The delicate, at times exquisite, poems in John Glenday’s third collection, Grain, emit a kind of twilit radiance. They tend to occupy an emotional space “between the last beam of last night’s dark and the deep, grey first light of today.” While many of these short, mostly free-verse lyrics brood on absence and liminality, they do not formally reflect these themes. Or rather, they do not take such trendy themes as pretexts for textual ruptures or lacunae, but brood upon them from within the safe confines of traditional forms. Glenday’s métier is the tender personal lyric, inflected with love, lovesickness, clear-eyed naturalism, and a faint religiosity.

This religiosity, along with the ubiquitous absence and liminality themes, is on display in “Sermon”, a prose poem after the lights of John Donne’s sermons and perhaps the most beautiful piece in the volume:

On all sides his absence arranges itself. Can you feel him move? He is so small and everywhere, like blown ash or cotton frets. He flutters in the closed hand. His name a tiny breath in a breath. He is all things, inside all things, seeking himself. His body so light it winnows itself; chaff in the wind. He is the midge that sings for your blood that you may be one with him. Look at this room, this world, it is so small, the darkness streaming from the windows; and he smaller than anything, a fleck of desire. Can you feel it, the small ballast of your soul shifting? How inconsequential he is against the failing of the afternoon, riding with the dust to lightfall and shadow.

Glenday strikes a similar chord in “The Twins,“ which compares two stars to “God / and the shadow of his absence in our lives:/ helplessly adrift between the dusk / and dark and dusk; but always together,/ sailing together over everything.” This passage and “Sermon” offer a kind of primer to many other poems in Grain, a book haunted by ghostly figures (lost lovers, dead family and friends) who are at once absent and omnipresent, sailing together with the poet over everything.

Yet, Glenday is not always this serious. The clever “St Orage,” for instance, turns on an extended pun on saints’ names:

Oh Lord, we know your faithful
knew more deaths than we had fingers—
St Ifle and St Rangle and St Arving and St Ab, all
flew into your mercy through their disparate anguishes.

But most of all remember us yourselves,
forgotten saints we here commemorate:
St Agger of the drunken brawling praise;
St Ainless, martyred on the lopped branch of his perfect life;

St Anza, stunned by her own reverberating song. . . .

Another poem tells the “Beauty in the Beast” story in reverse, making it a tragedy. It begins, “She had been living happily ever before,” and ends with the first gloomy “once upon a time” in history.

One of Glenday’s favourite tricks is issuing commands to his readers: “Imagine you are driving / nowhere, with no one beside you”; “Listen: / beyond the heart’s breath / and the lingering soul. . .”; “Come along with me now and we shall see what this animal is doing”, and so on. This unmistakably “poetical” effect is often one of too much telling and not enough showing. Another trick, picked up from Seamus Heaney, is the nominalization of verbs, as in, “We drift in the pluck and lift / of something that is not the sea,” or “I send you the hush and founder / of the waves at Mangurstadh.” But who can blame him for writing this way, when the results are so lovely?

At other times, he comes off sounding a touch overripe, as in “Loving Cup”: “You were the stone cup / brimmed with ash and shadow / I once prised from the coom / of a winter howe.”  Aside from its biblical connotations, this smacks perhaps too much of Billy Collins’s corny “Litany,” which begins, “You are the bread and the knife,/ The crystal goblet and the wine,” and then lists the attributes which the addressee does not embody (“There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air”). Needless to say, Glenday is a far more serious poet than Collins (another Picador poet) and deserves better than to have his poems contaminated in this way.

The most memorable poems in Grain are those rare lyrics that stand free of both crepuscular lyricism and gimmicks. Consider the hypnotic “Noust”, which leaves an impression of something very old and splendidly hermetic:

Noust in the grass
grass in the wind
wind on the lark
lark for the sun

Sun through the sea
sea in the heart
heart in the noust
nothing is lost.

According to Glenday’s note, the word noust, taken from the Old Norse, means “a place of shelter, either natural or man made, where a boat may be hauled out in bad weather.” The safe haven—the noust—is a fitting symbol of the heart for Glenday, who lives in Drumnadrochit and works for NHS Highland as an addictions counsellor. And if poetry, too, is a kind of safe haven, then Grain is a noust that will provide comfort and counsel to readers for some time to come.

© Stephen Ross

John Glenday, Grain, Picador, 2009. £8.99. ISBN 978 0 330 46134 4

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.