ANNA ADAMS - Time - Pockets

This nicely-produced chapbook—perfect bound, in plain white, with an exquisite chalk self-portrait on the cover—comes with more far information than the average pamphlet.  It contains a list of previous publications spanning more than forty years and a two-page introduction by the publisher, John Killick, laying out his personal connections with the poet as both friend and longtime publisher.  Killick sets her work in context and bemoans the relative lack of exposure she has enjoyed for “a body of work which is consistent, approachable, observant, humane, humorous and highly crafted”.  I would second all of this, with the exception of “consistent”.
At least on the evidence of Time-Pockets, Anna Adams is on far stronger ground with her poetry of nature, and its interaction with humanity, than she is on humanity alone.  Those poems dealing with people, roughly forty percent of the volume, are competent but rather uninspiring, tending occasionally to the pedestrian or collapsing in underused detail.  The conclusion of ‘Our Fritz’, for instance, a ballad-like description of a German stranded in the Dales decades after the war, builds towards bathos rather than revelation:
.......Meanwhile out Fritz has reached the Lion Inn
.......to find the bar tricked out for some sort of party.
.......He turns to go; he’s come for a domino-game
.......but is hailed by shouts, sees banners and hears his name,
.......gets kisses, cake and free beer.  Today he is eighty.
Or the settled domesticity of the central character in ‘A Portrait’ – a woman who has found “a pride in ordinariness” – which is evoked in clean and efficient traditional verse, but with a distinct detachment:
.......She shuns disgrace
.......and pays her rent and spins her money out,
.......and cleans and decorates her dwelling place,
.......unhampered by excessive thought or doubt.
If these poems represented the whole of the collection, Killick’s assessment would amount to  hyperbole.  But when Adams leaves aside human beings in their ordinary settings and plunges full force into nature, the work takes off dramatically.  The second stanza of ‘River Scene’, for example, describes a gathering of birds:
.......A gravel mound, till recently an island,
.......becomes a Golgotha of cormorants.
.......First one goes cruciform, hangs out her pinions
.......in slanting sunshine, then two more breeze in
.......to take their stations either side of her.
There is no sense of forcing the human, or indeed divine, into this scene; each image arises naturally, fusing the two worlds with their differing concerns into a single, if mutually uncomprehending, whole: “Our world is marginal to theirs/and meaningless, and could well be dispensed with/from any common cormorant’s eye view.”  It is a deft fusion repeated effortlessly through the nature poems.  In ‘It’, the poet captures our place in the liquid flow of life perfectly, “we’re all … like salmon swimming up a waterfall,/shawled by our dwelling place”.  Or depicting the disease-ravaged body as a bestiary, a crooked ecosystem of monkeys and butterflies, she achieves a magnificent soaring conclusion which lifts us beyond the realms of everything physical, yet retains all its sad meanings:
.......Then, high above the orchestra in the pit,
.......the fluting voice of a child who sings of the future
.......over the sonorous woodwinds full of shadows.

.......Above the dark forest a skylark is praising the light.
It is, overall, a strange volume.  Achieved in many places, flawed in others, with the flaws marked always by an interest in men and women abstracted from the natural world, and the achievement singing high and pure as the skylark.  Beyond the poems, there is perhaps a message in this for everyone.