In Praise of Books (and Deborah Harvey's in Particular)

I've just read Deborah Harvey's luminous book of poetry, Communion.



Actually, I'm being a bit disingenuous here, because Deborah joined a writing class I was teaching in Bristol in the late 1990s and I've had the intense pleasure of reading her work, poem by poem, over many years, although this  hasn't in any way diminished the delight of seeing them published so successfully this month by Indigo Dreams.

She is in thrall to the West Country and the literary geology of Communion fits neatly between Thomas Hardy's Wessex and the Gloucestershire of Laurie Lee - in fact much of her work, with its strong narrative undertow, echoes both of these writers.  She is a teller of stories, her poems are fables of love and loss.

This collection, "a crucible of fleet, elusive dreams," is shot through with the tension between the breakdown of a marriage (Taking the Plunge) and the resilience and importance of the family (Kin).  Deborah's style is voluptuous - I particularly like Nettle Rash, where recollections of cooking junkett conjure, "moon daisies, drowsy peonies, / a windfall of laughter and stories / in apple-deep shadows, / licking fingers, / clotted with raspberries / and bottled cream, / and later / you, tracing the nettle rash / staining the milkiness of my skin, / in the treacherous depths /of our thicket bed, / our lips stung with kisses, /our quickening breath."

Much of her inspiration comes from Devon folklore and beyond that from classical mythology, but she wears her  erudition lightly and her reworking of ancient legends is accessible and sparks with dry humour -  many of them, Meditation on a Bristol Tomb in particular, left me with, "a smile too wide to jump". 

The past and its connection to the present can sometimes seem opaque, but Deborah's writing is translucent: it sheds light astringently; examining the relationship between cause and effect, between then and now, and her own particular alchemy is that she can turn history into something that more resembles memory, something private and personal, creating in the process poems that are difficult to forget.