: 'Why isn't he out in the fields, our common passion?' she asks of her sleeping father in 'The Visit'. It's not the subject matter that holds me (and anyway the range is far greater: piano playing and teaching are recurrent themes; snakes, too) but the writing. 'Grace' is one of the words on the back cover that seems to me to have it right. But now I have to say what it is I think constitutes that 'grace'. It's twofold. First, there's both elegance and flow in the language. You can pick up the book at random and read it aloud and not falter. Let me test this, with a random dip (and the book is well-made for dipping, opening easily, with lots of white space) - 'Talking the Fire Out, 5': Who can distinguish knowledge and belief? Against the dangers in your own house, you take up every weapon - Listen: my father killed a copperhead with a switch. Out fishing, coming on it by the pond, knowing the exact angle and trusting it, he flicked the weed against its back as he had often cast his lean line over secretive waters. It's interesting that I only needed to glance once at the text to be able to type it out - it sounds natural. Secondly, the writing's pared down. I don't mean minimal - rather, stripped back to what is essential, so that is what fills the space of a poem. It's the fierce honesty of the writing that strikes me in 'Lesson' - a more recent poem from Shadow of Heaven about her mother, seen over a long period of time. It opens Whenever my mother, who taught small children forty years, asked a question, she already knew the answer. 'Would you like to' meant you would.... and moves forward in time to a crisis, when the daughter acknowledges her own tactic for dealing with her mother and says I... made my face a freshly whitewashed wall: let her write, again, whatever she wanted there. The voice is objective and unsparingly open - poems of rural life don't in any way idealise it. 'The Farmer' shows his strengths are also his limitation: 'everything he knows is practical', which is stifling for his wife. 'The Trust' is a particularly haunting poem: after neighbours' lambs have been killed, in his own dog's mouth a farmer finds wound around the base of the back teeth - squat molars the paws can't reach to clean - small coils of wool, fine and stiff, like threads from his own jacket. The farmer has to shoot his own dog. The poem's as unsentimental as it is exact, rich in details where it needs to be (the 'evidence' round the teeth) but driving unflinchingly forward to the dog, 'his best companion in the field for seven years', being shot. The last 6 lines of the poem however are given over to understanding what happens in dogs such as this: the event's distressing, but there's much more to it than that. Although she opens the 1987 collection The Lotus Flowers with a poem about teaching, 'The Last Class', like this Put this in you notebooks: All verse is occasional verse. and although many poems are occasioned by significant events and moments and family memories, Ellen Bryant Voigt has also undertaken longer sequences of poems, including the 1995 book-length Kyrie. Several voices speak in these poems (some through letters, prayers or incantations) to build up a sense of the 1918 pandemic in which 'You wiped a fever-brow, you burned the cloth. / You scrubbed a sickroom floor, you burned the mop.' A sequence, 'Variations: at the piano' from the previous book also takes a long perspective. Its final couplet is striking (I keep coming across striking phrases that make me stop and savour them): Digging a hole to where the past is buried, one covers the living grass on either side. What's so remarkable is that this writing doesn't in any way cover over the 'living grass'. So it's unsurprising (turning again to the cover) to find Ellen Bryant Voigt has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. © Jane Routh 2009