Victoria Moul reviews Something, I Forget by Angela Leighton (Carcanet, 2023)
I’ve come across a few of Angela Leighton’s poems before, in various magazines, but I haven’t read any of her previous collections and I didn’t have a sense of her overall character as a poet before sitting down to read her sixth book of poetry, Something, I Forget, published last year by Carcanet. This is artful, precise, thoughtful and quite often beautiful work. Leighton is particularly good at landing an ending. Here’s the second half of the first poem, ‘Snowdrop’, which also works well as an introduction to the collection:
Something I wanted to say which slips my mind …
So here’s a garden instead, and a snowdrop stiffened –
its natural antifreeze anticipating zero
(survival technique), like unfeeling learned, like frozen
bedrock closeting its secret deep in the earth.
Here’s my wilding garden of remembrance. It will run
to seed. But today, deep winter clamps and leaves
just a fragile whiteness surprised in its shivering bracket.
The poem establishes two of the main preoccupations of the book – nature, and forgetting (or trying not to forget). There’s a lot to admire here, especially that precise and suprising final description: “a fragile whiteness surprised in its shivering bracket”. It’s hardly original to take a flower as an emblem of human fragility – we think of all those classical poppies, Biblical lillies, the daffodils of Herrick and Wordsworth, and so many others – but the familiarity of the motif is part of the point, part of what it means to forget and be forgotten, reabsorbed into the larger flow of life, language and a literary tradition.
This is artful, precise, thoughtful and quite often beautiful poetry
Something, I Forget is a long collection but it comes full circle: the final two poems are ‘To the Lord of Forgetting’ (“as the kind lord of forgetfulness / eases a way out to a clearing / even from myself”) and ‘Cyclamen at the Winter Solstice’. The winter cyclamen recalls the opening snowdrop and the many other ‘nature’ poems in the collection, and also provides the title of the collection. The poem begins “Something … I forget” and, addressing the cyclamen itself, ends:
Dear winter survivor –
(how many now dying?) I might live to know
forgetting’s a life gift.
I came for something … Is it time to go?
The self-consciousness we hear here – in which the poet reflects on what it is to write – is also a theme of the book, recurring in particular at the beginning and ending of sections.
The collection is organised in five quite substantial parts: ‘Stone Ground’, ‘Sea Crossings’, ‘Riddling Hell’ (which is a bit shorter than the others), ‘Summoning Heaven’ and ‘Remembering Gardens’. ‘Stone Ground’ offers a compelling though understated version of pastoral, drawing on the English tradition of nature poetry, from Marvell through to Wordsworth and Bunting, as well as classical poetry, especially Virgil: Virgil’s Eclogues, his pastoral collection, are particularly preoccupied with memory and forgetting. I thought this was the strongest single section. It is spare, trim, dense with wonderful lines, and formally highly varied. I loved this description of walking in the fells, looking for a pool of melt-water, and coming instead upon an unexpected wall:
I set out in such to reach that shore –
the climb’s surprise
among the higher fells – its wide-open eye
a bowl of ice-melt
brimful, sky-struck, a cup for the gods.
But I found instead
this Damascene stop – a blindness sudden
as the unread rock
“This Damascene stop” is marvellous, so compressed and resonant and precise.
As soon as I hear the word ‘fells’ in a poem (as here, “among the higher fells”), I think of Bunting, and sure enough we come upon the mason from Bunting’s Briggflatts in the very next poem, ‘Villa dei Misteri, Pompeii’: “(a mason chiselling a stone – whose name is it?)”. The whole of this section achieves a similar combination of richness, allusive depth and surprise – the surprise of coming upon an unexpected wall, a single lost shoe, the pitch-perfect phrase. It is a real achievement.
‘Sea Crossings’ begins with rain and ends with the sea erasing words from the shore, like Spenser (“One day I wrote her name upon the strand“). The whole section is linked by water, including a sequence set in Venice, and a commissioned poem on the death of Andrew Marvell’s father in the Humber. There are excellent poems here too – and an impressive array of words, Leighton is one of those poets you learn words from (fipple, pashm, chamferred) – but a few of the pieces in this section felt like exercises, and I thought it contained slightly too many poems self-consciously about writing itself (for example, ‘From Poetry’s Lighthouse, Again’).
Leighton is one of those poets you learn words from (fipple, pashm, chamferred)
The shortest section, ‘Riddling Hell’, contains the most explicitly ‘topical’ verse, with almost all the poems alluding more or less directly to the outbreak of war in Ukraine. The poems in this brief part (only seven pieces) are particularly diverse in style, form and tone, as if the author were casting around for the best way to tackle a difficult subject. All are about the complexities of communication, and the overall effect is perhaps a bit too variously self-involved: this set of pieces might have worked better as the starting point for a separate collection. I admired, though, the two quirkiest poems: ‘Prayer to the Skull with Ears’ (apparently in a church in Naples) and the longer poem ‘The Emperor’s Fool’, which casts Putin as a kind of Renaissance monarch, entertained desperately by a fearful jester:
See here, big Pa, Pappy, Pa-Putin,
I can throw an outline spiked by knives
that will cut no ice, incite no wars
but only glint one moment in the light.
Watch how I magic these knives to nothing.
Can you see? No lies, no terror. Just dancing.
‘Summoning Heaven’, the fourth section, is longer but shares similar strengths and weaknesses with ‘Riddling Hell’. This is the most explicitly religious part of the collection, with a poem on All Souls, the last judgement, the ascension and even a figure poem on writing as crucifixion (I confess I found this last, ‘Cruciform Sonnet on the Art’, rather revolting – though perhaps that’s the point). Another poem (‘Lines: Linen’) links weaving, conventionally enough, to the writing of poetry (by women in particular) and then, rather strikingly, to women finding and folding the discarded grave clothes in Jesus’ empty tomb. There are some strong poems here, but as in ‘Riddling Hell’ I felt that the level of self-consciousness in this section sometimes overwhelms the poetry. Some pieces feel artificial or over-written and the sequence doesn’t quite come together.
The final section, ‘Remembering Gardens’, begins with a five-page piece of prose describing a post-industrial, but now rural landscape: ‘Unquiet Sleepers’. This is a good, atmospheric piece of descriptive writing but I didn’t really see what it was doing here: it’s long for a prose poem in the usual sense, and, unlike most prose poems, it doesn’t lack any of the markers of ordinary prose narrative. I didn’t think it added much to the book. The focus on a particular landscape, though, does signal the return in this final section to the dominant pastoral mode. My favourite in this section is a clever and finely achieved poem on old CDs hung as bird-scarers in a garden or allotment, turning to catch the light:
Just old CDs
someone has set to scare the birds
among the plums and figs and pears
to shiver and wink
and catch distractions on a cadmium screen
that tags the green mortality of leaves.
These razor-thin
flashes of brightwork turn in the wind
mimic-mirrors of the nature of things.
(from ‘A Secret Garden’)
Here I felt Leighton combines all her considerable strengths: precise, allusive density of expression (we hear Marvell’s “green thought in a green shade” in the “green mortality of leaves”); deft aural music; a flair for creating new forms; and a huge descriptive talent.
Leighton combines all her considerable strengths: precise, allusive density of expression; deft aural music; a flair for creating new forms; and a huge descriptive talent
In short, despite a few reservations, I admired and enjoyed Something, I forget and I recommend it. I think the collection is challenging, but in a well-judged way: It is certainly quite a learned book in various respects (with references to Eliot and Dante, for instance, in addition to the various echoes and allusions already noted) but the range of reference feels natural to the poet’s voice, and the poetry is so well-crafted that there’s a great deal to enjoy here, even if you don’t pick up the allusions. I do think, though, that the collection could have been shorter. There are nearly 70 poems here, not counting an untitled prefatory piece and brief italicised lyrics printed as epigraphs to each section and for my money there is some redundancy. The average length of UK poetry collections has increased in the last few decades, a trend which must, I suppose, be driven by editors and publishers as much if not more than by poets. No doubt there are reasons for this, but when the best pieces are as good as they are here, less is more.
Victoria Moul is a poet, translator and scholar living in Paris. Recent publications include A Literary History of Latin and English Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2022) and (with John Talbot) C. H. Sisson Reconsidered (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). Recent poems, reviews and verse translations have appeared in the TLS, The Dark Horse, Amethyst Review, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, Bad Lilies, Modern Poetry in Translation, Ancient Exchanges and the anthology Outer Space (CUP, 2022). She writes about poetry and translation at Horace & friends.
