This is a 100-page book of poems. At the back there are a dozen poems, written for each month, and comprising ‘A Commuter’s Calendar’, pace John Clare, which I enjoyed very much. Preceding those is a more varied, more rural, series of poems in a variety of styles and covering the author’s years living in rural West Oxfordshire, near the Thames, enjoying the Swallows and fearing the encroachment of impending built development. Lurking in some of these poems is a character called Avery Dunnock (no relation).
Reading a book of poems, whether from a single author as here, or a compendium volume, is obviously a very different experience from reading prose. How does one judge or assess a poetry book? I’m not sure that I know but I can tell you what I think. Mentally, as I read, I am keeping a score in my head of how many poems fall into each of four categoriess: ‘I really like this’, ‘I like this’, ‘It’s OK’ and ‘Doesn’t do it for me’.
The 12 poems of ‘A Commuter’s Calendar’, which were written in 2009-10, are, for me, uniformly in the top two categories. I would have been very happy if the year had more than twelve months in order to get more of these poems.
In the first three quarters of the book, the poems were, for me, spread more evenly through the four categories described above but none, in this book, fell into a fifth category of ‘How ghastly!’ which does sometimes come into play.
From the photograph of the author on the back cover it appears that the author is male, older than ‘young’ and from the poems I think I can detect areas where he and I would definitely agree and others where we might politely disagree. Sometimes I read poems where, to me, it feels as though the poet is trying too hard or not trying anything like hard enough, whereas here many of the works feel effortless to this reader (though perhaps the author sweated buckets over them). Yes, I like this book of poems.
I rarely mention price in my book reviews and that is partly because there are usually opportunities to buy books more cheaply than the RRP and in any case some books are bound to cost more to produce than others. But this volume of poems is so cheap to buy that I’d gently point out that its purchase would set you back less than a truly awful bottle of cheap wine or a couple of large delicious coffees – you aren’t risking the house if you buy a copy and don’t like it. I do like it and I’ll be considering over the next few weeks whether it will make the cut for my selection of the Top 10 books reviewed on my blog from which this blog’s Book of the Year will be selected.
The cover? It’s functional. I’d only give the cover 6/10.
Spirits of the Place and A Commuter’s Calendar by Nigel Pearce is published by Bookvault Publishing and is available from The Great British Bookshop.