Kathryn Southworth reviews Collected and New Poems by David Perman
Rockingham Press (Ware 2021). Pbk 208 pages. £14.99.
David Perman is best known as a supporter of poetry, founder of the Ware group of poets and editor of the Rockingham Press, publishing poetry, local history and biography. However, he has produced three volumes of his own verse and this book includes those, together with uncollected and recent poems. Disarmingly, the back cover quotes the observation that his verse is ‘not particularly subtle in intent or execution’. What then, other than honesty and humility, does this book have to offer?
First of all, the book presents a writer of fundamental decency, interested in people, both his peers and contemporaries and those more marginal, like the character in ‘A rescued man’: ‘Now I sit unnoticed, noticing/as only a rescued man can’. In ‘Maggie Merilyn’ he watches the muttering Rapunzel-haired woman dressed in outmoded charity shop clothes, her red and chapped hands suggesting she is a cleaner, ‘someone everyone calls on /to scrub’ but probably also a carer at home for someone she lets her hair down for,/using it to wipe the feet/she’s washed with her tears’. Suddenly the nickname of the title achieves significance. However, there is no easy sentimentality here, the person she cares for being described as ‘a saviour from Pointlessness’.
A similar hesitation over religious signification comes in ‘St George’s Ivychurch’ where the poet wonders whether an old church on Romney Marsh, far from any population, should be left to the ravages of nature: ‘let God’s old garland/of ivy reclaim its heritage’, until he finds a coffee jar filled with wild flowers and a crayoned note ‘For St George’s from Jemma and Jan’, which manage to ‘send a cynic on his way’. Not a cynic, perhaps, but Perman is wary about the danger of easy nostalgia, certainly in revisiting his own childhood. In ‘Going Back’ he recognises the risk that ‘the old/print will be obliterated by the brochure/colours of today’. Thinking of his teachers, he remembers them as always bald and ‘tired’ like the ‘clapped out classrooms’. Nevertheless, they were proud, not only of knowledge but of their own achievement, ‘masters in a meritocratic world’ and the children learned more from that pride than from books.
Perman’s verse is not especially musical and the form which works particularly well for him is the extended free verse of the memoir ‘Under Warden Hill’, where the former evacuee from London revisits the countryside of the 1940s. Here ‘the sky was wider’ and both nature and boyhood were, for a few years, ‘unchecked’ by adults and suburban growth. Returning to the city, the child still found settings for the books he read in the memories of his country years: the Casterbridge of Hardy, the Satis House of Dickens. Now, though, the grown man finds it hard to trace such landscape in the streets below, their private drives and privet hedges, or to remember any trees which are not garden varieties or pavement-rooted.
Love of language is the very stuff of poetry and Perman is as impatient of lazy clichés as lazy thinking. Quoting Boris Johnson’s ‘I think we long-grassed it’, he replays other political metaphors before celebrating the ‘real long grass’, sanctum of small creatures where ‘Heath and High Brown Fritillaries/flutter free and rare, where/there’s every species of a summer’s day’. A similar playfulness and political satire is in ‘Poems and Parsnips’, which explores the justice or otherwise of Auden’s assertion that poetry ‘makes nothing happen’, that, to put it metaphorically, ‘words butter no parsnips/sweeten no swedes’.
A poet’s duty, he concludes, is ‘meaning… and beauty’. All the more regret, then, when words fail. After suffering a stroke, Perman is acutely aware of the blockages which impede his flow, he who was known to ‘shoot from the lip’. In ‘Autonomy’ he plays with the newly re-found word and mourns his loss of self-sufficiency. He particularly regrets his inability to remember the names of plants, ‘the centuries that went into the names’ and his own past struggle to acquire them.
This book is thoroughly engaging for the reader. It is the voice of an urbane, thoughtful and humane writer and one, to quote the description he uses for the editor of Sofia, ‘vindicated most of all in the down-to-earth/dispensing of Wisdom’.
Kathryn Southworth is a former vice-principal of Newman University College in Birmingham. Recent publications are her poetry collection Someone was Here (Indigo Dreams, Beaworthy, 2018) and her pamphlet, A Pure Bead, a sequence on Virginia Woolf (Paekakariki Press, London 2021).