Alison Brackenbury reviews Scattering Eva, by James Sheard.

Scattering Eva is a risk of a title, a fellow traveller leaning forward in a train, lips parted. Will you hear stories you will never forget? Or will you spend much of the trip glancing wistfully at the buffet?

A journey through James Sheard's first collection can, strangely, lead to both. For this reviewer, the border between fidgeting and fascination is perfectly clear. Scattering Eva is as sharply divided as the old East and West Germany. Stay on the train: "Eva, lion" in her final thirty pages will justify your journey. But as your guide to the first thirty, I am, at times, strongly tempted to pack you off to the buffet.

As you gulp your coffee, although James Sheard at his best is a strong, and already much-praised poet, I will briefly be a complaining passenger and risk what my fellow-traveller calls "huffy dismissals". Most of Sheard's beloved compounds, "goldmean", "shawlings-in", should go out of the carriage window. His trick of ending a poem with one stranded word, "pounce", "instruments", should be left to fellow-passengers who write in German, with its richer consonants and musical inflections.. Shocking epigraphs from torturers or terrorists may deaden the listener to what follows, especially when the traveller continually fades out his own landscapes: "pale", "dim", "empty"-

Come back from the buffet! Kick these huffy dismissals, like orange peel, under the seat. From the suburbs of Sheard's first, short poems rise clear landmarks of what he does best. The violence of the past wakes his poetry to echoes, in "Studying Santiago": "you give me his names:/ Pilgrim. Slayer". He has a powerful, almost mythic sense of political struggle, which opens his lines to other voices, like the outcast living off the land in "J. V. Prospero": "Send news. Send books. I'll not burn 'em". His favourite travelling companion is not love. It is death who leaves the sounds of Sheard's lines richer, its rhythms more subtle

Father: ashes.
[...] the slack tide's heart-flutter.
("High Tide, Bosham")

Death tenses Sheard's poems from slackness to urgency, as if, for the first time, the point of the journey is clear:

"That we pray for nothing.
"That we can die."
("Writing History)

Eva has died. Survivor of the Hamburg bombings, she crackles with life throughout Sheard's long poem in her name. She brings with her, full-blooded, the German language whose ghost has haunted and diminished Sheard's earlier journeys. "Schatx", (darling), she croons to the narrator, "wie mütig, wie tot-/ brave, dead- " She deepens Sheard's poem into her own heroic age:

Eva, lion,
shaking that dyed and misjudged mane".

But his (never-defined) dealings with her also open a sure and shocking journey into not-so-distant history, to executions

A wire garotte
beneath hard cellar lights

to murderous nursery rhymes of anarchy

The cocksure and cock-sore
grabbing what they can carry

and to Eva's own memories of the raids.

Children lay like smoked eels
on the doorsteps.

Eva's single, raw voice puts all her inexperienced fellow-travellers firmly in their place:

Tchaa. One night under the bombs
Would drown you.

But, far from overwhelming Sheard, Eva gives his journey a purpose: the scattering of her ashes. She crowds his sense with visions

I saw her then in Baltic furs
bristling with vanillas.

For her, the engine of his poetry works. Its rhythms tense and pound with feeling:

the sea [...]
heaving its sledgehammers to my heart.

From the first, his speech to Eva becomes music, "I tell Eva we are cracked bells". The earlier carapace of cramped urbanity cracks. Lines chime and toll:

So break me the bells and walls
of the dolorous North.

In his epilogue, Sheard, "Like stories told/ at a long-closed border crossing", gathers his poem's fragments into a whole, at the moment when Eva's physical ashes are scattered. The journey now, unmistakably, is of the spirit. Its allies become the past and art, with glancing references to the Meistersingers, with fierce rhythms and the hard material world Sheard registers so acutely.

Lord at twilight, Lord at bay,
Lord who looks the other way,
Lord of hiltless rusted sword
Lord dismantled, yet still Lord.

The militant rhymes and the soft sounds of decay blend in a muted music:

And sigh through Eva's ashes
Of our godlessness and grace.

What is this poem's journey's end? Sheard floats English and German, fact and rhyme, one woman's foibles and the repeated finality of prayer:

I lift my eyes [...]

All those you scatter, Lord
The un-cursed and de-blessed,

and roll them, Herr,

Then words.

Let them rest
Let them rest

as Eva might.

Let them rest.

Destination? Or starting point? Only time, and the traveller, will tell you.

Scattering Eva (Cape, £9.00)

The views expressed by contributors to the reviews section of Poetry Matters are not those of Tower Poetry, or of Christ Church, Oxford, and are solely those of the reviewers.