NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

The majority of the poems in this collection (although by no means all) reveal a failed attempt to disentangle themselves from the more mundane concerns of everyday life. In fairness to Utting this is merely the latest symptom of the ever growing trend in poetry towards a more prose-like and prosaic register. In FLOOD we can see this in the opening stanza with a description of the affects of rain:

	The lawn is a lake and still it comes down,
	it lashes and sluices down gutter and glass,
	the yard is an eddy of flowerbeds and dross
	and I am reminded of stories of sandbags
	stacked on a river bank, four deep, ten high,
	the unstoppable Ouse, lost fortunes and lives,
	bulb fields and orchards, whole nurseries of glass
	swept along, swept away in the rush to the sea.

	poured the salt in a steady stream into cellars,
	a glass row of thimblefuls, measured for morning,
	then brushed what he spilt, over the table into his
	cupped hand;

Alongside the prose-like register of the poems in this volume is the equally prose-like requirement for accurate observation and faithful description of objects and events. This is evidenced in ON THE EIGHTH DAY where she describes the affect of dust falling on everyday objects:

	they saw it profile objects,
	cloud the mirrors, turn black
	into grey, they saw a lacquered
	box grow dull, the cuts and facets
	on a crystal bowel fill up and soften.

It is interesting that Utting utilises quotations from artists, writers and poets interspaced between her poems. One such is Coleridge's statement from BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA regarding his conception of "the fancy" :

The Fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space.

His ideas about the fancy grew out of his wider theory on the nature of the imagination. He conceived of the imagination in two parts: the primary imagination, and the secondary imagination (an examination of which would take too long and distract us from our main point of interest). From these two categories Coleridge further subdivided the imagination to posit the concept of fancy. For him the fancy is the lowest form of imagination because it 'has no other counters to play with but fixities and definites'. In other words the fancy involves no act of creation, it is merely a reconfiguration of existing ideas — unlike the primary and secondary imaginations.

Another quotation of interest is the following by Louise Bourgeois:

The sculpture speaks for itself and needs no explanation. My intentions are not the subject. The object is the subject. Not a word out of me is needed.

In the poem CONDENSATION we can see an instance of this subject/object fusion in practice. In this poem she observes that her inability to cry at certain everyday aspects of life (such as weddings) becomes objectified and replayed through memories of her father who was able to cry at

	everything the Queen said and when people won
	big prizes on a quiz show and whenever any kind of
	goal was scored by anyone on either side at any match

	marriages or royalty, at TV jackpot winners
	or at sports events unless I am reminded
	of the way my father always did.

Indeed, the first stanza of the poem where we are given a skilful description of raindrops fusing into one another as they slide down a window can now, in light of what we have discovered from the rest of the poem, be seen to be a metaphor for this fusion. Similarly, the word for word repetition of this description directly following its first appearance can be seen as a metaphor for the circular nature of her experience. We as readers, unfortunately, have been excluded from this process by necessity and are only allowed to be observers to this union. Our emotional involvement and imaginative collaboration has been short-circuited.

That Utting is a talented writer is beyond doubt. Her use of simile, metaphor, and description are skilfully executed. But she is at her best when she allows herself to be free of the constraints of what I call "the creative writing workshop syndrome": the obsessive desire to introduce into poetry the techniques and tone of prose-fiction. Utting excels most when she allows herself to be lyrical and elliptic. It is in poems such as THE ART OF FALLING, THE QUIET MAN, HERE LIES, THE EMPEROR'S LAST NIGHTINGALE, to name but a few, that her real talent can be seen.