Dark Wings:
Alison Brackenbury reviews Birds with a Broken Wing by Adam Thorpe and Black Moon by Matthew Sweeney

Birds with a Broken Wing.  Even the title of Adam Thorpe’s poems, a quotation from a Canadian chief of 1909, is brushed by the wing of the past.  For Thorpe, the past is a living passion, which his poetry touches with peculiar grace.  His encounter with a hideously scarred German veteran flows into a characteristically lovely final line: “the long liquid of remembering”.  Even dinosaurs make a brief, convincing appearance.
 “They moved their heads like birds” Fittingly, the book closes in night, with a quiet invocation of “your ghost”.

But Thorpe’s work is also alive to the present, tender to its details, “civilisation/ in a washing-line and tended tomatoes”.  The city intrudes, but has its own music, “the marigold/ smudge of Swindon foxing the stars”.

Under the flight-path of Thorpe’s music lies a tough appreciation of the practical, and of materials: the weight of the “great wing” of a harp, a boy “slicing balsa” for a plane.  The mind, too, can be embodied.  He writes with lucid sympathy of a friend who leapt to his death,

Something removed your retaining wall.

Thorpe has a particularly careful ear for speech.  His subjects speak directly out of his poems, as in his blind mother’s outburst:  “It’s living hell, to be honest, Adam.”  But, for all his receptiveness to people, and their past, he can calmly imagine a future without the “bruise” of Swindon’s lights, “the badgers loping over the grassed/ main roads”.  His poetry deserves his own praise of an abandoned Spanish town

                                                      “the present moment’s
phantom dunes, locking in whatever
has to come, as well as all that’s past”.

Some poems, of course, meander, or fail to take off.  But Thorpe’s strengths can keep the reader with him until the final marvellous lift off in his best, final lines.  The power may be contained in one expansive line:

but lands and seas and skies and all their life

or sustained throughout a stanza.  In “Dromberg Stone Circle”, rapt contemplation of the past is ended by an aborted phone call, from a son, to a mobile phone.  I was continually impressed, throughout this collection, by the solid technique, without show or fuss, which underpins the easy movement of the poems.  It seems to me the more remarkable since Thorpe has also published much prose, including that haunting novel of time, love and land, “Ulverton”.  This technique lends authority to the ending of “Dromberg Stone Circle”, its expansive eleven syllable lines and its easy colloquial tone locked into threat by the darkening of its slant and final rhyme:

it was as if we’d caught on the too-warm air
word of something dreadful that only the wise
might know how to neutralise: deciding what the offerings

should be; and who must be sacrificed, and where.

Adam Thorpe’s poems are grounded in a quiet of profound strength.  They can also take flight.  This is an admirable combination.

I admired, too, the music and menace of Matthew Sweeney’s title, Black Moon, and found much to commend in the collection.  My main reservation was that some of the blackest poems burnt themselves out.  How can poets successfully tackle horror? Often, with their utmost art, as in the powerful measures of W.H.Auden’s stanzas in “The Shield of Achilles”, or in the savage snap of John Clare’s couplets in “Badger”. Sometimes Sweeney’s final lines peter out through lack of a main verb or metrical authority.  Sometimes a poem simply ends too soon.

“Naked” which relates the tormenting of a condemned man by his executioner, is a poem of quatrains, followed by couplets.  Its opening is compelling, a seductive ballad turned vicious.

Take off your shoes, he said,
    and hurl them into the sea.
Take off that satin shirt
    and hand it to me.

But as the violence worsens at the centre of the poem, the metre falters.  The poem then abandons its pattern and ends with a quatrain.

More mess! he bellowed.
     You’re worse than a pig.
Then he handed me a spade
     and ordered me to dig.

The mind, obediently trying to follow events, is distracted by the ear, waiting for its couplet.  The dark focus of the opening is gone.  Compare the leaking energy of the quatrain with the ferocious final couplet of Clare’s “Badger”:

Till kicked and torn and beaten out he lies
And leaves his hold and cackles, groans, and dies.

Suspense, even in a poem’s darkest story, is fragile.  Avoid the quotes on the cover if you do not wish to be locked out from the last shock of a fine poem, “The Doors”, where the speaker in an empty house is first alarmed by “the portraits breathing”.  But you cannot avoid the title of a poem featuring eerily perfect twins, which reveals the encounter’s final twist, “No Sugar”.

The twins “chuckle in stereo”.  Sweeney has a gift for compressed, unsettling phrases, and for details of background menace, barking dogs, returning sirens.  Armed with these, his procession of hit men, firing squads and mercenaries begins to exert a dark weight on the reader’s mind.  This weight is fully contained in “Black”, the story of a world whose light failed.  Its stanzas unfold into panic, offbeat reactions and final despair:

                                                         Only kids
too young to know anything else would cope:
rat-hunters, blood-drinkers, ignorant of the sun.

The longer stanzas and lines, with occasional rhymes stressing the lost sun, allow Sweeney to throw the weight of form behind the poem’s final crescendo, the eclipse of civil life.

Sweeney can also produce formidably good political poems (rare beasts in English poetry).  “The Fire” catches light with its breakneck energy and its fierce final verbs.

so I galloped on, past Yeltsin,
past Putin, shouting now,
as if anyone could hear me,
as if anyone would care.

Not all the poems feature horror, or speed.  There are quieter poems, of journey and middle-age, such as “The Ascent”.

Today he’d take his time to arrive [..]
and he wouldn’t look down at all.

This collection reveals Matthew Sweeney as a poet of variety and power.

Birds with a Broken Wing, Black Moon.  These titles are a broken mirror of our times.  Astonishingly, the birds still fly.  But the moon, alas, grows darker. 

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.