The new poetry book by Peter Sansom, Lanyard contains a poem about Emily Brontë:
by Peter Sansom
Carcanet Press
'On First Hearing Careless Whisper' is one of several poems in this compelling new collection that put time on pause to look at life through art, whether 1980s pop, or painting, or a congeries of writers including Emily Brontë, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, D.H. Lawrence, Alice Munro, Fernando Pessoa and the New York Poets ... and several of Sansom's beloved contemporaries.
But keenly-observed family life is at the centre of this warm, witty and moving book by one of our best-loved poets and teachers. Sansom evokes working-class life in the early and mid-twentieth century, through the 1970s of vinyl and tie-dye, and into the uncertain present day. We travel in his first car, and meet roofers, walkers, darts players and a pigeon fancier. We see Sheffield as it is seldom portrayed. His elegies celebrate Gerard Benson, children's poet and founder of Poems on the Underground; and Sarah Maguire, poet, translator and anthologist. All human life, and death, are to be found here. There is laughter and tears and a vivid evocation of a world that survives thanks to poems like these.
Emily Brontë
She bakes with a German grammar propped open
Beyond the window an estate of washing flaps in moorland.
Beyond another a graveyard whose trees speak rook,
the hollow darkness of her father's church.
Cobbles walk down to the steam railway,
calling in with her painted-out brother at one pub or another.
Ambition. Sup up. The tea rooms look out from stoneware and fridge magnets.
Her books and her sisters are everywhere, too late inoculate, her lyric with its lone green lane.
Her truest poem was fiction.
The tapping at the window's a a village juke box with six plays for 50p, the same wild and windy 1970s.
She admits her illness in terror only hours before the last hour on that roped-off midnight blue velveteen sofa.
Only our hearts and her heart coincide. (...)
Cumbria Times reviews the book and this is what it says about this particular poem.
As, in a different way, is the strange, time-transcending ‘Emily Brontë’, whose moveable locators negotiate our relationship with the novelist and poet from the perspective of a mental journey through Haworth in tangential pre
sent tenses, as though Emily’s vision might not be circumscribed by the ‘stoneware and fridge magnets’, or the relentless pastiches of our own time; the Black Bull unaware of her calling for the inebriate brother whose own image was painted out of the canvas. Sansom’s final lines draw the strings of perception together, foregrounding the ‘midnight blue velveteen sofa’ on which she expired, and which remains in a front room of the parsonage. The narrator’s short and enigmatic ‘too late / inoculate’ sounds like a premonition, or an acknowledgment of the inadequacy of contemporary medicine against the consumptive prompt of an haemoptysis in a handkerchief.
Either way, the past endures in Sansom’s poetics, leaving traces like clots of blood, as if an event that unfolded in a draughty parlour in December, 1848, might burn the connection into the fabric of our emotion in perpetuity: ‘Only our hearts and her heart coincide’. (Steve Whitaker)
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