The subjects of S.J. Litherland’s new book are mainly her familiar ones: a Warwickshire childhood with a harsh father and memories of WW2, her adopted Durham (coal-mining elegies, local issues), other personally significant locations (especially her parents’ house in Mallorca), current affairs (Brexit and Covid here) and a poem ‘for Barry’ (MacSweeney). This 142-page chubster also makes plenty of room for paintings, gardening, her home and its surroundings, the weather, ageing and family. Less standardly, there are more of her distinctive poems about cricket and about her visits to the USSR.
The variety of style, however, has a few surprises for Litherland-watchers. Lots of the pieces are in note-form, a mode which has carefully to balance that sense of the immediacy of the poet writing against fitfulness of rhythm and the risk of flatness. There’s a good bit of anthropomorphism and pathetic fallacy (‘a hard frost lays its cold lips/ to the bushes’; ‘the barge constrained by chains wanting to sail from/ moorings’). And a certain grandiosity, as in this about a football match:
The performance waits to be opened like a book. Unlike a book
it is not reliving the past. It flows with time. They are running
in the invisible sea of time, choices weigh on their feet.
Pressing on their heels the web of ghost moves:
woven and unwoven, chosen and not chosen, […]
It’s a grandiosity that can even get amplified towards mysticism:
Through a locked door my children enter the past. […]
When we trod the path in half light to the sunrise
strewn on water, the sea knew we would one day enter
the house of my mother and the coast would assent.
There’s a similar contrast between minor cliché (laughter bubbles, hearts race, ‘he lit up my life’, &c.) and sharp novelty of expression (‘rills of cold’, ‘calligraphic bat’). I did like ‘The dandelions have seized the lawn// with brazen lamps’ and ‘the long autumn/ in gold livery is losing threads’ which spark those gardening-and-weather topics that can be so difficult otherwise to make engrossing. At other times a fine line is drawn between paradox and confusion: ‘Illness is not a metaphor but a cloud at sea’ (where ‘a cloud at sea’ is being used here as a metaphor ‒ for illness) and in the same poem ‘words fall like grenades mining the future’ – grenades can apparently be used for mining, but it did jolt me at first. ‘We reap our harvest of CO2/ glued to our planet’ also conjured peculiar images. The poet says ‘I edit/ hand/ down/ the book unmarred by Errata’ [sic majuscula] but in a literal sense there are quite a few, especially diacritical ones: reguarded? ribbonned? prix fixé? a la mode? café litterateur? entente cordial? (Unless this last is a pun on the amount of drinking the British and Soviet poets are doing…).
If it comes down to personal preferences among all this variety, I was most gripped by the diaristic travel sequence about the Soviet Union, which switches back and forth between Summer 1987 and Winter 1991 and evidences the high prestige of poetry in Soviet society. Also by the poems of childhood, several hair-raising examples of which describe being repeatedly locked in the coal-shed ‘for her own good’. And the fine elegy for Max Levitas, Communist councillor and veteran of the Battle of Cable Street:
He was part of that movement,
that lifted itself, rearing like judgement.
Even if The Work of the Wind might perhaps always remain SJ Litherland’s best-known achievement, this collection does provide, for any new readers, a valuable introduction to her extensive interests and range.
Guy Russell 25th June 2025
