An important aspect of the poetry of Audrey Ardern-Jones is its humanity. Perhaps it is a failure of mine, to perceive it that often in the poems of others. Certainly, in Time in Pleats and Folds, it is there for all to see.

‘A Makeshift Diner’ refers to the “tunes of kindness in other languages”. In ‘Imaginings & Happenings’ the poet notices “a man alone/ at the next table  his face broken hearted / I offer him a slice of cake”.

Another element for this poet is her Polish ancestry. In ‘Ghazal – Voices’ she is seeking “voices of my Polish family never mentioned – hidden voices … my mother’s story, why she chose to leave, / leave her other life”. She imagines “Lwów’s freeze in WWII, who white deceives, / deceives the innocent – bodies in snowflakes.”  

Some poems read like scenes from a film. Her mother was the image of Marlene Dietrich, speaking English “with a thick-honey accent”, and who “smoked all day despite TB/ breast cancer, warnings from doctors”. Watching a video of Pope John Paul’s UK visit with two Polish priests, a letter arrives, redirected many times, from a long-lost sister in Warsaw, followed by a phone call -  “the sisters speak in stammers and stuttered tears” (‘A Miracle of Timings’). There is a trip through Lwów, which is now Lviv, and part of Ukraine in 2017: “in my head / I hear Mother speaking in her broken English”; ‘My Mother’s House Speaks’ tells of "days of lavish culture …  years of swastikas defacing walls … Families have hidden in sewers in my rat-infested basement”. 

‘They Offer Themselves Up’, dated February 2022, pays tribute to Ukraine’s fight against Russia’s invasion, and recalls casualties of other wars on this same battleground:

 

     This place hides my history of unmarked graves,

     fields of bones buried deep underground, faces

     I never knew. In my head I hear my mother

     imploring the Russian soldiers to exit now.

 

In her previous collection Audrey Ardern-Jones has written about her nursing career, and she returns to it here, in poems including ‘Night Duty’, ‘The Blood Room’, ‘Locked Inside’ and ‘Girl in Bed’, before moving on to her husband in hospital (‘Unstable Angina & Meanings of God & Other Lives’).

Like a number of other collections being published now, this one also has its segment of Covid poems, which I tend to speed-read these days, until ‘Stranger in the Vaccination Queue’ and a “lady in a fur coat with a German accent” and the story she tells brings me up short.

The interest of this poet in other people is reflected in ‘Neighbours Wrapped in a Sestina’, a celebration of diversity, the line endings a succession of different names. An older person’s warmth towards a young child is captured in ‘After Three Miscarriages & an Ectopic’:

 

     You turned a dulled sky in the afternoon

     into a kaleidoscope of multi-colours.

     Nowadays, each time I see you, a whirl

     fills my heart, lifts me like a balloon.      

 

The acknowledgements at the end of this conversational and crafted collection - the cover design of the book is from one of her own paintings - include grateful thanks to poetry workshops where “many of the poems in this book have been created”, and particularly to Coffee House Poetry’s Anne-Marie Fyfe & Cahal Dallat “for so many inspiring online writing courses”. It’s a clue to the fact that poems are not always created in isolation, and to this poet’s generosity in recognising that fact.

Nevertheless, the family history and life of Ardern-Jones seem to have given her a unique perspective and wisdom, encapsulated in the profound and strangely comforting collaborative title poem that opens the collection. It includes a number of lines from the seventh century Chinese poet Li Bai, including this one: “the living is a passing traveller, the dead, a man come home.”   

 

Audrey Ardern-Jones, Time in Pleats and Folds, Indigo Dreams, £10