An author’s first book comes loaded with expectations and anxieties — will it hook readers without being overtly attention-seeking, will it convey originality without having to wear a weasel as a neck tie, will there be recurring Subjects of prime concern or many opportunistic fancies.

John McCullough sets out a fair amount of his stall in ‘Talacre’, the second poem in The Frost Fairs — the shoreline as liminal space, the sea as an agent of separation or death, relationships, permanence vs. impermanence, fixity vs. fluctuation, themes which will recur throughout the book. The narrator and his (new?) partner go

            splatting down with a squelch to write names
            in sand among the casualties

            of starfish, bladderwrack. Messy letters […]

An agent of Mr Death makes a personal appearance in ‘The Last Hangman’, with its subtle infusion of oddity in suburban domesticity: a visit to real hangman and his wife.

            I left with a dry throat and crumbs on my sleeve,
            the executioner grinning as my taxi set off

            and he grew smaller, vanished beneath the road,
            waving constantly, returning my gaze.

The crumbs have followed us down from the nice scone in line two, scattered remains which, alongside ‘dry’, suggest mortality. The hangman himself vanishes ‘beneath the road’ and yet his wave is constant. Permanence and impermanence, but so lightly — almost  lovingly — described. In other poems these tropes can seem rather tired and over-familiar (the car headlights ‘scribbling their names on the dark’) or gently philosophical (‘I could twig that Brighton is unreal, / is being made as we approach’), as McCullough niggles them from various angles, looking for a better hold.

With ‘The Floating World’ the collection begins to find its feet. We’re on the shore once more, the chalk cliffs a museum of hopeless failures:

                                                fossils

            of iguanodon and mammoth strive
            for attention, claw over hoof. Flattened limbs
            stretch wide, a tableau of thirst.

Joining them in death is a cyclist, drowned, whose transformed body the narrator imagines in a dream, and which prompts a long-distance phone call to New York:

            You picked up and I made you describe
            all you could feel and hear and smell:
            your jagged fingernail, a busker’s horn, the box

            of fetid plums left outside your flat
            all week. As well as any voices could, we proved
            your body’s life then planned your journey back.

All the elements are skillfully drawn out: a lover’s paranoia about a partner’s wellbeing, the fruit already in decay, a return journey across the same perilous water.

The fantasy-narrative levels are tweaked up in ‘Georgie, Belladonna, Sid’ with its burst of Polari lingo and wit, and its final lines:

                                    Each dusk I vada
            the ripped-open, scattered rose sky and pray
            to God for the safe return of my blackout.

The amplified gestures in the vocabulary come as a welcome surprise: McCullough rarely goes in for showy effects or eye-popping similes. And, similarly, the fictional lead of ‘The Empress of Mud’ is extravagant and mysterious:

            On every side, the gluey tongues
            of hibiscus. Foolish hummingbirds disappear
            down boas’ throats. My project will not finish.
            An empire must forever be improvised,
            imagined — coffee made with brackish water
            from the wells, crab fed to the chickens.

And yet, as so often in McCullough’s poems, there is a genuine heart — the ‘man-woman’, as the narrator is described, is concerned with relationships and what might be appropriate modes of attachment before declaring in the final line: ‘And nothing I say or build is good enough’. A shockingly naked way to finish a poem whose foreground is presented in an other-worldly, almost whimsical way. McCullough makes you care about his characters, and before you know it you have a lump in your throat.

It may be no coincidence that three of the poems mentioned above are based on others’ true stories; uprooted from their sources, however, they take on a dreamlike quality which is both vivid and emotive, weird but with serious intent, and entirely believable. There’s a sense that McCullough is benefiting from the elastic space, the Orlando-like drift through time and identities. The present-day observational poems pale in comparison.

Also concerned with romantic options is the narrator of ‘Miss Fothergill Observes a Snail’, and whose vision is similarly feverish, ‘the snail ascending my chair leg oversized, / overexposed,’ the scene Edwardian. The dramatic turn is saved for the fourth stanza:

            I adjust my buff cotton skirt, the pleats
            above my organ that in puberty divided
            meetings of the Sexological Society. On advice
            I restrict myself to flirtation and friendship.
            It is a question of pragmatism, of dressing
            the wound. The snail, frustrated by the chair’s rim,
            takes an upside-down journey underneath.

The line breaks at ‘divided’ and ‘dressing’, the re-introduction of the snail turning contrary-wise, inverted, in order to get ahead — this is one of the best poems in the book, an unforgettable encounter.

The poems in which McCullough goes on a trip, imaginatively, are the ones which leave a lasting impression. There are others whose very good-naturedness lets them down, perhaps, and which don’t press hard enough on the language to become that Other Thing, the magic medium. For all the qualities of his measured, unflashy approach, one begins to yearn for a little more linguistic disruption to match the energy of his subjects –  it is an odd irony (or not so odd, perhaps) that poems dealing with the anxieties of self-discovery and self-loss, sex and death, expression and repression, are in the main so conservatively styled. It is the sheer heart-stopping quality of the better poems, however, which make this collection such a rewarding and moving debut.

*  *  *

Anna Robinson’s The Finders of London (Enitharmon) opens with a moon poem, and contains five more: a risky strategy given the ubiquity of the subject, and with the memory of other contemporary shots at it (for example in Jen Hadfield’s Almanacs) still fresh.

            Above the plane tree in the park and moving fast — Lenten Moon —
you silence the birds with fullness. Down here — it’s my neighbour’s
birthday; we sing and laugh not fasting much at all — and you — crisp
as a crust moon, crow and sugar moon, light the yard.

                                    (‘Lenten Moon’)

The saving graces are the Emily Dickinson dashes and the associative flourishes. In the next, ‘Egg Moon’, the moon is roped-in to the narrator’s surroundings, the Department of Health building, the Mission, both of which take on an unearthly hue in this context. Come the next, ‘Milk Moon’, we are verging on the unsettled surrealism of Charles Simic or Vasko Popa:

            Milk moon, our mother is gone. We have looked everywhere.
            All we can see is the she-wolf. Somewhere, I read that it all
            depends on how wide we open our eyes. Corn moon, lately we
            have only been able to make out the bare outline of something.

And so the others continue and build on various levels of lunacy (‘Tomorrow I must shift / boxes, I must move earth. Flower moon, this does not end.’ … ‘A mouth has grown in the back of my head, Blue Moon.’) and have enough hooks to capture the unsuspecting reader.

The city of London, past and present,  looms large in almost all of the poems in this first collection. The title poem is made up of three sections: ‘Mud Lark’, ‘Tosher’, and ‘Pure-Finders’, all three prefaced with a description of these Victorian scavenging occupations, the last two by Henry Mayhew, author of the compendious and compelling London Labour and the London Poor (circa 1850-1860).

‘Mud Lark’ begins in the present day but in an atmosphere of heightened sensory awareness which elevates the moment to a weird pitch:

            There are lines and lines of sound falling in layers.
            She’s below the line of café chatter,
            neighs of laughter, bleeps of tills, phones

The narrator is omniscient and no-nonsense, and the female protagonist is unnamed and un-characterized. The sound of an opening iron gate triggers the switch into time past or a past life in which the heroine first grounds herself (‘My foot must touch the sand’) and goes searching the tide line for usable odds and ends (‘masonry nails pretty with rust, / some old stems of clay tobacco pipes’). No sooner has this been registered than another door ‘appears in the river wall’, at which she listens, only to hear the twice-repeated ‘Can you do it, can you bear it, can you bear not to?’

This is all very mysterious, very Alice down rabbit holes, with perhaps a nod to the multi-layered realities invoked in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. This is no ribbons and bows reverie, though: we are travelling with the underclass. Mayhew says of the mud-larks:

They may be seen of all ages, from mere childhood to positive decrepitude, crawling among the barges at the various wharfs along the river; it cannot be said that they are clad in rags, for they are scarcely half covered by the tattered indescribable things that serve them for clothing; their bodies are grimed with the foul soil of the river, and their torn garments stiffened up like boards with dirt of every possible description.

Without pause for explanation the ‘Tosher’ section begins with a reiteration or retracing of steps (‘A small brown door appears in the river wall’). A male spirit guide provides her with the tools of a tosher’s trade (lantern, bag, apron, hoe) and she comes to a company of chattering rats whose king advises:

            Good Toshers who don’t flam get treated nice
            down here. But, don’t you be a dollymop;
            each ding, each gift is a lesson, take them away,

            study hard.

Accepting this premise, we’re James in his giant peach or on the couch with Carl Jung. The final section explains that pure-finders collect dog turds, and a friendly dog tells us:

            This is a tanyard and this leather needs tanning.
            […]
            Purify him! She looks at the skin
            stained with flesh and asks, how can I do this?
            The dog replies, use what I give you
           
Notions of purification, of base materia working the transformation, lead us to the psychology of alchemy. It is a curious poem all in all — the extraordinary events are described with an absolute flatness of tone, and the style is prosaic. The protagonist is a nameless agent whose function is to reflect her surroundings, and the significance of the (dream) journey to this individual is neither stated nor suggested. Striking, and yet oddly unresolved.

Elsewhere in the book are more directly affecting poems (‘Operation at St Thomas’ Hospital for Poor Women’, ‘The Scavenger’s Daughter’, ‘From Paul’s Wharf Stairs’) and some absolutely hair-raising ones. ‘Chimney’ could be an account of an innocent climbing-boy, after Blake’s ‘The Chimney Sweeper’, or another puzzling dreamscape. It ends:

            […] if I ask I can find out what this is all about.
            The snow-melt slides from my feet and forms a puddle.
            There is no bridge or stepping stone, and no trowel.

The gate-keeper in the poem of the same name is at once a London Labour character and St Peter welcoming the newly dead, the narrator-visitor stating grimly:

            I began again;
            collecting up bones, shaking mud
            from my flesh, as was expected.

By the end of the final poem in the book, ‘Agnus’, we have strayed into Christopher Smart territory and the words invoke something close to an out-of-body experience:

            Lamb, all winter I wear black to absorb the sun.
            Red is not as good at this. It is only for inside.
            Lamb, my mother had a dream,
            the whole family lived separately in sheds
            in the back yard. It was dark and cold.
            When we went to find each other, we weren’t there.

            Lamb, who exalts what the world gets wrong,
            heals wounds, smoothes troubles, loving lamb
            feel for us.

As Smart declared in Jubilate Agno, ‘I am not without authority in my jeopardy,’ a phrase which might serve as an epigraph to this wonderful book.

The underlying strength of this collection, somewhat missing in McCullough’s daylight dispatches, is the electrifying contact with the subconscious. If you like a high Uncanny content in your poems, you will love The Finders of London. Having said that, Robinson’s elaborate trajectories contain high levels of coded significance, whereas McCullough is confident enough to wear his heart on his sleeve; a different measure of risk. Both authors make life-saving journeys towards self-definition via the energies and vocabularies of other lives, other times, while recasting the present day in all its shifting uncertainties and subterranean continuities. Both make judicious use of the Theatrical to establish the sense of wider community, bonds of attachment, bonds of responsibility. Buy them both, and support their publishers.

A.B. Jackson