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Pamela Beasant |
Precise, but no sentimentality
Running with a Snow Leopard.
By Pamela Beasant. Two Ravens Press £8.99 Order This book
FOR Pamela Beasant , poetry is “a secret place”. Born in Glasgow and now living in Stromness, Orkney, she came to that awesome landscape – where “the sense of being a pinprick on the edge of the world” surrounded her – via Willesden Green and Hampstead.
Wherever she’s lived she’s written poetry and this, her first full-length collection, shows what a precise and attentive poet she’s become.
Her subjects are mostly private ones, the birth and growing of children and portraits of friends and neighbours, but then she goes out into the Orcadian world to take snap-shots of things glimpsed in the street or field, and the effects of wind, sea and sky, on tiny human-shapes.
On an old man, for instance, whose teeth are “stalwarts of storm and erosion”, his eyes “a shock of life, half-shut in the lair of the droughted cheeks”. The landscape itself can become human, cliffs falling head-first into the water and sprouting seaweed which the sea “combs... with the care of a child”.
Beasant is the least egotistical of poets, her feelings sieved through her family and her neighbourhood. Take this perfect little poem, a kind of miniature version of Yeats’s “A Prayer for My Daughter”:
Sleep, tiny girl,
while the sea,
sea-green, cold,
lovely green,
sucks at the teeth
of the town.
You are far
From storm wind
And hail sting.
Little voyager
sail back safely
from your dream.
A section of the book, inspired by working with severely disabled women, is darker, but has the same compassion.
Here’s deeply depressed Jean looking at her well-meaning carer:
If I were free,
I wouldn’t spend all this time
with me. I’d put a pillow
over my face
if my hands would work that way.
I wouldn’t give a painful shit
for any of the last, long, fifty years.
There’s no sentimentality in Beasant’s work, as befits the first George Mackay Brown Writing Fellow. That great poet of the Orkneys never wrote a sentimental word in his life and I think he would be proud of this collection.
Piers Plowright
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