Agapanthus

Betsy Struthers is a poet and novelist and the author of Found: A Body.

Ann York’s second collection of poetry shows an assured talent alive to the music and nuances of language. These poems sing of love lost and betrayed, from the familiar despair of the woman left alone to the grief of a mother whose children grow up and away. York employs dialogue often, counterpointing descriptive passages with italicized asides. These add a further dimension of drama and colour to the poems as characters speak out (as in the title poem) ort as the poet reflects on the situations she describes (see, for instance, “Island”). From the strict style of the sestina “Oyster River” to such imagist fragments as “Partly a Nightmare,” York displays a fine control of language the form and content blended in a satisfying whole.

Of the five sections into which Agapanthus is divided, the second contains the most consistently powerful pieces. The titles tell the story: “Men Who Must Ride Horses”; “Farm at Night”; “George,” the portrait of a drunk (“He’d always loved the bottle / but what man takes to gin?”); “Partly a Nightmare”; “Leaving”; and “This Desire to Weep.” I wish I had the space to quote all of “Farm at Night” with its wonderfully hypnotic monologue in the man’s voice: “The pond? Yes, over there / beside the web of hawthorn bush, / its surface smoking and the geese like figurines. / The hills are watery, but still in place. Yes, / that was where I walked the dogs last night…. “

The final section is a sequence of 13, “The Walsh Poems,” concerning the death by tuberculosis of the young American poet Ernest Walsh in Monte Carlo in 1927. Although they share the same control of line and vividness of imagery, these suffer from the distance between writer and material imposed by the adoption of an historical persona. There are some illuminating moments —

It could be any woman
leaning slightly forward
to capture from the air around
that moment when a brain and heart
subside
the breathless afterglow
him laying down his bones bike violins

(from “The Drawing”). However, after the intensely-felt urgency of the rest of the poems, the historicity of this sequence fails to hold much interest.

On the whole, Agapanthus is a very fine book which well rewards repeated readings.