Tears in the Fence

The first section of Gerald Killingworth’s superb new collection is called ‘Fabrics’ and is preceded by the author’s note concerning his ‘sense of fabric’ which links closely with imagination. Readers will have their own mental images of fabrics but they’re unlikely to include some of the diverse objects in these poems such as bread, a drumskin, ancient scrolls, shrapnel, a gutted and carved up pig, a feather, and a marble fragment from a chiffonier top.

Extraordinary images, and in this section we have examples of extraordinary juxtapositions as well with graphic details linking humour and horror, the quotidian with the tragic. ‘Sambridges’, for example, begins with humour in its title, the mispronunciation of the word ‘sandwiches’. There is laughter and a feeling of comfort as the narrator nibbles the dry slices which gives him the chance ‘to get the feel and to remember’ but then, in an abrupt shift, we are suddenly in the middle of a battlefield where a sandwich is offered to fill the gap ‘between breakfast and dying’ and the mouldy bread parallels the decay of rotting bodies in the mud, the ‘cheese and jam already indistinguishable from the/ muck they fell in.’

‘Jack’s Drum’ is a subtle confrontation of the question of value. The drum with its softness derived from ‘the downy pelt’ of a calf is worth the cost because of the exquisite music it creates, but, in a clash between harmony and disharmony, no one hears ‘the silent sounds – the anguished/bleating, the stunning smack.’ 

‘Great Uncle Harry’ features in ‘I Have Four Children’, presenting an image of ‘elegance along a seafront somewhere, /complacent, dapper’. Someone else takes care of the pig he owns, the ‘feeding, killing, quartering’ while tender hearted Connie shows no qualms or queasiness when called on to ‘slice off a porker’s/nose and turn his jowls inside out.’ This, like war, is slaughter and mess off stage.

The second part of the collection, ‘Fancies’,  is full of sounds as well. In ‘May Morning, Cerne Abbas’ we are taken to ‘a hill of cloth of gold’ where the air is full of trumpets and horns and the vibrations of hundreds of cowslips – but all these sounds are ‘too subtle for us.’

I admire all the poems in Fabrics, Fancies & Fens but I think my favourite section is this one – ‘Fancies’ – which is clustered with magic, music, dance and, most of all, imagination. ‘True magic isn’t ready-made,’ says the narrator in ‘Poundbury Wassail’, ‘we need to conjure it defying all sorts of gloom.’ Speculative writing that explores possibilities beyond any current reality is a popular genre in fiction and is becoming more so in poetry with elements like science fiction, alternative histories, myth and its contemporary relevance. But fantasy with its cast of giants and fairy folk, its world of ‘what ifs’, is so much harder to write about in a way that’s both imaginative and ‘convincing’. Gerald Killingworth is an exceptional writer and achieves it, perfectly in my opinion, as poems in this collection show. 

He does this by creating an atmosphere of mystery and ambiguity, by inviting us to explore the curious and inexplicable, to share a glimpse of an ‘inner vision’. ‘I am a stranger facing down shadows’ his narrator says in ‘An Etruscan Tomb Outside Orvieto’ as he haunts the ‘dead streets’ and wonders if ancient deities and spirits ‘haunt ours and wonder what/the world has come to.’

This poem also gives an account of a strange experience where, at the threshold of the tomb, with not a plum tree in sight, the narrator sees two unripe plums ‘green as the/verdigris on an Etruscan bronze’ and wonders:

          Are they an offering from…whom? an 

          enticement from some shade? Their 

          greenness is unnatural – perpetual?

          like the hillsides of the afterlife painted in 

          tombs elsewhere, its music never-ending, 

          its wine never sour.

The final section of Fabrics, Fancies & Fens is titled ‘Fenlandia’ – a play on words and subtle allusions which appear throughout the collection and are a delight to come across. Many earlier themes and images recur – land here is ‘dissolved in water’ and it’s ‘water so/thick it has texture’. Sunrise in the Fens is a ‘bloody smudge’ while a downpour of rain is ‘incessant drum-rolling on the windows’ that later washes down ‘the bloodied tarmac/after another hit and run.’ The poem ‘The Bog Oaks’ recalls ‘an echo of centuries’:

       Millennia since their thoughts reached 

       cloudwards, branches feathering the unreachable.             

       Precipitation became intense, ground waters rose,

       reeds and sedges, confident, empire-building, 

       ingratiated themselves into every spinney:

Fabric, Fancies & Fens is a stunning collection – witty, lyrical, quirky and insightful. It is one to read many times. 

Mandy Pannett 22^nd August 2025