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Pluto

‘Pluto’ is the author’s ninth collection of new poetry, given thematic coherence by the choice of poems with a personal, autobiographical flavour. These range from short love lyrics (‘The Ages’, ‘South-East of Eden’, ‘Greenwich’) to free-associating ‘riffs’ on actual events (‘The Case of After’, ‘Dunwich’) to deeply personal histories, ‘mea culpas’, and elegies (‘The Window’, ‘The Given’, ‘The Double’). The centre-piece of the book, although positioned penultimately, is ‘Birthplace’, an extended meditation on the effect that one’s place of origin – in the author’s case the idealistic ‘city of tomorrow’ Welwyn Garden – has on a person’s philosophy, work-life, love-life, dream-life. The poem journeys towards the four points of the compass, each one representing a different environment or atmosphere, and is written in an apparent jumble of tenses: this is a technique the author has experimented with over the years, but in this poem it is central to the idea of time being distorted or elongated by the experience of life in a single place. Formally the poems range from regular and irregular sonnets to ‘terza rima’ to ballad form and various kinds of rough rhyme. The opening poem ‘The Byelaws’ is a song-like lyric with a refrain, intended to establish a sense of the timeless at the outset of the book. Classical figures such as Agamemnon, Cassandra, and Orpheus appear, as well as two poems narrated by witnesses to the Crucifixion: this is a recurring practice in the author’s work, to draw contemporary relevance out of ancient texts. The atmosphere ranges from the wry to the bleak to the playful and back.