Sleeping Under The Juniper Tree

Pauline Stainer

Bloodaxe (£9.95)

Angel hill

Michael Longley

Jonathan Cape (£10)

Review by Hayden Murphy

THE ethereal is given voice from the very first lines in Pauline Stainer’s ninth collection: “it was night. /The angels glowed like phosphors/but gave out no heat.//until that flower in the wilderness/prophecy/sprang from his throat.”

The ‘he’ is Elijah. The language comes from the Bible. As often do the themes. They are rarely so overt. Stainer conceives the spiritual and communicates with secular simplicity. She conjures up phrases and visions. The poems are short. In line and length “stealing the breath”. In Avoriaz a “cube of mist/was held momentarily/between ski-slopes”. In the same poem the very air “disorientates...over pastures withholding their sweetness”.

‘Withholding’ is one of this writer's attitudes. As an early poem concludes there is “the lure of the unsaid/still withholding its miracle”. The poem is entitled Alchemist in search of a voice. In this her second individual volume since the magisterial Selected: The Lady & the Hare (2003) Stainer has found fresh impetus and a singular tone. Her voice revealing “unrelated things singing to themselves”.

In The Library of Water are “hands beating the meniscus lightly,/ memory without mark/ written on water”. Scientific terms alert the reader to the breath of the writer’s interests. There is “a nomadic queen” who “shook out her folded crown/ of shivering gold//neutrinos”. John Donne arriving in heaven has an unexpected twist: “if the body is a sacred garment/you would never guess it//until you notice how/he leans, leans/into a known landscape/made inexplicably/strange”.

She is always prepared to “guess”. To be “strange”. Frankenstein in Orkney finds himself in a place where “lichens are blue-green/like copper silicates,/and everything is horizontal” and he “can cobble together/ a second creature”, a creature caught in a dream as “an apothecary’s rose”. And then in that dream declare “I felt such awe and eeriness/I thought of Christ/on Galilee, / summoning, with salt-glazed eye,/ the energy with which/ to still the tempest”.

And then in the final poem she returns to prophecy and the gift of tongues: “a merlin /smallest of falcons/flew past so low and close/its subtle body/ touched me a moment/inside the mouth.”

Michael Longley’s 11th collection geographically straddles the west of Ireland and the Highlands of Scotland. Thematically it exults family values. The most beautiful and tender of poems hymn his marriage to Edna Longley. His “first reader”, the formidable literary critic: “For fifty years, man and wife, voices low,/ Counting oystercatchers and sanderlings.”. He remembers his last meeting with Seamus Heaney: “I blew a kiss across the stage to you/ When we read in Lisdoonvarna/Two weeks before you died. Arrayed in straw/The Armagh Rhymers turned up at the end”. The poems in Scotland are in Lochalsh on the west coast overlooking Skye. A place where “Someone must be looking after the headstones”. This is where his daughter Sarah, an accomplished artist, lives with their grandchildren. Specifically they live in Angel Hill where she uses “big sheets and charcoal for drawing/Snowdrop cumulus and lichen lettering”. A place where “Someone must be looking after the railing/And closing the rusty gate behind her”.

The dead and the living are central to the thoughts of the Irishman now in his late seventies. In Ireland his poems colonise the light that enchants Carrigskeewaun in County Mayo. In a distinct departure from previous collections it is the creatures of the air that inhabit the poems. Corncrakes “skulking among nettles... their ratchet presence going quiet/As I approach, then disappearing.” Starlings, “Heavenly riffraff flocking/Before they flap down to roost.” The “long-beaked whimbrel /Night flying overhead,/Whistling down the chimney/At nobody’s address”. Finally the Dipper, “Winter’s only songbird,/ Wild and melodious” and the Greylag geese “In regular formation/ Along the shoreline, sky shapes,/An image of poetry.”

All these creatures on his pages come to earth. An earth remembered once again as the place of graves, “nameless slabs” telling of the dead from wars in the distant past and recent conflicts: “comforting the ground-level shades”. In a rare direct reference to the Troubles in his native Ulster he begs, “Think of the children/behind the coffins./Look sorrow in the face. Call those thirty years/ The Years of Disgrace”.

The pleasure of reviewing becomes a privilege when presented with poets and poetry of this quality. To adopt and adapt a phrase from The Beatles, Steiner and Longley in their communion of the spirit and the soul gift us with alchemical compounds, “saviours of the human race”.