Books: Review - Songs of the Darkness: Poems For Christmas. By Lawrence Sail

Published: 23 December, 2010
by JOHN HORDER

POEMS for Christmas are not a push­over. Lawrence Sail reminds us in the introduction to this selection of his Christmas poems over 30 years that, as with UA Fanthorpe, part of the solution is to expand the cast to include, “the sheepdog left behind to look after the sheep while the shepherds were on duty at the manger”. 

Sail’s solution in the first stanza of “Slack” is to write beautifully about the sea near St Ives and Penzance in the context of a painting by Vermeer:

After the long etceteras of the flooding tide,
before the surf rattles back through the beaches knucklebones, 
the sea's fallow is still as the twist of milk 
which Vermeer's milkmaid tips slowly and for
ever
from a jug to a shallow bowl.

This poem reminds me of Alfred Wallis’s exquisite seascapes, which can be found in Kettle’s Yard Gallery in Cambridge by appointment only. 

The third stanza of “Sloes” is a miniature by itself:

Cutting one (sloe) open, you find
a simple pulp
of greeny yellow,
weak moonlight,
and a single nubble
bedded in blister-water,
a boner-hard core,
an oubliette that beggars belief. 

For another really good seasonal work, Google Robert Herrick to find “A Christmas Carol, Sung to the King in the Presence at White-Hall”. Here is part of one of the most beautiful poems in English literature:

The darling of the world is come
And fit it is, we find the room
To welcome Him. The nobler part
Of all the house here, is the heart,

Which we will give Him; and bequeath
This holly, and this ivy wreath,
To do Him honour, who’s our King
And Lord of all this reveling. 
Robert Herrick (1591-1674)

• Songs of the Darkness: Poems For Christmas. 
By Lawrence Sail. Enitharmon Press , 
26a Caversham Road, NW5 2DU. £9.99. 
Cover engraving (above)  by Eric Ravilious