Deborah Harvey’s fourth collection is very readable and accessible, augmented by notes at the back of the book. She has taken a range of themes, from ‘The Good Dogs of Chernobyl’, the first poem, to grief and family relationships, and explored the inhumanity that human beings can inflict, not just upon  each other, but upon nature, on animals and on the opposite gender.

There’s a thread of feminism running through the poems, not misplaced in a poem like ‘The fragrance of Clara Schumann’. Clara is not intimidated by the behaviour of her cuckolded husband’s famous friend Brahms, but contemptuous:

 

     he can’t get away fast enough once we’re done.

     There he flusters, the famous composer,

     cursing his collar stud…

 

     … while I’m still spread on the bed, laughing,

     sticky as the sweet jam tarts he likes

 

From the notes we learn that the poem is based on a quotation from Brahms about his greed for women that makes Donald Trump look positively gentlemanly.

There’s abuse and murder of women and girls in the background of ‘Sensible Shoes’, linked in the notes to the Fred and Rosemary West murders of women in Gloucestershire in the 20 years before they were caught in 1987. It’s a ‘what might have been’ story which the narrator’s friend has put behind her, making light of it. But the poem almost becomes a ghost story:

 

     But this was before our January tour

     of mid-Somerset churches

 

     the final chancel carcase cold, with some vast presence

     malevolent, old, cooped up inside

 

Much more chilling is ‘Nature Notes’, a list of incidents in which women and children have been abused and killed in domestic settings, and a comment on the damage done to those who survive.

There are ekphrastic poems on the theme of female empowerment or its opposite, too. Leonora Carrington’s paintings in a recent London exhibition are the inspiration for a sequence in which Harvey comments on Carrington’s relative powerlessness in comparison with “Maestro Max … Leonora’s shaman".

 

     He paints her

     tangled in briars and vines

 

     she paints herself

     frozen in the background

 

From the images in the paintings, as well as her biographical knowledge of Carrington’s emigré life, she deduces:

 

     She is brooding mysteries in her head,

     her unhatched visions sprout strange

     feathers in their egg.

                                   (‘The Giantess (the Guardian of the Egg)’)

 

Harvey’s poems about father-daughter relationships and about death are some of the strongest in the collection. ‘Complicity’ approaches a small girl’s feeling of inadequacy in her father’s eyes through his attitudes to the birds he feeds: “the dully-coloured, cheapjack jesters, the ones like puddles under cars he’d scare away”. But his daughter sees

 

     a greenfinch deep in leaves, feathers mossed

     with yellow edges, barred by shuttered sun.

 

              Only something small and drab knows its beauty.

 

In the sequence ‘Black Seeds’ she remembers the death of her father in eight free-verse sonnets linked last line to first line by concepts and phrases. The form moves the sequence on through the roads in which she drives to reach her dying father, aware, too, that she must come to terms with “the wreath of black seeds that was lying / dormant at your core.”

Interwoven among these poems referencing gender politics and topical themes are landscape poems containing phrases of vivid beauty, visual and kinetic. In “Touchstone” she exhorts

 

     Let your flesh feel the gravel of wind-thrown rain

     the luxurious burn of summer gorse…

 

     and the road back home is slow with cows

     and quick with swallows.

 

Deborah Harvey’s sensibility is effectively rooted in the landscape, memories and stories of the West Country where she lives. In this collection she offers a varied bouquet of stories and meditations, gentle, yet tough in her honesty. As she says in ‘Try Yoga’, she writes to

 

     feel the roar that is passing

     silently through the mountains

     as poetry’s teeth close on your nape

     and it drags you

     unprotesting

     deeper into jungle.

 

It’s a good enough reason to write your world.

 

Deborah Harvey, The Shadow Factory, Indigo Dreams, £9.99