Staircase wit befalls us all. Three women with first collections published later in life present very different positions on their lives. Isobel Robin has taken the measure of personal experience, laying it out with neither declamation nor anger. Dilemmas of the adults in her youth—spinster teachers, honourable secretaries—grant new meaning to Robin’s own life as she retells their stories. The past can be ‘an old cicatrice long healed’. While ‘Retirement Road’ amusingly observes the present:
Stout wives and husbands,
blindingly white, bend to bowl
intense as virgins
The poet also reports more grimly:
Garrulous widow!
She chatters to a mute shade
in another room.
Robin possesses the perceptiveness of Fanthorpe, the stoicism of Witting. Like them, she can say that ‘we who have passed through youth/should write poems/only to each other’ (‘Dreams and Visions’), as though poetry is an adult conversation, serious even when it is light. And how else can that conversation be held than through reflection on youth and experience?
Her steady control of forms is typical of a generation educated in this extra layer of complexity. Poetry’s age-long challenge of combining the emotional with the rational is met here with a calm, controlled voice. Like poems, ‘Ferries are for short journeys,/here to there/on the drifting difference of water.’ In her poem ‘Ferries’, Robin recounts with deceptive ease different boat trips. We learn quickly that the Antiron ferry ‘joins the road to Delphi/which is a place the same as nowhere else.’ We are told, ‘don’t expect all ferries to oblige with cliches’, a saying that is equally true of the poet herself, especially in her masterful conclusion where she wonders about ‘the last, mysterious ferry ... at Styx Wharf’ and hopes it will be like the Manly ferry: ‘An accolade of pines, and Mother/with picnic lunch and everybody’s swimming togs.’
How we reached such a conclusion is a journey in itself, best taken by reading the book. With wit, Robin comes to terms with the romantic nexus, the golden moon of her teens become ‘blotched’ and old. If she danced beneath the moon now, ‘what would the neighbours think?’
The colour and sweep of the seven seasons of the South-East are prime motivation for Penelope Alexander. Words imitate the small inflections of the natural world, as when ‘the dotterel runs in fleeting spurts’ and a dog charging down the beach has ‘the sun just in front of his nose’. Blake disliked Wordsworth en masse, but confessed delight in single