Ian Parks, The Landing Stage (Lapwing Press) £10.00; The Exile’s House (Waterloo House) £10.00
Parks is not afraid of the definite article; not only in the titles of his books, which also includes The Cage but also with the titles of the poems: ‘The Northern Lights’, ‘The Girl in the Garden’, ‘The March’. He also has poems entitled ‘Miners’, ‘Eclipse’ and ‘Standards’. The use of the definite article establishes, by definition (!!) parameters around the subject. And the definite article pushes the noun it precedes into a position of particular importance. That importance is part of what makes Parks’ poems so strong, because he’s not afraid of holding a large subject and making it his own. Of course, ownership is part of the job of every poet, but much of Park’s achievement as a poet is the way ownership is held in Park’s wonderful technique.
There is a kind of sculpted inevitability about Parks’ poems. Some of that inevitability is to do with the way in which Parks holds the line in elegant balance, ‘I envied him, the man without a name/who spent each winter where the tide begins’ (Sleeping on the Island) And nearly any line from Parks has that poise and elegance. Such poise and elegance brings to these two, necessary books a warm accumulation which is beguiling and continuously engaging. Similar to the wonderful, and equally under-appreciated, American poet William Matthews, these poems engage the reader with a world and character that is sensitive and empathetic.
Parks is known as a lyric poet, described as ‘the finest love poet of his generation’.The love poetry is a strong presence in both these volumes; not only to the women in his life, but also for his father and a pungent, heart-stopping elegy for his son.Parks father was a miner, amongst other things(!), and Parks writes beautifully about the complicated relationship he had with his father. Parks, the ‘love’ poet uses that technique to describe the mining industry set around Parks home town of Mexborough; in particular, he adumbrates both the miners’ strike of the eighties and the heart-breaking legacy of those years. In the poem ‘Miners’, Parks writes about those miners during the strike, about how the enforced idleness from the work brought them closer to both their families but also other centres of emotional attention, ‘… crossed the field/ to where the old pit ponies/were at grass/ to whisper at them,// stroke their twitching ears./I found them there/embarrassed by my smile’. In this emotional range, Parks comes close to his hero Auden, whom he writes about so movingly in the long poem, ‘The Double Man’. Unlike more contemporary Audenistas, Parks eschews the Auden voice and manner. What Parks takes from Auden is a profound acceptance of the human condition, an acceptance which Parks adumbrates with an exemplary technique, and exemplary tenderness.