Matthew Paul reviews A Land Between Borders by Mike Barlow (Templar Poetry, 2023)
In Barlow World (let’s call it Barlovia), a reader can expect to encounter poachers, mole-catchers, diesel-thieves and other chancers, usually loners, quietly and nearly invisibly subsisting on the black economy. One might be tempted to call Mike Barlow the Laureate of the North Lancashire Edgelands – ‘edgelands’ being those places between town and managed countryside identified and labelled by geographer Marion Shoard in 2002 and celebrated by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts in their 2012 book of that name – were it not for the fact that Barlow’s characters, and their localities, are almost always nameless, as if they exist somewhere beyond the reach of the Ordnance Survey or Google Earth, perhaps in the realm of Absurdist plays.
His previous collection, Hotel Anonymous, was published by Pindrop Press in 2021. Some would say that a space of only two years between full collections is too short and must surely produce a dilution of overall quality; but not in this case; the pandemic presumably gave more time for Barlow to write. ( A Land Between Borders also includes all bar two of the poems from his 2017 pamphlet, A Promise Boat.) One poem – ‘Like Members of a Vanished Tribe’ – set during lockdown recalls the “soundbites infectious with statistics”. Covid times might also account for the even sparser, more liminal population within this set of poems. Barlovia is an unremittingly dark and unsettling region, if not positively medieval or post-apocalyptic. Barlow paints it without sentiment, as if he, or his personae, thrive on it:
here
on a small patch of land I’m hefted
and content in my lifelong discontent – borders,
boundaries, rules, fitting me like a carapace.
(‘The Hills’)
Even in town, human contact is merely to be guessed at:
I had a neighbour I never saw. No one did.
He was a hole in an untwitched curtain,
invisible life of gossip.
(‘Rumour in its Squat’)
If home is dubiously congenial, abroad, wherever that might be, is no better:
The town itself was soporific,
the inhabitants like sleep-walkers, eyes open
but fixed on a make-believe horizon.
(‘Getting Away’)
Maybe the poem, with its deadpan ending of “None of the pictures have come out”, is meant to be ironic. Gauging who the narrator is, or is meant to be, in Barlow’s poems isn’t straightforward and a simple equation of any of the lugubrious personae with the poet himself needs to be resisted.
Barlow’s characters, and their localities, are almost always nameless, as if they exist somewhere beyond the reach of the Ordnance Survey or Google Earth, perhaps in the realm of Absurdist plays
Isolation is no more apparent than at the coastline, where the damage humanity is wreaking is also painfully clear in ‘Along the Coast Road’:
Sea’s smack of blood on the wind,
tideline a berm of kelp tangled around plastic,
gloop of spilled oil, the carcass of a gull
its harbinger cry still haunting the air.
The omission of an article before “Sea’s” bestows an immediacy which the poem, with its rich sounds, sustains as the narrator picks through flotsam and jetsam. That phrase “a berm of kelp”, connoting fortification, reinforces the sense of nature’s battle to survive. This oil spill is one of three in the book.
When the marine seascape is used metaphorically, perhaps for Britain as a whole, that absence of warmth, despite the best intentions, is keenly felt:
Wade ashore, breathe the island’s brokered air,
subverted history, quiet resolutions, easements.
And I’ll respond as if you were my own, you
with your grudges, your alien ways, me
resentful, old heart choked with judgement.
(‘The Isle of Discussion’)
The title of another poem – ‘An Island Break for the professor of Orthodontics’ – promises something whimsical, yet the content is still bleak:
A fish and oatmeal diet we might think healthy.
He’d have it otherwise: plaque
brought gum disease; in those days
no one over thirty died with their teeth in;
though when he went, he went with a full set,
amalgam and gold cremated with the rest
Only in the most nautical poems does Barlow belatedly shift the register – if not necessarily the mood – into dramatic modes, no more so than in the neatly-titled ‘Finn the Finn’:
our captain like a marionette
strung from swinging yards
paced and paced the quarterdeck
the slow neurotic march of him
our windless collective sigh
when up spake Finn the Finn
our fo’c’sle fixer
usually a card trick man
with now a claim to conjurie
Here, Barlow lets the wholly lower-case and almost punctuation-free language do his work for him in a more overtly musical manner than usual. ‘Sea Voices’ works similar wonders: “No matter how the wind blusters and breaks on your ears / or the chop slaps the sides or the surf rattle sits shells”. While you can’t sail a boat to Bolivia, you can clearly sail to Barlovia.
Barlovia is an unremittingly dark and unsettling region, if not positively medieval or post-apocalyptic
Another of Barlow’s trademarks is the mystery poem, which provides the reader with a fair amount of work to do; the type of poems at which Matthew Sweeney excelled. Although Barlow’s ‘The Deal’ and ‘The Hum’ (“wherever you turn it’s there”), for example, are intriguing, they don’t, alas, reach the heights of Sweeney’s black comedy.
The book’s final section is the most miscellaneous, including some ekphrastic poems and curiosities such as ‘Listen’, a stand-out monologue of a phone-hacker, its content as fine as the subject-matter is unlikely: “I’m an old hack listening in / to the heart, its complicated rhythms, / the sluicing of seconds, the dogged / morse of muscle”. ‘Witnesses’, in which the anonymous eponymous people are “here, there, everywhere”, concludes on Barlow’s familiar downbeat song of the otherwise unnoticed:
We know the score
and keep it, bear witness the future will forget
as it dissembles great affairs. Grist and fodder,
we’re a dumbed-down chorus no one listens for.
A few character studies, ‘Doorkeeper’, ‘The Old Abbot’ (“At the end of a long laboured silence, / he’ll step though the noise of the present // where everything lasts forever, / to disappear before his own eyes”) and ‘The Old Campaigner’, are pleasingly-turned, like poetic Toby jugs.
Barlow’s style and techniques aren’t showy, and his mostly stanzaic forms are generally traditional. Happily, he does produce the occasional flourish within them; for example, in one of his quirkier poems, ‘They Came down from the North’, one quatrain cleverly includes three incidences of ‘where’:
They came down through the borders,
the porous and mutable borders
where where you come from
is never where you find yourself.
It takes a certain amount of confidence not only to defy the grammar-checker in Word in that third line, but then to compound it by adding a third.
These poems are unfailingly well made, as one would expect from an artist–poet who counts the National among his competition wins, and many are individually excellent. But for me, as a collective entity, they somehow lack a spark. That’s partly attributable to the poet’s refusal to name people and places, which makes them insufficiently tangible and at the same time renders the poems they inhabit frustratingly generic. Moreover, too many poems are tonally similar. Sharper editing might have helped to address these issues, not least in the sequencing. Nonetheless, however dark the experience may be, we poetry readers need to visit the lands and waters of Barlovia every now and then.
Matthew Paul lives in Rotherham and worked as a local government education officer for many years. His first collection, The Evening Entertainment, was published by Eyewear in 2017. He is also the author of two haiku collections, The Regulars (2006) and The Lammas Lands (2015), and is co-writer / editor (with John Barlow) of Wing Beats: British Birds in Haiku (2008), all published by Snapshot Press. Matthew Paul’s blog is here.
