Jane Griffiths reviews Public Dream by Frances Leviston

The poems of Frances Leviston’s first collection are studies in suspension. She excels at exact description, finding the precise verbal equivalent for the scene or image she has in mind, and yet the sum of these exactnesses is a shifting and uncertain world. What is not said is at least as important as what is said; what is not quite seen may be more important than what is clearly apparent. ‘The Gaps’ – a poem that can really only be quoted in its entirety – addresses this habitual mode of perception directly:

And then they revealed that solids were not solid
That a wall was not solid
That it consisted of molecules fixed and vibrating
Some distance apart, as did the flesh

That solidity was really the likelihood
Of stuff not falling
Between two chairs, down the gaps

And that walking through the wall was not impossible
That it could be like
Slipping between pine trunks into a forest
Which had looked from the road impermeable
But was where something lived

And that one could peer back from the gloom towards the light
A different creature
With tender eyes, with an ear for water.

The sense that the stuff of everyday life is permeable and (at best) provisional is key to Leviston’s writing. So too is the way in which that realisation enforces a change of perspective – something that Leviston frequently enforces on the reader too.She is expert at providing a shock of surprise at the end of a poem that might appear to be going somewhere altogether more predictable. ‘Humbles’, for example, shifts suddenly from the conscience-stricken anatomical examination of a road-kill deer to a wholly unlooked-for comparison:

the burst bowel fouling the meat
exposed for what it is, found out – as Judas,
ripped from groin to gizzard, was found
at dawn, on the elder tree, still tethered to earth
by all the ropes and anchors of his life.

The comparison is extraordinary. At first it seems to work entirely on a physical level, and perhaps rather troublingly not to work in any other way: what point of contact could there possibly be between a deer and the archetypal traitor? But even asthis doubt arises, it is resolved by the last two lines, which take an entirely new direction, linking Judas and the deer by their mortality, and by the traces of their lives that continue (like the deer’s beating heart) long after the technical moment of death. Their lingering sense of ‘I am’ recognised – perhaps even shared – by the poet too.

This shape-shifting level of subtlety isn’t quite sustained throughout, but the lapses are rare. Leviston’s habitual mode is ahighly idiosyncratic and tough-minded reworking of a set of images or ideas. Grevel Lindop once suggested that poets work from a combination of  a  ‘medium’ (which he defines as ‘a kind of soup or stew of preoccupations, thoughts, feelings’) and the ‘crystal’ (a word, a phrase, or a line) which serves as a focus or conductor. In Leviston’s work, the process of focusing is attractively on the surface; as we read her, we can almost see the connections being made.

While this makes for demanding poetry, it is also extremely rewarding – in no small part because Leviston makes high demands of herself as well. These are not obviously formal poems, but they exhibit a consummate understanding of how sentence structure can be set to work against line breaks so as to create a complex rhythm that draws the reader into mimicking the poet’s thought processes (or believing that she does). The effect is to create a further kind suspension, one that exists in the structure of the poem rather than in its content. At best, the two fall together, as they do at the end of ‘Scandinavia’, the poem that provides the title for this collection. Imagining a life where the self would be as indeterminate as the northern snowscape, the speaker suggests that she:

            …  could sit, lie, settle down, the white
of one idea entirely lost upon another, as rain is lost

in the shift of the sea, as a single consecrated face
drowns in the swell of the Saturday host, and the notion of loving
that one critically more than any other flake in a flurry
melts, flows back to folly’s pool, the lucid public dream.

The way the snow flakes, the faces and the poet’s own thought processes become indistinguishably exact equivalents for one another is matched by the brilliant linebreak after ‘loving’, which for a long moment leaves unresolved what it is that might be loved, showing just how arbitrary such apparently defining connections are. For Leviston, too much certainty or too confident a sense of identity may both be impositions. Her poems provide an alternative and much less stable viewpoint. This is an original and compelling first collection: the work of a poet who has found her subject and is in command of her medium.

Frances Leviston, Public Dream. Picador, 2007. 50 pp. £8.99.

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.