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New British Poetry: 17 A Voice from the Vale

© Dr J D Ballam

Herbert Lomas is a poet of distinction. He has been a lecturer at the universities of Helsinki and London, his nine previous collections of poetry have earned him several of the UK's most estimable literary prizes, and his fourteen translations from Finnish literature contributed to his being accorded a prestigious knighthood in Finland itself. His career has been varied and his credentials are plainly impeccable. And it is the knowledge of this long trail of achievements that makes his newest collection, THE VALE OF TODMORDEN (Todmorden: Arc Publications, 2004) a surprise and a delight.

In this handsomely produced volume of over 100 pages, Lomas returns to his origins in the north of England. Todmorden is located in a wild and beautiful district in Yorkshire called the Pennines, and in this new book Lomas recalls the people and images that he met with there as a child in the early 1930s. The book is characterized throughout by its honesty, lack of sentimentalism (even in those places where there is a note of profound admiration for his neighbors or family), and downright earnest yet personable esteem for his memories, whatever their nature. It would be misleading to say that the subjects of these recollections are highly original, or outside the spectrum of types often met with in reminiscences in prose or verse. But what makes Lomas's work here so engaging is the sheer closeness he manages to the actualities he observes, so that even the most ordinary of encounters is infused with a sense of discovery, or of mysteries just beyond his grasp. Confessions, if that's what such works can ever be called, are only as worthwhile as the evidence of their own integrity, and that is quality on show everywhere here.

Certainly the feature one most hopes to find in anything funded by autobiography is a sense that the writer has a balanced regard for his or her own merits and shortcomings. Lomas, at least, never attempts to deceive himself or his readers. This can be seen in his image of himself and his reflections, literally and figuratively, as he tries to learn to the play the piano under the guidance of 'Albion Barker':

But as I sit here, seeing my fingers/ mirrored in his grand piano's black shine,/

so different from our own brown/ upright fortepiano that plays 'Nelly Dean'/

on beer-stained strings, I know my/ real fingers are in the wrong place.

Here it is the sense of being both inside and outside the moment which gives the poem its special resonance. Elsewhere, the strategy is simpler. In one of my favourites from the book, 'Buckley Wood', it is the clear-eyed immediacy that is entrancing: