A Mesmerising Diorama of Creatures: James Midgley explores the natural world of Meekings and Leviston

Sam Meekings The Bestiary (Polygon Press, 2008) £7.99
Frances Leviston Public Dream (Picador, 2007) £8.99

Sam Meekings’s The Bestiary is a collection of poems centering around – you guessed it – animals. The book is separated into two sections – “Water” and “Air” – and the method throughout is one of observation and then entry into metaphor, as in “Ellipsis” where a “trio of hedgehogs bumbling about / between the dustbins and next door’s fence” become a “panzer formation” in which the speaker “sees a perfect ellipsis”. At its heart the technique is one of domestication; the hedgehogs are inevitably lead, through the sanitization of metaphor, as it were, into the human realm: “The hedgehogs must have sense of the parts of our lives / we leave in other places”. With the notion of “ellipsis” firmly in mind, this makes sense.

A comparison to Hughes is probably unavoidable when looking at these observational accounts of creatures in and out of their habitats. And it is a sensible comparison, given the abundance of brawny sonics and the occasional glimpse into a more tumultuous natural world, as in “The Butcher”:

Chicken heads, pig livers, lamb; world
shrinks tight to a point where it forms
at his throat. Hieroglyphics fizzle
on the cold room walls, waiting by
the stretched skin of weightless lives.
He sharpens knives, cleavers, clenches
his fists to warm his fingers. He bites
his tongue to stop it muttering.

In The Bestiary violence seems most often the result of human interaction with the natural world, as is also the case in “Dissection” where the speaker learns “to cleave the earth in two / and stretch in up to the elbow to pull out / its offal”. This is an obvious departure from the threat of Hughes’s nature, and a similar difference in sound accompanies in Meekings’s more assonant music, filled with the suggestion of internal pararhyme (“cleavers [ … ] fingers” for instance).

This more humane approach to the natural world, employing these observations as stand-ins for human experience, is more reminiscent of the kind of animal poems you might find in John Burnside’s work (outside of The Light Trap); while faithful study plays its part, the creatures do not exist entirely on their own terms, but rather as additives to the poetic brew. Where this is best-handled, it is seamless, and presents an elegant symbiosis, but at times the poems can feel too easily written, or as if the animal is only a convenient entry into the poem:

No it is not with the silent grace of stippled turtles
[ … ]
that you take to the sea, but splashing up a flailing trail
of spray and elbows.

Which finally concludes with, “Yes this is where the dead go, / with turtles to the weightless empire of corral. / You stand at the shore and take the sky into your arms / as if it were a child”. It is difficult to see the turtles here playing much more than a very supportive role to the poem’s machinery.

The Bestiary is an impressive debut, but does have a tendency to play it safe. Perhaps its most striking poem is that beautiful combination of text and white space, “Eels”. In the end Meekings crafts a mesmerizing diorama of creatures – but the reader is not left content to be a mere onlooker, but rather a collaborator in the poet’s naturalistic alchemy.

Frances Leviston’s Public Dream is, as the name suggests, poised at the point where the exterior world is internalized, and vice-versa. The first poem, “Humbles”, indicates this well, describing a deer that has been hit by a car, whose insides are,

what is not meant to be seen,
is packed in cannily, coiled, like parachute silks,
but unputbackable, out for the world to witness

The literal turning-inside-out of the animal is used as material for the final metaphor, where the deer is likened to Judas “still tethered to earth / by all the ropes and anchors of his life”. In this way what might be at first an overly familiar approach, with a reliance on sensationalistic imagery and accompanying sounds, becomes a more interesting and incisive reflection on the poetic process and the manner in which this narrator immediately turns to metaphor to deal with an unsettling encounter.

However the material Leviston uses to power her metaphors, in examining this internalization, is not always sufficiently apposite to guard against the risk of pushing the metaphor too hard. In “Dragonflies” a pair of the insects stands in for the machinations of love:

I think of delicate clumsiness
lovers who have not yet mentioned
love aloud enact,
the shy hands they extend
then retract, the luscious fumbled chase
among small matters seeming massive
as rushes are to dragonflies

Without the excuse of examining how the world is interiorized, the dragonfly-love metaphor appears a little clumsy, even overwrought – above-all, too obvious to have the narrator state it again and again. It is a risky balancing act which works better in the previously-mentioned “Humbles”, and also in “Sheep Skull”, where a resurfacing memory is prompted by the eponymous object:

Thoughts gather, as flies once gathered: helping dip the sheep as a child,
Helping without helping, just greasing my hands on their coats as they passed
From one enclosure to the next.

In this poem the process is more exteriorization, as memory is prompted by and projected onto a physical object. Both this and “Humbles” highlight Leviston’s strength for describing the nitty-gritty, the physical thump of the concrete world. More often, it is in describing the metaphysical, the more abstract internal, where her writing appears less confident. Despite this, it is an attractive difference, as the confidence found in those other poems frequently feels too tried-and-tested, too trustful of the old tricks and tropes of poetry appealing directly to the gut. In contrast, the voices found in poems such as “Incubus” are startling and possess a less familiar kind of imperative. Here, the monologue, filled with subtly changing repetitions, creates a tangible world of fluctuations in tone:

What seems to be the problem is this:
That I was completely alone when it happened.
I don’t mean alone in the room with him,
Alone with him – I mean really alone,
alone with nothing. There was no witness.
I am a victim and cannot be witness.
One must play one role or the other.

The poem is less complete, less sure, but also less closed and more unusual. The sophisticated line of thought displayed throughout the poems in Public Dream is surely indicative that more good things are to come. For now, Frances Leviston’s book is a noteworthy debut.