NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

This collection, published by Oversteps, contains new poetry by Will Daunt together with some from two previous collections published by the late Grendon House.

Daunt continues to be fascinated by the impact of time. He notes his impressions of austere landscapes, abandoned villages and charts change. Glimpsing down the titles of RUNNING OUT OF ENGLAND, England seems to be still very much there: the south west: Exmoor, the Mendips, and further north: a large number are devoted to Lancashire, Cumbria, Eigg and more. Lurking in between are signs of trips abroad...Giotto, Roscoff, Ijesselmeer, Brussels, Aqbal... and especially northern Europe. Many an invitation to a journey.

Isolated roads and villages and valleys abound. In nearly all of them, there is an economy of language that mirrors both the harsh landscapes and the personal tragedies. LOST ONE is a bleak moving sequence on a still birth, where the accumulation of technical words — from the freeze-frame, scanner, disconnecting, plug, of the first two poems contrast with the bleakness of the aftermath —

	nothing beyond the empty branch, 
	and a child without a brother,
	the silence.

	as dark as they numb.

	unfound by the map-gang.

	Mondays... 
		is the moor
	you're allowing
	to ooze through your mind.

	And on a rise
	of roots and moss, 
	the quarry ends, 
	well overrun.
 
	A sandstone town
	was unearthed here, 
	its paths disperse
	towards elsewhere.
 
	Some underpin
	an upland arc,
	where fields succeed
	or towns might be, 
 
	and others merge
	where railways died, 
	on mounds that lie
	like boundaries. 
 
	Behind all this 
	goes Lancashire,
	The farms run down
	the walls are wide, 
 
	and where it lay
	it ends, and there
	where sunsets rise
	the city flares.

This collection gives bleakness and alienation a rhythmic thrust that leaves a reader more breathless than bereft. Good writing transmits energy from its creator to the page; and Mr Daunt is a dynamo. Even in the set of longish-lined iambic poems, which begin the book, he persuades us the lines are short. They rattle along, almost counterpoint to their content — from MOTHER BESIDE HERSELF:

	could name you the husbands she'd sooner have stunned,
	but opted for one who left no turn unstoned;

	threw dear things to chance, took the cheap on the chin
	living hand-to-purse days, in the scrabble for change;

	worked acres of hours her unchosen field
	and used them to guess how she'd once planned to feel;

	This was the place where your home had a heart
	and you are displayed on its albums and walls.
	Each year that you lived here it felt more apart.

	A playpen of hills, drew your primary chart
	that boundary of bridleways, outcrops and falls
	encircled the place where your home had a heart.

	and I'm here on my mobile, I've
	switched it on now, and it means I'm
	able and itching to speak.  I'm
	stuck on some beach, weather's naff. I've
	let the rest walk to the sea.  Yes, I'd

	...
				I'm
	breaking up?  Sounds good to me.

It is perhaps noticeable (when reading one poem after another) that there is a tendency to employ clusters of up-front alliteration; this is not too much of a problem when mindful of Mr Daunt's clear, intelligent, and unique voice.