{"id":7634,"date":"2017-06-12T19:05:01","date_gmt":"2017-06-12T18:05:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=7634"},"modified":"2017-06-26T12:31:14","modified_gmt":"2017-06-26T11:31:14","slug":"william-palmer-the-water-steps-reviewed-by-ian-pople","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=7634","title":{"rendered":"William Palmer, The Water Steps<\/em>, reviewed by Ian Pople"},"content":{"rendered":"
William Palmer, The Water Steps<\/em> (Rack Press, \u00a39.95).<\/h5>\n

There is a corner of English poetry which is forever Georgian. It traces its roots back to Edward Thomas and tends to go there directly; it does not pass Larkin and has a nodding genuflection to Yeats, but it goes straight to Thomas. This means that it is often resolutely English, though without Hill\u2019s fossicking in the long barrow of English civil conflict, and without Auden\u2019s partiality for the mechanisms of geology or the industrial revolution. But that does not mean that it is pallid or etiolated. It gazes directly and without favour on the world it finds around it. One of its most important members, Nicholas Murray, is an accomplished satirist, whose A Dog\u2019s Brexit<\/em> was reviewed here<\/a> recently. And Murray\u2019s dog was not a quiet lap dog but, though pettable, was happy to bite the ankles of the Coalition and the May government. And that Englishness should not be confused with \u2018little-Englandism\u2019; Murray has also written sympathetically and empathetically of the refugees coming over the Mediterranean. But the poetics of the neo-Georgians tend to the short lyric, and English under-statement is often the watch word, although under that understatement is a reservoir of deep feeling and focused attention.<\/p>\n

William Palmer\u2019s The Water Steps<\/em>, published by Murray\u2019s Rack Press may be a representative of that grouping, but Palmer\u2019s is a particularised and individual voice. In \u2018The Exhumation of Lizzie Siddall,\u2019 muse to another very British grouping, the Pre-Raphaelites, Siddall\u2019s body is not the focus of the poem. Instead, it is \u2018The book wrapped\/ in her lovely hair [that] is mildewed,\u2019 which is the focus of the \u2018narrative\u2019 of this sixteen line poem. When the body is exhumed, by some \u2018miracle,\/ she is quite unchanged.\u2019 But it is this book<\/em>, whose nature is never defined or described, which is the object of the exhumation, and which \u2018the poet\u2019s representative\u2019 takes. Thus Palmer\u2019s quiet lyric accretes a real sense of the uncanny, and the process of the exhumation, and the resealing of the coffin after the book is retrieved, achieves a striking, yet understated, horror.<\/p>\n

Palmer is a master, if one is allowed to use that gendered word, of not only the uncanny but the sense that the world he writes about sits at a slight tangent to whatever we might call \u2018normal.\u2019 In \u2018The Priest of Dreams,\u2019 the priest \u2018rises as the birds\/ take shape and call,\u2019 and when he reads it is \u2018from the saints \u2013 all those\/ uninnocent, other men\/ – until the trees unshroud\/ and stand about.\u2019 Palmer\u2019s achievement here is the deft, beguiling placement of a few words which just nudge the view out of kilter, \u2018the birds take shape,\u2019 \u2018those uninnocent, other men\u2019 and \u2018the trees unshroud.\u2019 There\u2019s a quiet, technical mastery in the choices which gives Palmer\u2019s \u2018out-of-kilter\u2019 a strength and reality which anchors these uncanny moments. Thus these small narratives both settle and reach out at the same time; there\u2019s a feeling of trust engendered in these poems; we feel we can believe the text worlds Palmer describes.<\/p>\n

Palmer is also a poet of deep empathies. In \u2018Letter to my Daughter,\u2019 he\u00a0uses a line from Keats \u2018The Eve of St Agnes,\u2019 \u2018The hare limped trembling through the frozen grass,\u2019 to meditate on the love a father can and cannot give a daughter, culminating in the heart-breaking, \u2018that what\u2019s not given can never be returned,\/ that words not given when they\u2019re sought\/ limp, tremble, rot into a frozen ground.\u2019<\/p>\n

This is a book of beautiful poems, each of which catches a different facet of the light and uses it to shine upon a different corner of a singular, and beautifully achieved world. It is a book to be noticed.<\/p>\n

Ian Pople<\/h5>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

William Palmer, The Water Steps (Rack Press, \u00a39.95). There is a corner of English poetry which is forever Georgian. It traces its roots back to Edward Thomas and tends to go there directly; it does not pass Larkin and has a nodding genuflection to Yeats, but it goes straight to Thomas. This means that it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nWilliam Palmer, The Water Steps, reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=7634\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"William Palmer, The Water Steps, reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"William Palmer, The Water Steps (Rack Press, \u00a39.95). 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