Books

Review by Francis Sheppard

‘Round the Wrekin’ we say, of those who use too many words for explanations that should be simple. The phrase, not unknown in other parts of England, is widely used in the Black Country, its obvious origin, where folk like you to get to the point. If Sedgley Beacon were a cliff-top, and an outlook, the hills of Shropshire would be an archipelago, the Wrekin its most prominent island.

Shropshire is not submerged, though water, of Severn, Teme and the stretches of Ellesmere infuses itself into this collection. Above the water, the land, surviving places that carry their past secretly, to be uncovered by this group of poets.

This is landscape poetry, totally so, rooted in the region’s geology, as Jeff Phelps writes of Wenlock Edge:

Ice once clunked and ground its way here,
sliced through hills, thawed to a broth.
Now every stone turned over at the field edge
carries the memory of warm seas.

In lines of consistent beauty, for all the variety of the pieces, we are taken back to Shropshire as a land apart; at Little Heath Green:

… steeped in rain, new hawthorn boughs hang heavy.
Each wet leaf droops and drips
And each wet flower tips …

… and Andrew Harrison celebrates the natural life that has emerged from this soil; as does Marilyn Gunn, in lines of great complexity, and hope, in Coalport Morning.

… the bright benediction of slant rays
firing up the dew, kindling grass
on this next in the chain of first days;

Thereafter it is humanity, and the strength of figures from the past, that interests these poets. Roger Garfitt calls up the timeless, ancient figure of the ploughman, explaining how he was …

… the first scribe, perfecting the oldest script.
All alphabets go back to tallies, harvest yields
scratched on clay.

Yet not all Shropshire’s progeny have been skilled and inventive. Kuli Kohli, a Wolverhampton poet, conjures up the devilry of Baron Robert Clive, whose stately home Powys Castle sits on the western border of the county. Speaking in the voice of the hereto-celebrated colonial hero, ‘I grabbed riches, took them back to Shropshire to live like a king,’ while Simon Fletcher visits and remarks, in Loot,

… I’m simply on the trail of Clive.
Known in India and the subcontinent
As a villain, a thief.
(stole most of Bengal, let’s face it)
In England as a hero, role
Model for dashing, daring types …

This collection was assembled in 2013 and there are powerful reminders that we also live in times of violence and personal ruin. Rosamund Brown’s journey between Wem and Shrewsbury, recalling Hazlitt’s two hundred years before, has:

no Coleridge for company
and road is replaced by a crusty seat,
heater, flip-down table and the raw stench
of weed.

So too, in Don Nixon’s Ex-soldier on the street in Telford as a homeless man, veteran of Afghanistan, in his mind still lives among

… hidden trip wired mines and burning tanks
[that] flame into fear that still flares deep inside.

These poems remind us that ours is not a comfortable world. Nor are the words of Salopian Wilfred Owen recalling an equally unstable and war-prone world at the end of Roman rule in Uriconium. We are in Housman territory now, a necessary inclusion. I am heartened by the inclusion of Mary Webb from whom, as the twentieth century began, heard in birdsong

… cries of life that is short and death that is long
Telling his daily love to one heart only.

Every one of these poems is memorable; each is perfect. I know that I will go back to this book, time and again. Buy it as a gift for anyone who loves Shropshire, or looks for a deeper knowledge of it. Your own copy, you will treasure.