Frances Leviston reviews: Ginnel by Lucy Newlyn

Lucy Newlyn's first book of poetry, Ginnel, for Carcanet's Oxford Poets series, is a collection in the truest sense, drawing its subject matter almost exclusively from remembrances of the civic and social topography of 1960s Leeds, where the poet grew up. The title comes from a dialectal word for the paths and shortcuts that run between buildings; in these secret spaces truants loiter, neighbourhood lines are crossed, games are played, and time is, momentarily, collapsed, allowing the poet to revisit a place she seems never quite to have left behind.

Newlyn's is a consciousness deeply alive to sound, shape, smell, mapping the sensory territories first, relishing the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary in which she works: 'Mounds of pink gruntlings / grubbed in the swill or nuzzled the sows' / dugs: six at a time and wriggling' ('Pig-pen at Meanwood'); 'A lopsided grin creases half the girth / of his neck and sinks into the bulk / of his warted body' ('Toad'). All ordinary activity, whether that of animals, people, water, light, is worthy of documentation, preservation. The poet carries her memories down the ginnel of the years like a jar of frogspawn 'carefully / so as not to spill them / sideways' ('Snicket'); and, read back to back, these memories gather weight from one another, from the gaps and connexions running between, like ginnels behind houses, acquiring shadow and resonance.

Take the triumvirate of 'Juan taught me', 'Comfortable box' and 'Across the street', for example. The first lists how the speaker was taught by a neighbourhood lad 'to wish I was a boy and working class'; the second is a paean to the grocery box from Groocock's delivered each Friday ('Every packet, carton, tin and jar / pronouncing regularity and order'); and the third is a painful moment of realisation as the speaker sees Juan's mother bringing in her 'Co-op shopping' and 'can hear the latch on her gate / clicking as it swings shut' – shut against the speaker, who is from a different, Groocock's-fed world. These are separate poems that convene on mutual territory to powerful effect. Similarly, the love of language that informs the collection's opening poem, 'Ginnel', an etymological exploration of the word's settlement in Yorkshire, follows through to poems like 'Walls' ('I love the curt sounds of the vowels') and the meditation on Keith Waterhouse's prose in 'Prosaic', but acquires a more sinister note in 'Playin' out', as the speaker's acute sensitivity to language leaves her all-too aware of the social differences denoted by it: 'the gaps, the embarrassing / thresholds, the voices slipping.' You could not call Ginnel ambitious, and yet something impressive has been achieved: the depiction, piece by piece, of a whole childhood, neighbourhood, vanishing way of life.

The downside to this cumulative effect, of course, is a dissatisfaction with many of the poems as artifacts in and of themselves. However evocative the sound and fury of Newlyn's descriptions, you occasionally wish that they were driven harder, further, towards a more difficult and seemingly elusive conclusion; you long for the insight that a different species of attention might have brought to such material as trout-tickling ('Ginneling') or the 'Rag and bone man'. Lines of real promise – 'all our tomorrows are a hooked tunnel / of bummelkites' ('Brambling') – are left strangely unexplored. The best poems here are those which manage to create their own self-contained effects even as they speak to the work surrounding them: the sheer pleasure of 'Washing Day', generated by its tongue-thickening sonics and the way its own images are brought so perfectly and circularly into balance, or the understated sadness of 'Town Hall lions', their recently-scoured surfaces 'pale and crumbling', augmented (not overwhelmed) by an epigraph from Milton's Areopagitica. 'Transposed', perhaps the least integrated and ironically the most successful of the pieces here, draws a delicate comparison between bird-mimicry, growing-up and art, without fudging the particularities of each, and closes finely with the confession that 'I blow / for the sound's sake, it's lone / witchery. Expecting no answer.' Newlyn's is a careful, humble poetry that does not overreach nor shrilly demand its readers' attention; perhaps for this reason more than any other, it ought to receive it.

Ginnel. Carcanet Press (£6.95).

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