This small but densely crafted and reflective collection encompasses vastness. We move, though not in this order, between the asteroid impact that marked a boundary in geological time and its effect on the ‘Lilies and Fish’ in the title of one poem, and the vividly imagined life of a specimen of homo erectus some of whose teeth are discovered in the grit of a quarry (‘Essence’, a particularly fine piece), through various historical periods to the present and into a dystopian future.
People’s destructiveness is a recurrent motif, mainly to other people, but also to other beings: another stand-out poem matches the pathos of a creature driven to extinction with quaint, obsolete language which is now just as dead (‘Forgotten Words for a Dodo’).
Mediaeval drama and a Renaissance painting reflect the duality of life, its Heaven and Hell. A ‘singing-bird sky’ stretches across a hinge (hence the poem’s and the pamphlet’s title) separating panels of what a note tells us is a Hans Memling triptych, from the donor and his family to the image of the Virgin on her throne – but also to the ‘vermillion abyss’ in which ‘tiny fiends… tumble downwards.’ The wings of the painting close, we are told , and ‘with the next daybreak’ open on a mysteriously transmuted secular heaven and hell, a pastoral landscape – though even the heaven here is ambiguous – and a confusing scene of a soldier in a city street with a ‘skeletal-white’ face, anticipating a sniper’s bullet.
It’s no accident that the whole first of three sections in the book takes its title from that phrase describing Memling’s Hell, ‘A Vermilion Abyss.’ There is much darkness in these meditations, and the contrast between secular hints of heaven and all too powerful experiences of hell on earth is pervasive. ‘A Chain of Words for Roseanna’, set in a nineteenth century Brighton slum, asks ‘Did you hear the applause Roseanna/for the queen in her Pavilion while you paddled/ in puddles of shit and sickened/ on water and grease’ . There is no punctuation, leaving the reader to make what they can of what is as much a statement as a question.
As we saw with the white-faced soldier, the sufferings of our contemporary world are also represented. In ‘Everything, at Once’ an expansive evocation of an English riverside idyll encloses an almost parenthetical hint of a very different world ‘beyond the gate’ (so this idyll is not open to all?) which ‘…is feverish with heat./Many die gasping like goldfish left too long// in a fairground plastic bag.’ And a little later ‘…daylight is gunfire/in the trenches and over Syrian skies.’
It is, as this poem remarks explicitly (and as the whole collection implies), ‘A simultaneous world.’ It concludes with a return to that idyll: ‘…Here on the Avon/ bees and butterflies, bright as any aubade/ wallow in the buddleia.’ That word ‘wallow’ is one of several in the poem which hint at an ironic distance from the apparently innocent and pleasant world described.
If we have the leisure and the capacity to read and write poetry, whatever our other individual and collective troubles, we might be seen as among the privileged, the relatively fortunate, compared to many people and other living creatures we know to be suffering, and to have suffered, appalling extremities. How can we live our lives, knowing about that vast world of pain, without becoming overwhelmed by it on the one hand, like the poor madman in Shelley’s Julian and Maddalo who says of himself, ‘Me — who am as a nerve o’er which do creep/The else unfelt oppressions of this earth’; or, as so many around us seem to be, defensively callous and complacent on the other? In short, how do we deal with cognitive dissonance? Part at least of Mandy Pannett’s answer is to imagine, empathise with, and steadily contemplate that suffering , and to acknowledge how it coexists with ‘Everything, At Once’ in ‘a simultaneous world.’ And to use all the resources of a deeply meditated and highly skilled poetic art to do so. To be the world’s conscience, or part of it. It is an ambitious undertaking. It deserves attention and respect.
John Freeman 8th July 2026
