|
Underneath the BoughBough? Wow!UNDERNEATH THE BOUGH Ouch. Fetching cover, neat title, but if you decide to use Omar Khayyam as a way into your own second collection of verses, please, please avoid a double mis-quotation on your title page! Even the hymn by Samuel Davies (an ancestor?) gets in a bit of a muddle on page 42. However, this is an often appealing little book; a thoughtful present for someone whose own writing could be encouraged by it. It comes from a generation which remembers cigarette cards, and patches of grass where local lads played cricket in the summer rather than round-the-year football. The author has a sharp eye for detail and a ready pen for the small incident. Are his half-rhymes and mixed rhymes clever, careless, or a mixture? One of my favourites is the almost flawless 'Love's Philosophy'; he must have been relaxing with Marvell or Milton. But the first poem (the second best?) is by far the longest; 19 pages of 'The Pilgrim's Way'. A sequence of cameos which is harder to write than it looks; part-delightful, part-demanding, but what about these first four words, 'I chose the path?' Is he still teasing? Not so much 'ouch' as 'wow!' Christopher Idle, Peckham© Evangelicals Now - February 2002 |