Lovely review on poet roy marshall’s blog.
http://www.roymarshall.wordpress.com
A review of ‘ Last Farmer’ by Shaun Belcher, stuff Salt books 2010.
This is a thematically and stylistically cohesive and deeply personal collection. It opens with ‘The Nettle Fields’, patient a poem which sets both the physical and emotional theme for the book. The narrator is working to clear a field of nettles with his father. As they work they uncover a broken cockpit and the father relates a tale of a crashing warplane.
This uncovering of the past in relation to the poet’s younger self within the context of wider historical setting, in particular with reference to the war and his agricultural upbringing, recurs throughout the collection. Belcher is of a generation at only one remove from the seismic events which informed and shaped his parents and grandparents lives. The lives of his own generation (and I count myself among them, being seven years younger) have witnessed enormous social and cultural changes.
Belcher explores the struggle to relate across to the gap of generations, to find a ‘common language’ with his forbears and with his own past. These poems deal with changing landscapes and their disappearance, with the traces the past leaves in the present.
Perhaps the experience of growing up on a farm exacerbates the feeling of being out of step with both the past and with a changing modern world. Some of these poems convey a sense of being trapped and growing up in an age which is disappearing, where things are falling apart or are already broken like the 78 records that
‘ seemed to break of their own accord.
Splinters of black shellac
bulging the faded paper sleeves
Belcher evokes evenings in which parents play Ray Martin records, and despite this being the early nineteen seventies, try to teach the children to Foxtrot, Tango and Waltz, a world in which
‘Somehow we never quite learnt the steps
even when we stood on their feet.
The physical and emotional landscape of the present is shot through with history which intrudes, unbidden and inescapable. A photo in the newspaper of an uncle’s war grave sparks his mother and father into memories of the uncle’s ‘glider crumpled in a field near Arnhem like a puffball’. The uncle is shot and wounded, but does not die of the bullet but of
‘…poison seeping through his limbs’.
In the powerful ‘The Ice Horses’, timelines are collapsed and blended to bring generational experience together. The poem contains one of the few untarnished images in the book; the new-born child is taken to be shown to his grandfather ‘like a new tractor bought to his farm.’
A complex relationship exists with a world of disappearing accents and ways of living, with lost promise and opportunity, a world to which the writer is simultaneously drawn but to which he seems to feel he may no longer belong, if indeed, he ever did. The power of these thematically linked poems lies in the fact that the past is not one-dimensional country to be viewed through rose-tinted glasses, but one in which there was always disintegration and constant change.
These poems explore the conflict between a compulsion to revisit and to break free from a world which is already ‘Lost like a spitfire over the channel’.