If you didn’t manage to get out amongst the countryside this bank holiday I have found some poetry that will make you feel just as if you had. Morley’s most recent collection recounts the friendship, lifes and loves of poet John Clare and a Gypsy named Wisdom Smith. In two sonnet sequences the friends speak of language and the land, they bicker and fight, discuss work and relationships, get drunk, eat together, and sleep out. If nothing else the collection is an acute illustration of a very real male friendship enacted in the outside world.
Sandwiched between the first (‘The Gypsy’) and third (‘The Poet’) parts of the poem is the ‘World’s Eye’, an opening where Morley explores poetry in the form of nature. The sequence ‘Pipping’ is made up of short poems that Morley wrote onto species-specific bird boxes so that birds would ‘nest in a poem about themselves’ and their fledglings would emerge ‘from within the poem’. A beautiful homage to British birds, the poems are naturally easy and formally precise in their impact; on the Chaffinch, ‘whose call/ is a cricketer bustling up/ to bowl’ (from ‘Pipping’). I can do them no justice reproducing them in the paragraph here.
The Poet of the collection is in a constant battle to provide for his family with or without his pen whilst the Gypsy lives off the land and working for others. The Poet wrestles with language, ‘sweats out the poem’ (‘The Spared’) and the pen ‘pricks at his knee with its one claw, a kitten pawing to be held…the pen stabs his hand’ (‘The Pen’). He is blessed and cursed by his need to write of the world around him. The Gypsy challenges the Poet’s aesthetic obsession with words and nature: ‘“Eat flowers then,” replies the Gypsy. “Serve harebells to your children./ Save petals against their schooling. Whittle pens from a thistle-stem…Eat words then. Some must murder their supper.”’ (‘Woodmanship’). The romantic and the rationaliser, they create the perfect pair for argument.
Morley does not reserve his preoccupations with language to English; epigraphs to the poems in the first part of the collection are snatches of Romani, a language which the Poet describes as ‘“borrowed goods/ or burglary”’. The Gypsy is accused of smashing up English to create his own ‘dark tongue’s dossities’ but he retaliates that the Poet does no better, looking to nature to create his poetry. This collection is not just obsessed with but within nature; the poetry, the characters within the poems, the world they inhabit are of the natural world. The poems both reflect and exist as leaves on trees, birdsong, thoughts thought on the road.
Reviewing Me, Reviewing You 