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Were my
neighbour still alive, I'd give her a copy of John Barnie's book. With no
interest whatsoever in the who's who and what's happening in the poetry
world, she liked the poems she liked so well that she wrote them out into
notebooks - painfully, and not very legibly, towards the end of her life.
They were on the kitchen table, and often revisited.
I wonder now whether any of my own poems made it into her personal
anthologies? Unlikely, I think, though she did once quote back to me some
(unpublished) lines which she said 'got' something so right, she could see it
exactly. She'd have rejoiced in John Barnie's encounters with flowers, many
of which, lightly and succinctly, get something just right: you can see both
the blue of distances and their brief lives in '...bluebells travel / from blue
to obscurity'.
All the poems in A Year of Flowers are short, and short-lined. They refer to the short lives
flowers - not leaves, the plants as a whole, or their histories - so they're
essentially visual, brief moments of recognition. How about this for sea
holly:
Spiked
samurai of the sand
holding a
pale blue brush
a lady
powdered her face with
or (I'm quoting the whole poem here) this characterisation of daisies:
Dressed in
whites with
innocent
eyes, tennis-
player girls
from the '50s
squealing
'game!' and laughing
as they crowd
across lawns
on a summer
afternoon
Her (adult) grandchildren gave my neighbour notebooks with 'starter' poems in
them. She'd been the sort of grandmother who led adventures down to the river
and into secret corners of the valley, and made sure all the plants and
animals of this landscape were known. They'd all recognise straight away that
this procession of flowers through the year, starting with snowdrops, comes
from a landscape which shares some soils and plants with ours, but not
others: it's a flora specific to its own place - coastal and inland Dyfed.
We'd all recognise the common flowers, though maybe not those from more
specific places, like the yellow horned-poppy of a shingle beach. But John
Barnie has paired his own photograph of a flower on the verso facing its poem
- with plenty of elegant white space around both. (It's a beautifully
designed book.) These little images (about 4cm x 5cm) are the equivalent of
plant 'mugshots'; like the poems, they're of the flower, not the plant as a
whole. They're clearly not intended to be used for identification (indeed my
sharp-eyed neighbour might have complained you'd only know what sort of buttercup it was if you could see
it's leaves), because there's no common scale to small and large flowers.
Rather, the photographs point up a quality that drew the poet's eye. The tiny
pale toadflax positively billows across its portrait, announcing
...I expect you
couldn't
see us before
in our
silk pyjamas
delicately
striped,
peeling off a yawn,
taking things
easy,
while humans
hurtle
past in the
cars
I could nitpick about lineation which doesn't help the flow of my reading, or
about some of the photographs looking as if a bit flattened by flash, or
about shiny paper (which is one of my pet hates even if it does make for
sharp images) - but that's not what this book is about. It's a book of small
delights, and one you can't fail to delight in. My favourite's the hawthorn
blossom. I think my neighbour might have copied out the bird's-foot trefoil
poem.
© Jane Routh
2011
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