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REVIEWS of Many Waters

Church Times 27 July 2007
Looking beyond to what is holy
Martyn Halsall enjoys poems that spring from a year spent in and round Truro

Many Waters: Poems from ten months at Cornwall’s cathedral
Victoria Field
Fal Publications £6 (978-0-9544980-7-8)

THIS COLLECTION of poetry by Victoria Field represents “ten months at Cornwall’s cathedral”. It therefore raises the issue of how a cathedral, both as building and as a community, might be presented by a poet-in-residence.

Field offers an elastic response, spending the months as much out and about in the county as in the cathedral close. Hers is a Celtic translation: that of a pilgrim seeking spiritual significance as much among old clothes, the homeless, or down a back street, as within what is officially holy.

Her poems celebrate the practical care of cathedrals (“Gifts of the Women of Truro”), the way in which she, Field, can “read the birds” (“December Walk”). Her tone is interrogative yet respectful, neatly contrasting gifts of jewellery from wealthy Londoners with the liberating wonders of the natural world.

Such negotiations come together in a poem such as “Doing Theology”, where she casts questions at a child hearing “bright and terrible stories of scripture”, and needing a spectrum of earthed experience through which to interpret them.

Many of her poems are similarly tentative and questioning, moving between cathedral and countryside in exploratory steps. The overall journey of the book is frequently edgy, as in the poem “The Crossing Place”, where teenage male choristers (“exuberant, rampant with life, callow and beautiful”) are contrasted with “the old lady”, who is similarly on the cusp, nursing her cat in a cold room.
The quality of writing is diverse. Field has sometimes a tendency to over-write her work, as when she adds a wrecking “Amen” to a sensitive study of disability (“Echoes”), or includes an unnecessary final couplet in an evocative poem about the language of birdsong (“Wren”).

She keeps the best to last. “Pastoral” is a keenly observed and sensitively interpreted account of “a flock of small children” visiting the cathedral. The nine lines of her last poem “Going Up-Country” show her at her most perceptive and economical. Here a whole debate is sketched in taut, deft images, with modesty and irony that open a potential volume.

It shows what poets-in-residence can contribute, and why they are essential.

Martyn Halsall is communications adviser to the Blackburn diocese and poetry editor of Third Way.

Lapidus Magazine Spring / Summer 2007

After the bleak materialism and insufferably egotistic shut-mindedness of Richard Dawkins, what a treat it is to fall upon these poems - 'a sufficient sheaf' by any reckoning. The sense of delight appears right at the start - with feet. Not perhaps the most euologised part of our anatomies, with a remembered dignity here from scripture, which Victoria Field plays on, adding her own inimitable poet's tenderness: 'their fret of small bones untouched, unseeing', with 'fret' carrying an almost pun on 'feet'. These poems themselves constitute a cathedral, invoking a mood of reflection that may be more conventional than Larkin's in Church Going, but producing lines that are, like Larkin's, (to use his own word) equally 'unignorable', like the last line of Five Windows:

Sea eats the starlight, swallows it whole.

From such cosmic images she can turn you with a shock to something homely but equally startling, like the old lady recently widowed, looking through glass 'for the old man in blue overalls/who wouldn't be in for his tea'. The simplicity here is breathtakingly deceptive, reminding me of Milton's insistence that poetry should be 'simple, sensuous, passionate'. If he fails to meet at least one of his own criteria, Vicky Field scores a hat-trick.

There again, how can you write poems about seasons any more? She does. Or about struggling with your craft or sullen art? And just as you think a set of images has been too self-consciously constructed (poems in progress are foetuses 'encased in amniotic plastic sacs from Woolworths', or in December ('illuminated manuscripts of pheasant/have too many colours on one page'), she hits you at the end with that kind of Larkinesque after-effect (cf. his Sad Steps), that leaves you eerily, endlessly reflecting:

On the longest night, grey clears to black
moon in a curtainless window
indexing my days.

It's the required frisson and she delivers it, quite lethally. These are no Vicar of Dibley's poems. Such pieces allow her ample licence to practise her more conventional devotions, as in Many Waters itself, where Cornwall's Cathedral is so lovingly personified, and the title ripples with scripture. Many waters cannot quench love.

Of course this collection shimmers with spiritual awareness, and of course with the images you would expect from a cathedral poet - votive candles, icons. But each awareness, each image, goes off in a direction of its own, steered by the poet's indomitable intelligence, charting her own private anxieties. So the votive candles, lit one after another, become daisy chains, bringing back to her those old summers, the 'slow moments in long grass'. And the art of the icon painter suddenly has her making her own confessional:

I add rice glue
billions of hearts beating in China ache with my missing you
egg white
harvest of love from the sheets
They say bone glue and marble give permanence
my spent flesh is cold with not touching you

It's still about the art of the icon painter, but it's about her too, as true poetry must be, and takes you with the electrifying force of the unforeseen the naked poet, standing in a sea of public troubles. Nothing so paradoxical as a cathedral, after all, in whose blent air the personal and universal meet and merge, and you can be at the same time most on show and most alone. Victoria Field unclothes herself to the bone, but always modestly, unpretentiously, encouraging the reader to come with her, not to be afraid.

Lost souls wander in - as they do. Or are wheeled in - as they are: a back-from-the-brink suicide, a man who suffered a stroke, speechless paraplegics. She builds them into her foundations, she soars with the peregrine, she becomes the Service, in the dramatically unusual poem of this title which turns the sacred into an open secular sewer of human need: 'People piss in me ... I absorb the anxiety of the elderly, clutching/their carefully counted fare ... I love the caresses of sanctioned rain and snow/but can take too, the drunk's vomit, used condoms'.

And it's in this poem that we finally get it. Victoria Field is the cathedral, is the Service. Her place of work has become her voice. Her year as cathedral poet has paid off in a perfect poetic fusion of flesh and stone and glass and water, a fusion of the ordinary and the divine.

The final line of this poem says it all: ‘let the truly human pass through me.’
This is exactly what happens when Victoria Field writes her poetry and when we read it. She has become the receptacle of that still sad flow of humanity that is also flecked with fun and fascination, just as the verse flickers with life in all its forms, like sunlight on a busy beautiful river.

No hideaway poet then, that much is certain. And by the time she's done with you and you've read Interrogating the Abyss, you are left, again Larkinesquely, 'wondering vaguely what might have been there' if there had never been a cathedral at all. Precisely the same question applies to the poet, and to this poet in particular. She has interrogated silence, and in so doing has, like all poets, made it answer back. You can't ask more of a writer than that. In the case of a cathedral poet and Victoria Field, you have to add: well done, thou good and faithful servant.
Christopher Rush
16th October 2006
Fife Ness

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