Paul Mills, Voting for Spring (Smith/Doorstop, £9.95) and You Should’ve Seen Us, (Smith/Doorstop) £6.95
Paul Mills, at a reading in York in the late 1990s, was the first writer I ever heard to suggest that the next major movement in poetry and also literary theory would have ‘something to do with the environment. It’s inevitable’. In the decade since Mills’ previous poetry collection, Dinosaur Point(2000), eco-poetry has emerged as a forceful and diverse area; yet, changing and disturbed landscapes, with tensions between nature and machinery, had characterised Mills’ poetry since his first collection, North Carriageway (1976). His debut followed his Gregory Award, judged (perhaps tellingly) by Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes. In Mills’ new, fifth collection, Voting for Spring, ecological concerns are made inextricable from core themes of family, history, conflict and resilience. Mills’ additional new publication, the pamphlet You Should’ve Seen Us, opens up further areas, confirming that this intriguing poet, while publishing collections only once a decade or so since Third Person (1978), remains not just relevant in contemporary poetry, but ahead.
In the late 1970s, Mills was Creative Writing Fellow at Manchester Victoria University, then Gregory Fellow at the University of Leeds (which recently acquired his archive). After establishing one of the UK’s first Creative Writing courses, at York St John University, he is now commencing an RLF Fellowship at the University of York. Mills’ Routledge Creative Writing Coursebook (2006) demonstrates the methods and standards of his commitment to developing new writing.
Voting for Spring will appeal to readers interested in eco-literature, but it cannot be reduced to this label. While vivid in its images of a marketplace destroyed by a gale, the world as a football sailing down a river, and a Tory MP’s novel in a recycling bin, the book is also urgently personal.
Mills’ previous two collections invoked his time in California on a Fulbright Exchange and return to Yorkshire as a single parent. Through literary, cultural and geographical reference-points, Britain and America were situated in dialogue. Voting for Spring joins these lands, beginning:
Three hundred million years, no Atlantic –
Scotland, America, one mountain coastline.
(‘Brimham Rocks in January’)
However, the focus moves from ecological unity to sinister political mergence. The book’s most haunting question is ‘who is the President of England?’. The question is posed by a psychiatrist in Mills’ twenty-one poem sequence ‘21/2001’, reflecting on his twenty-one year old daughter’s psychiatric illness, which began in the week of the terrorist attacks on America. The personal and national strands are so tightly twisted as to be inseparable, and the repeated question ‘Who is the President of England?’ yields implications of the planet itself undergoing an unprecedented kind of illness in the 21st century.
It is, though, the experience of a family that makes Mills’ ‘21/2001’ remarkable. Other than The Bell Jar, I have encountered no other literature or textbook that so devastatingly, yet truthfully (and thus consolingly) addresses the terrifying unpredictability of some psychiatric illness for both individual and family. The breakdown is also one of language itself for the young woman:
Now she rehearses walking across
the polished surface of words, without taking her eye
off her mind, just in case it slips into a corner
While hope becomes the most persistent but fragile expression in ‘21/2001’, it emerges long before the situation has finished swinging between glimpses of recovery and new extremes of despair:
So we pronounced you you and brought you home.
Two days later your mind slipped from its ledge […]
When you seemed so much yourself
too much to be inside one skin –
she appeared, an excess of you […]
Every morning the shock like new knowledge
after deceitful sleep.
While healing is eventually confirmed, the cautiousness of hope coincides with thankfulness. In this way, ‘21/2001’ honours the book’s overall perspective. Mills ends the sequence not by providing any fixed or reducible resolution, but a look to the ever-evolving landscape:
driving towards the moors one afternoon,
my hands at the wheel turning glooms
of walls and hedgerows light in the last sun,
a field stood out, wrecked, luminous
As well as reflecting on Mills’ travels in Peru, the book presents alternative viewpoints on contemporary England by invoking the country’s past, juxtaposing geological evolution with the modern history of photography and film. Through the latter, Mills expands another longstanding focus throughout his work: the effective ambiguity between technology and (or as) human nature. In Voting for Spring, and also his new pamphlet You Should’ve Seen Us, Mills (who is also a painter) reflects on the relationship between history and photography, as well as (implicitly) that between photography and poetry.
While the camera’s invention sent painters in various new directions, its impact upon poetry was more delayed and has been largely uniform. Many relatively recent poets who have written about photographs – including U. A. Fanthorpe, Ted Hughes, Dianne Wakoski and Jen Hadfield – have focused on photographs that are generations old and usually depict the author’s family. Mills has proven adept at this in earlier volumes, and a highlight of Voting for Spring is ‘My Parents’. This is not without risk: such a title – over a poem beginning
1940, married a year, stopping in front of a camera
outside a church at his brother’s wedding
risks letting the whole piece and the tradition it (initially) follows seem, if not clichéd, then close to wearing out. Yet, ‘My Parents’ indicates how it is at such points that tradition can be forced (or forces itself) towards reinvention.
Mills enables details in ‘My Parents’ and the unshown photograph to convey whole aspects of lifestyle and personality, but gradually becomes a commentary on the incompleteness of all perception. What makes the poem most valuable – long after first putting the book down, I noticed – is how Mills philosophises on photography itself. The effect is similar to that of Manchester artist David Gledhill’s 2008-11 Dr Munscheid Paintings (paintings adapted from photographs), encouraging us to gaze at any photograph from the past with imagination. Mills quietly shows what photography can do to us and others, but more pointedly, how, for earlier generations, the photographic occasion could represent not typicality but anomaly in people’s lives:
She beside him, waiting for the aperture
to click, for the moment to be returned to movement
Although much of Voting for Spring appears autobiographical, it also enriches Mills’ poetry through powerfully convincing contemplations of strangers’ pasts. Essential to this are the group of poems composed in response to selections from the Yorkshire Film Archive, which has prompted Mills’ second new publication from Smith/Doorstop, the large, beautifully illustrated pamphlet You Should’ve Seen Us. This reproduces three poems from Voting for Spring with stills from the films that prompted them, and six new, illustrated poems. These, mostly responding to municipal films of community events, are Mills’ basis for an imagined history from below.
‘Coronation Celebrations, Harrogate, 1937’ accompanies images of a street procession; ‘Almost the whole town, it seemed, on parade’. However, ‘you hated it;/
you refused to participate’. The same poem has ‘Everyone thinking about London,/ even the men doing silly athletics’, before
Upbeat of swingboats, play-time England.
Downbeat of endemic depression, rain.
Meanwhile, ‘1958’ asks ‘Who owns the garden fete?’. The guest of honour Major, the Vicar and the May Queen are all dismissed from the answer, as Mills’ focus transfers to those on the margins of the filmed occasion. An insistent implication through the pamphlet is that the archived films can mask the realities of both local and national community through the very act of parade. It is in imagining back to the mid twentieth century that Mills’ poetry becomes most thought-provokingly political in relation to the present.
Mills’ poems are unflinchingly candid in their reflections on family, ecology, and a de-sentimentalized national past. It is when moving around and between some of the most frequent topics of contemporary poetry that Mills is most inspiringly risk-taking. The risk is that such areas are already overly-familiar. Yet the achievement of Mills’ two new publications is that they continually address prevalent – and important – concerns of current poetry in uncompromisingly stark ways.
James McGrath