The sense of something happening beyond the words on the page gives these short poems of Beth Junor's a resonance that stays with us.
On the top deck of a London bus a solitary boy starts to sing. Another bus passing a women's prison, now closed, stirs memories of blue plastic plates. It seems not just observed but experienced.
In ART ATTACK, the Mona Lisa watches a group of protestors move towards her, her expression unchanging -as they bring out containers of the soup they will throw in her face, asking a shocked crowd to define its priorities in simple black and white.
Shifts in time, lightly handled, allow us to flit through space and century, most strikingly in MEDIAEVAL HISTORIANS FORM A PICKET LINE, the title inviting us into a journey spiked with images that unite the human makers of history with the human narrators.
And as a year ends with a Celtic blessing in Duddingston Kirk we move outside to the loch where we are told: ‘Go, now, to sit among the swans’. Swans with ‘necks as strong as anacondas’, children feeding them sliced white bread while the spectre of Zeus in the disturbing form of a swan impregnating Leda lurks behind seven swans a-swimming.
The past again mingles with the present in GOING DOWN TO SEE THE DAIRSIE HOARD. The familiar field across the road, the church, the whole landscape of the small Fife village is lifted into another reality by the discovery of buried Roman silver, a feeling we share as places we call home turn out to have been home to exotic others. My own birthplace just across the Tay estuary was similarly reconfigured by the discovery of the Carnoustie Hoard. A Bronze Age spear with gold ornamentation and the outlines of two Neolithic halls rose to compete with the golf course and the beach to provide that sense of validation that early habitation gives to our familiar places.
POSTCARD FROM SYRIA is another poem that invites an individual response. A postcard with images of beehive houses discovered in a second-hand bookshop in Potsdam says ‘See you soon from Sunny Syria’. I went to Syria three weeks after Nine Eleven, only four of us on the tour because others had cancelled or failed to book from fear of repercussions. So we saw Palmyra with only half a dozen others there and met friendly Iraqis visiting the Damascus church built for Saul become Paul and where an elderly man in tweed jacket and keffiyeh shook my hand in the street and told me he was with Montgomery in the desert and where east and west seemed to live in mutual deference to a continuing history. And yes, we did see beehive houses and enjoy sunshine. The date on the card was 2007.
A delightful found poem HISTORY AT THE END OF HER TETHER concludes the collection with a teacher’s overheard remarks to school children at the Museum of Scotland, bringing the past, the present and future together in three timeless sentences.
Deirdre Grieve
