Boulder Awe Review

Boulder Awe Review
Elisabeth Rowe, author of Timewise, Taking Shape, Thin Ice

The title of this collection captures exactly the relationship between the outer and the inner landscapes that the poet is exploring. My first impression is one of sheer physicality: the moorland environment that comes to life with vivid description and verbal virtuosity. Dawn to dusk, season to season, we are feasted with visual detail:

’…the dusk oak dissolves,
trunk to limb to branch to twig,
into the mauve and tangerine sky
of everything.’

‘Sharp, the moor leat cuts
the granite…’

‘…mine a gem of daysky
from the bruised marauding clouds’

‘I am the land,’ the poet declares, ‘of the same stuff are we’, and this reverberates throughout the collection. The poet enjoys a profound intimacy with his immediate environment, but beyond the purely physical lies the spiritual, the psychological, the mythological, and this too is explored with insight and emotion. He becomes the poet as seer, sensitive to that which lies beneath and above the visible and tangible, and he goes ‘soul cap in hand’,

‘sentenced to pick
the crystal chips
of our collective
weeping’

And there is much to weep about.
‘How many summers do you need/To hear the wisdom on the breeze?’ he asks, in Grow up and die, a particularly graphic and apocalyptic poem, and he talks of times ‘when night is darkest,’ when he feels ‘life is pressed against you’.
‘Stop dying for tomorrow’, he tells us, ‘or living for heaven’. It’s powerful stuff that goes to the heart of the way we live our lives.
And always there is an awareness of time – seasonal, with beautiful observations of the natural environment, geological with references to the granite base of his moorland home, ancestral and familial with references to past and future generations.
Occasionally we catch a touching glimpse of his personal life, when he speaks of his younger self, fatherhood, love, personal struggle.

There’s a wide variety of form in this collection, to match the range of theme, including some lighter effects, as in Butter Dish, and a skilful use of occasional rhyme, both regular and irregular. But it’s the density and intensity of the language, by turns playful and urgent, lightweight and freighted with darker meaning, that engages the reader most.
This is a poet who has a unique relationship with the English language –grammar is re-purposed, and the poems crackle with inventive inversions  – ‘the yawned and stretching day’, ‘until the oasis drinks him’, and dizzying displays of verbal acrobatics! Two small details of the wagtail: ‘posted on the frontline of spring’, and ‘pie-eyed piping your /worm chirp’…Language by turns playful and urgent, lightweight and freighted with darker meaning.
There’s plenty of word-play too – he speaks of the ‘fraying of your seems’, and ‘muscles on a rope’, and the poems are full of wonderful sound effects:

‘Frog-throated
pigeon garbles
her gargoyle song’

Occasionally the meaning is hard to mine from the granite word-layers and sometimes the references are a bit obscure….but the rewards are exciting. Each poem goes beyond itself, and our eyes and ears are opened to worlds seen and unseen, that enrich the imagination. These poems are beautiful and challenging, they need and deserve to be out in the world!