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New British Poetry: 14 Inside the Arc

© Dr J D Ballam

I am very pleased this month to be able to introduce readers internationally to a publisher new to this column. Arc Publications, located in the north of England, was established in 1969, and its team of editors has consistently brought out work of outstanding quality and originality. Arc's books are uniformly well-presented, and especially well-received critically. They present a mixture of established and emerging talent, and Arc is noted as well for its highly regarded series of works in translation, called Visible Poets , which reproduces poems in their original language alongside facing-page translations- two of which I'll be looking at next month. But before that, I want to look at two new collections that each illustrate ways that poise, finesse and balance can be achieved in contemporary verse, without sacrificing either sincerity or, even more difficult perhaps, a voice that is both passionate and individual.

Jackie Wills's third collection, FEVER TREE (Todmorden: Arc Publications, 2003) is a beguiling read, inasmuch as she speaks very persuasively of encounters-especially familial ones-that we have all known. If the Renaissance had Everyman as its archetype of human experience, then the twenty-first century should have Everyparent-someone conscious of a need to be a better parent (better than one's own and oneself), who, in the face of those triumphs and failures that no one else witnesses, has one eye on the horizon where the shadow of Mortality falls. It's a mood of such candor that gives many of these poems their poignancy, as they move quietly and colloquially over situations and memories, their warmth achieved as much by an implied familiarity as by their expression. In 'Gold Reef City' she describes how,

The kids don't want to see/ the Museum of Apartheid/

with its room full of nooses,/ they want Thunder Mountain,/ the descent into a mine.

Then, in the company of their two grandmothers, one African, on English, she realizes the mine's place as a metaphor of their collective experience, as they stand,

above a lattice-work of shafts -/ the pits, the tunnels/ beneath both families/

meeting unexpectedly/ at the molten core.

It is a beautifully made piece, and like many here, its gentleness belies its passion. Yet when that passion emerges in a less manageable form, as in the title poem 'Fever Tree', it mixes with the surreal nature of imagination to make for a private and, in my view, very moving private logic:

In a forest of fever trees there'd be no night./ At full moon it wood glow like a city,/

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