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Adversaria, Stride Books, £5.95
Handmade Equations, Shearsman Books, £8.95/$14
The work in these new collections is formal in structure, and has an evenness of tone which still manages to encompass multiple registers; the mind's interior monologue, the voice of the mass media, overheard everyday conversations. Dent's recent poetry has some similarities in this respect, with the sonnets of Tony Lopez' 'False Memory', but Dent’s work has an augustan calm and austerity which is all his own.
Adversaria is a collection of forty twelve-line poems. The language is fragmented, slippery, turning this way and that, like a diary of a restless mind; but a mind which also comments on and describes the external world acting on it. The movement in the poems holds the readers attention, not at the level of description, or the things described, but at the level of language, which filters the original experience:
It's a dry tear leaking that dreams me
Up a miracle or so she said too many
Stations are crossed like lovers to be
Here with you and lost respectfully in
A world whose luck's this master-class
Of darkness immaterial real letters
('For the Attic')
The capitals at the start of each line turn the middle of phrases into new sentences, and add to the ambiguity. This poetry suggests, indicates, without settling into any specifics: 'master-class of darkness' is self-consciously poetic, but the movement of the sense pushes the reader forward before they have time to admire the artistry. Similarly, there are suggestions of the mundane everyday, which veer off into abstraction:
Black coffee departures still put off to
Read his papers news in its prime might
Explain nothing he really wanted but
Pink pages figures turning his thoughts
To an echo...
(Rendezvous)
Handmade Equations is a more substantial collection, numbering almost a hundred pages, and is divided into two parts, which appear to be separate collections. The opening poems of 'Horizons and Façades', the book's first section are similar in form to the poems in ‘Adversaria’, with intimations of ageing, and of Dent's home county of Devon:
...tomorrow will try
A different route long branches I packed
With blossom for delight more times of
Our lives laid down for somewhat premature
Recollection ...
When we come to the longer poem 'On-Set Intimations' subtitled 'out of anaesthesia', we seem to encounter a more personal tone, in a poem relating to recent illness, with the speaker observing from a hospital bed:
'small alterations only a window opened and
door left ajar a heavy coat (it's not clear whose) is
slung over the chair'
But this is no conventional monologue, interspersed as it is with stray phrases, mental chatter, and commentary on the poem itself:
'Days when I got it wrong occasions lost in
monochrome blue light and not exactly reason gazing
out there's cloud if nothing else to count small
matters come (as illustrated) to a head you'll find a
not uncomplicated distance'
The book's second section, 'Faith and Valediction' contains a similar mix, but there are a number of poems here addressing more public themes. The poem 'Close Disorder (Sanctuary Wood, 1915)' considers how the past sends us 'genetic overtures, or something':
...days can't
On their own renumber flesh to make
My way leaves down through trenches
Flooded...
The poem is a memory of a memory of the First World War, and the experience of this, like all those addressed by these poems, is as slippery and undefined as language itself. What we encounter in these books is a mind observing itself, and providing a commentary on its own perceptions and reactions in the form of poems which in turn observe themselves, and provide a commentary on their own workings, the whole phrased in a quiet lyricism:
Smouldering, the new blues attach themselves
To Autumn hills where his someone watches as
Always anxious at the wheel of an empty sky
© Tim Godwin, 2005
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