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New British Poetry: 18 Dress of Nettles

© Dr J D Ballam

One of the most rewarding things about discovering an anthology of new work - especially by a publisher one has grown to respect - is to find out just how much variety can be achieved within a small compass without any sacrifice of quality, or an over-reliance upon only a handful of authors. Over the past year and a half I've reviewed several recent books by Ragged Raven Press, and still, if asked, I would find it difficult to identify exactly what criteria the editors rely upon for their decisions over what to publish, beyond the obvious ones of originality, skill and the candid forthrightness of the poets showcased in their books. There is, I suppose, a preference for works that are colloquial in tone - that is, ones never overtly self-conscious about formal disruptions, no wildly designed formats, printed in circles or in scarcely-readable fonts with illegible illustrations - and yet all of the books I've discussed in these columns differ from one another in many ways. All have offered surprises, all have suggested insights.

What I like about Ragged Raven's newest offering, the 2004 anthology of brand new poems entitled Dress of Nettles , is that this sense of variety remains so clearly in evidence. If there is a single theme dominating the book, and it is certainly not ever-present, then it is one of reminiscence. One of the most touching examples of this - touching because it IS so aware of its mode, and the ironies that problematize recollection - is a piece by Pat Watson called, 'From the Archives (for H.A.D. 1897-1975)'. The poem begins by acknowledging the artificialities of just such an experience of recalling the past and attempting to 'fix' it in time:

You've turned it on? What do you want to know?/ The factory? I went there straight from school,/ and left this time last year. They let us wear/ print overalls to save our clothes from glue.

The poem carries on in this narrative fashion, mixing the observable with the sense of time lost and time regained, feelings never wholly readjusted to the changing circumstances, until it concludes laconically,

... Have you got all you need?/ It's been a pleasure talking of old times.

Somehow both the question and the statement here sum up the problem to which many of the thirty-eight poets represented in this collection address themselves. That is, there is, for the speaker, almost always a sense of pleasure in the telling of a tale not known to her or his auditors, however painful the recollection of the circumstances contained in that tale may be. And, at the same time, the lingering sense, that however much is told, those auditors will never have all they need to understand even the basics of the tale they've heard. It is a situation frequently repeated in Dress of Nettles, yet its unending diversity, its self-generating pace, and the fact that the authors never engage in intemperate self-indulgence, keep it from ever becoming cloying or repetitive.