Poetry Readers Challenge discussion

I'll admit I was misled and then taken by surprise by Malcolm Carson's collection Winging It. I mean that in a positive sense.

The first and title poem, Winging It, is a charming, lightly humorous character piece about a minister who keeps pigeons:

He loved his pigeons, almost as much as serving
his Lord. He would attend to them
when his other flock were grazing on life.

The ending of the poem involves a wedding service and pigeon poop: 'marrying his twin passions.'

The next poem, The Church of St. John the Dentist, is another humorous piece written: 'On misreading the church's name obscured by leaves'. And so it goes on: Agnes - a brief monologue by 'boring' Agnes from David Copperfield; 'Mr Wordsworth is Never Interrupted' - a delayed meeting between the great man and a certain Mr. Keats; Le Salon Des Refusés - two writers: 'proud conspirators/ in our sense of inverted celebrity'.

I therefore came to the premature conclusion that this was a book solely of light verse: technically proficient and cleverly constructed, filled with dryly amusing vignettes and lightly entertaining in small doses. There's nothing wrong with light verse, but it's not my thing. I was wrong and owe Malcolm Carson an apology.

Yes, there are dryly humorous poems, but the tone gradually deepens and darkens. The lightness of stylistic touch remains, but the characters in the carefully crafted vignettes take on darker undertones, as in the somewhat mournful Le Viel Amant:

Despite his better judgement,
knowing he was an old fool,

he couldn't help but think,
maybe this time, maybe
this one last time.

Or the simple but haunting Give Me A Stand of Trees, which I here quote in its entirety:

Give me a stand of trees,
he said, on a Northumberland knoll

bare against the dying sun.
Let me watch sky bleed orange
into night. No prayers,

no hymns, just
a stand of trees.

By the end of the collection the poems sound a lot like memories. There is room for humour, but also the gentle sorrow of, and nostalgia for, times past and, when circumstances warrant it, the darker note of bad memories. In Northern Ireland the shadow of The Troubles is present even on the sunniest of days. In Pulling Out of Belfast during a family trip: 'out of Belfast shipyards', family: 'incredulity at kerbstones/ in tricolour' leads to the observation: ' 'A lot's changed,' I say./'And nothing's changed.' ' In One Who Knew, the casual, thoughtless donning of a French beret takes on a much darker significance:

I found berets had been worn that day
in another place over the mourned, and was advised
by one who knew that it hadn't been the best
the night before to wear my own.

This is a collection of dark and light, humour and sadness: poems that entertain the intellect with tall tales, but are not afraid to reach down into the deeper and sometimes darker waters of recognisable reality and emotion.

I first reviewed this collection for "The High Window". The above is an abridged version of the published review, which you can read in full here (it's the second one in): https://thehighwindowpress.com/catego...