The Garden is the second book from this new small press in West Yorkshire, an anthology of rather delightful garden poems. I wouldn’t go quite so far as the editors to describe it as  “stunning”,  principally because I dislike the current fashion of terming everything “amazing”, “stunning”, “‘brilliant” - but I am very happy to go along with BBC gardening expert Bob Flowerdew, who describes the poems as “imaginative” and “inspiring” in his introduction to the book.

Let our poems be as our gardens (well, maybe not in my case) and let our gardens be endlessly inspiring , be they mud patches where dandelions struggle on,  geranium-heaped window boxes, terraces, patio tubs, or parterres with tightly clipped borders,  much beloved of the stately home.  The memories of the rows (and rows!), the quick and the dead, the care and the love, the watching of the patient work through a window are all encompassed here.   There is humour too, in Ray Snape’s ‘My garden’: “And all at once I saw a crowd/a host of golden dandelions.”

A line from a poem by Dorothy Frances Gurney says:  “One is nearer God’s heart in a garden/Than anywhere else on earth.”

Here we are also nearer to death and the glorious, messy merry-go-round  that is life.  How much of any of it do we ever own?  Nick Blundell wisely points out in his poem  ‘It waits for me’: “It is no more mine than the cat/it owns, mocks, shames me/shakes a cloddy fist/waves a brambly finger ....”  This is my personal view of gardening, something that is always there waiting, making you feel guilty, a task that can never be accomplished.

It is the ongoing nature of that which grows beyond the windows that brings us so close to the realisation of the temporariness of everything.  A building will last perhaps for several hundred years.  It will have at least the appearance of permanence.  A concrete road will crumble if weeds are allowed their rampant way. Yet, we know if there is a moment when the cherry tree is at its most perfect, the winds will have the blossoms off in a day or so;  the open rose will die, or tragically we will forget how to name it (Louise Holmes, ‘The names of flowers’).

There is gardening as life: “Now there’s more time for weeding/kneeling in long silence” (DA Prince, ‘At grass’) as well as gardening as metaphor for life. Laura Bobrow writes  in ‘Mother’s garden’: “I need her now to order the garden of my life/this wild overgrown disaster …”.    Where there is life there must also be death, and we are reminded of the garden as memorial:

 

     She’s clearing around the magnolia stellata

     They planted in memory of their unborn child.

(Cora Greenbill, ‘Bud’). 

 

I particularly admired the final poem in the collection, John Foggin’s ‘Grand Designs’ for its use of form, internal and slant rhyme, as well as its innovative theme of a Capability Brown style character conversing with a client. 

Frances Spurrier

 

The Garden: Poems that will grow on you, Otley Word Feast Press, £8