|
This is a remarkable book, the product of a lifetime's
endeavour. Elizabeth Bewick, now in her late eighties, has produced in As
Good As Salt a collection of poems which
does everything you would want of good poetry. It is her third Peterloo
collection, the others being Heartsease from 1991 and Making a Roux from 2000. Before these came Comfort Me With Apples in 1987 in a limited edition from Florin Press.
Readers who know the earlier collections will unfailingly recognise a poet
who can be relied on to produce not only meticulously crafted work but
writing which is moving, engaged, deeply thoughtful and unhesitatingly
honest. It is a perfect combination: mature experience honestly confronted
and explored in beautifully disciplined poems. Those who do not yet know her
work are advised to remedy the situation immediately.
Though she has written for most of her life, Elizabeth Bewick only began
publishing after her retirement from a career in librarianship, in particular
in the School Library Service, which, following her move from County Durham,
she set up in Hampshire in 1941. She has for over thirty-odd years lived in a
centuries-old cottage in Winchester and been active for a long time in local
poetry groups there.
Love is not just the province of the young. In her sixties Elizabeth Bewick
was surprised by joy: she fell in love. In her own words: 'Falling literally
madly in love at over sixty was both a shock and a delight and resulted in
number of love poems.' The first third of As Good As Salt gives us poems of extraordinary tenderness and, to
use a word Jeremy Hooker likes to apply to her work, vulnerability. These
love-songs-in-age are unflinchingly open and honest and tinged with
inevitable sadness, regret and a difficult-to-attain stoicism following her
beloved's death. I read these poems with a lump in my throat, the kind of
lump-in-the-throat the late poems of Hardy bring Ð not because they lean on
you emotionally but because they are heart-stoppingly true. This is life lived in the pulse.
They are so hard to quote from, because, like true poems, they follow their
own inevitable trajectories to endings that deliver real clinchers. But try
this sinuous fifth section from the sequence Love Songs Grave and
Gray:
Swathed in
the lapping silk
of
Badedas-scented water Ð
foaming like
ass's milk Ð
a Cleopatra's
daughter,
content to
dream away
the time that
should be spent
in planning
of my day
with
purposeful intent,
I lie and
think of you
in sensuous
delight,
as green
Badedas dew
dispels the
shades of night.
or the splendidly erotic last dozen lines of Sahara Dust:
But not for
you I made
the
bitter-sweet of marmalade;
for you
there'll always be
a store of
natural honey
waiting to be
spread
upon my
home-baked bread,
honey so pure
and rare
you will not
even care
how long it
has been stored,
in heart of
oak matured,
or mellowed
by the years
of my
too-certain tears.
or the ending of Grief IsÉ
A kind of anger, love crossed
with
self-pity and a strange
resentment
because you have left me only
a sense of
loss, a gap
that no-one
can ever fill,
an emptiness
where there should be music.
Such directness, to paraphrase Eliot, costs not less than everything.
And the same has to be said for all the other poems in the book, poems for
example of suffering and serious illness, of being in hospital Ð all
documented with clear-sighted honesty, without a whiff of self-pity or
special pleading, and with no desire to rub the reader's nose in it:
Confused and
tearful
the new
patient lies, convinced it is late
and she has
not eaten,
not
remembering the visitors who came
with flowers
and love.
Three weeks
is not long
to get used
to the fear of total dependency,
but long
enough
to recognise
the stark terror of skidding
out of
control.
['Confusion']
Painful though the experiences detailed in many of the poems may be,
Elizabeth Bewick makes us constantly aware in all of them of a solid core of
life lived consciously and to the full, accepting the good with the bad, and
still able to find consolations in the daily round, in simple domestic
activities like making jam, in aspects of nature and certain landscapes, in
her Christianity and her faith in poetry but above all in friendship as the
most sustaining and valuable of human interactions. The book is dedicated to
friends and its title is taken from an anonymous poem quoted as epigraph
whose last line is 'As good as salt my friends to me.' In other words the
real and abiding subject of the book is love and the 'holiness of the heart's
affections.'
Whether in sonnet or villanelle or free verse Elizabeth Bewick's
craftsmanship is exemplary. A lifetime of honing away at serious poetry
composition has born extraordinary fruit. The poems in this collection
celebrate love; they accept vulnerability and make beautiful poems out of it.
The collection ends with the words:
Still a
teenager at heart, I revel in now,
confounding
convention, surrounding myself with
admiring
young men, and living it up
in my
eighties.
Long may Elizabeth Bewick revel in the now.
© Matt Simpson
2006
|