arts
The Distant Valley Of Me: Blackbird Singing At Dusk By Wendy Pratt
Wendy Pratt’s extraordinarily sensitive antennae need little fine tuning: adrift in an ocean of voices, of stage whispers, of the groans and slippages of the prehistoric hinterland of Yorkshire’s East coast, her psycho-geographical afflatus is as all-consuming as the novelist Peter Ackroyd’s in his vision of London. Having exercised, in prose, her acute insight in the recent exploration of the ancient geological and socio-historical purlieus of the once-glacial Yorkshire Wolds in
The Ghost Lake, she gives some of those themes the distilled focus of poetic treatment in her brilliant new collection.
By accident or by design, Pratt’s great skill lies in the process of artful précis, or more properly in context, in the harnessing of an imagination susceptible to becoming overrun in a maelstrom of reflection. We find connections, here, that give coherence to the idea of an overriding theme: the metal detectorist who finds, and often fails to find, in her apparatus, a conduit to the material manifestations of an historical abstraction; the deceased father figure whose provenance breathes suggestion into a long and rooted ancestral history; the daughter she beheld only very briefly who re-emerges, butterfly-fragile, in a heartbreaking glimpse of what might have been; and finally, the abstraction itself – the deep and resonant toll of the landscape, and the poet’s place in a cavernous timeline best understood by the senses:
'Lay yourself down on the earth:
pelvis, leg, ribs
against the solid green of it.
Listen for the footsteps,
lost conversations.' (‘A Guide to Metal Detecting’)
The poet’s daily journey through
her land is an act of contemplation, a striving to give body to
heimat, that indissoluble sense of human longing for home, even as the connection sometimes fractures like a tectonic plate. Pratt extemporises that inexplicable yearning every day on social media as she meditates on her immediate geography with luminous brevity. Each motif in
Blackbird Singing at Dusk is concerned with the passage of time, from the bird whose evanescence is captured as though in the fast-flowing frames of an old newsreel that retails its unbearably delicate bone structure alongside its poignant song, to the withering of her father’s spirit, to the crushing weight of loss. Pratt marshall’s the inherent sadness of things with a wide-angled lens, bringing, for example, necrosis into sharp biological focus whilst foregrounding the inevitability of decay against the infinitely dynamic canvas of the aeons:
‘I touch the tip of my finger
to the henge of its eye socket,
place my nail just under the ribs
in the deep valley of its heart,
feel the ridged tops of its vertebrae.’ (‘Excavating the Bone House VI’)
The architecture of bones become ancient geomorphic strata as though the two were joined in that most ancient of forms, the metaphor. The centre might not hold in Pratt’s poetics: clinging to the polycyclic wreckage of perception like the many-angled eye of a fly, Pratt distils withering beauty out of the groyning of both human and geological pain, out of discomfiture and the agony of endurance and continuity. Here, all is transitory, but the temptation to jump off the train and into the temporal void is subject to the pen’s control; the poet rarely yields to abandonment, of form, or the thin sense of hope that may be salvaged in the efficacious ministration of structure.
Pratt returns to the blackbird, the jackdaw, the shrew and the badger at several points in her timeline and all, but especially the birds, are signifiers of stages, accompaniments to the rhythm of the seasons and purveyors of a kind of attuned wisdom; like Ted Hughes’ totemic moorland wildlife, they bespeak the ages in resilience and instinct. From the ‘Jackdaw’, an exquisitely concise poem, whose figuratively suggestive apparel resembles a coffin drape on a skeletal tree…
'a mourning necklace
on the collar bones
of a beech tree'.
…to the artfully contrived title poem, whose seamless blending of the two halves of a diptych interpolates a second narrative into the text whilst miraculously yielding cohesive meaning, both in isolation and in unison, the received effect is invariably breathtaking. Wendy Pratt’s poems carry so much emotional weight that the reader is inclined to overlook the formal acuity that immeasurably reifies gravitas. And the better to understand the brief moments of epiphany that punctuate the poetry, and, no doubt the life, of the poet. The gorgeous pastoral delicacy of ‘Drone’ brings fleeting relief to the narcotic drive of grief. Existing only in a drowsed, rhythmically-languid summer landscape, the narrator is an angel caught in a ‘moment of green light’:
‘Look down on me, I have the head of a saint;
campions form my head dress, apple-blossom
picks out the green of my eyes. I am
an offering to the ancestors.’
There is no sense of conceit here, merely the disclosure of a moment of contentment, a revelation even, in an elysian hiatus between yearning and disharmony. No stranger, like so many other artists, to the vagaries of self-doubt, Pratt once again finds corrective reassurance in the notion of ancestry and lineage: the fine dissection of ‘The Internalisation of Imposter Syndrome by the Rural Working Class Writer’, whose title pastiches the academic rigour of a psychological study, digresses, instead, into a rather beautiful meditation on transient fragility and transformation. The narrator’s self-image, conceived in luminous metaphors, emerges from the carapace of a ‘cocoon’ into an ancient sunlight whose measure is joy in the moment:
‘now her heart is a seal in the bay
now her heart beats for the first time
in two years’.
The ancient past, and those who inhabit it, haunt these pages, exerting a magnetic pull as though they remained tangential to the present, like visitants. They are benign, giving foundation and reassurance to existential anxiety, conferring the texture and form of a hidden age on the outlines of henge, gulley and fold, and becoming as integral a constituent of human architecture as to dissolve any degree of separation in the onward rush of time. Pratt finds something approaching exhilaration in anthropomorphic suggestion; moving easily between a crustacean world of ‘carapaces of tiny creatures / crushed into sand’ (‘When I bring you my body and tell you it is the landscape I grew up in’) and the seductive metaphysical abstraction of celestial dissolution, she declares an identification with place that is not circumscribed by time:
‘The hearth is my heart. I am
rooms of darkness and forgotten light.
My language is the mid-winter sun.’ (‘Self-Portrait as Bronze Age Burial Mound’)
Use of such terms as ‘Self-Portrait’, ‘Internalisation’, ‘A Guide to’ and ‘Study’ in poem titles yields the impression of research, thoroughness, distinctness of aim, but these are cold-blooded and forensic appendages that are rendered ironic by the dense thicket of totems and objects that make up the collection’s narrative. Yet Pratt’s fulsome inventory betokens a commitment to a different kind of rigour, the kind that describes an hyper-attuned emotional attachment, as it introduces the reader to the long slide of history via its visible appurtenances. The received effect is one of breathless displacement, where locators merge and overlap to subvert perception, giving notice of Pratt’s Empedoclean leap into several coterminous dimensions:
‘Our bed was a raft above a chip shop
above a thatch of nesting kittiwakes
above the Gypsy Race; the Woe Water
pouring its heart out into the harbour below.’ (‘Woe Water Fails to Rise’)
The ‘multiplying eye’ of self-abandonment is capable, also, of a fixed gaze: Pratt’s Methuselan homage to the ages maintains focus at all times on the human constituency, the character of those who make up the mostly unnoticed infrastructure of history. Squeezing love into poems of line and continuity, the poet releases memories held beneath the surface. In ‘After Chapel the Women Return’, the humdrum yet indelible markings of lives are underscored in a concluding, celebratory quintain, almost as a mark of affirmation:
‘They are massing in their kitchens,
the smoke of hot lard rising from pudding tins.
My mother is checking her own mother’s cookbook
for meat timings, the scribble in the margins,
bringing her back in a way that prayers cannot.’
There is real beauty in the prevailing sense of shared filial purpose, just as Pratt reflects, in turn, upon her own ministry of care for those lost in the aether of memory. No more so than in respect of her father and her daughter, whose appearances – the former against an agonised backdrop of hospital appointments coloured in the hindsight of grief; the latter in visitations that toll the years since Matilda’s death in heartbreaking chronological order. The poem ‘My Father on the Dark Side of the Moon’ is structurally unzipped, like the opened body of the father on the operating table, creating a fracture at its heart as the words contemplate his final days and hours in a temporal drift of mingled expectation and remembrance. The narrator loses syntactical grip, like Matthew Arnold in ‘Dover Beach’, as the father dissolves into the cosmic distance and she blindsides oncoming grief to the counter-intuitive comfort of humour: ‘and how we four left with // gravity and density tapped the // landline // and // said //
Ground control to Major Tom’.
It is a minor miracle, in a collection of poems engaging with forms of bereavement, of moving on, and of finding consolation in the knowledge of our limited tenure in a much grander universe, that Wendy Pratt does not sacrifice coherence more obviously; her subject scope and emotional depth would prove an intolerable burden in less controlled hands. And it is fitting that she should conclude her fine collection with an elegy for her daughter, whose appearance here, and elsewhere, is clear even in absentia. In ‘Thirteen’, the age Matilda would have been at the time of writing, Pratt finds, in the sense of her presence, the shape and form of her teenage self. In the gentle, sensual closing lines, she is heart-rendingly close:
‘I think I feel you there, your shadow
bridging the gap between us,
petrichor of your shampoo, slight
weight of your body next to mine,
columns of you drifting across
the distant valley of me.’
Blackbird Singing at Dusk is published by Nine Arches Press (2024).
More information here.