Shadow-Play

Mary Anne Perkins

56 pages

ISBN 978-0-9561991-2-6

£6.50

Shadow-Play

Mary Anne Perkins
 

With some trepidation, I agreed to review Mary Anne Perkins’ anthology, as I did not really know her work. What if I didn’t like it? Well, I worried unnecessarily, from page one I was hooked, not so much by what she said, but by what she left out, leaving the reader to guess the subject or detail of the piece.
The back cover states that MAP is a retired academic, who now relishes writing without the precision of footnotes! I do not know in what field of expertise she flourished, but her clarity of thought and the written word is everywhere evident.
I began at the beginning – where else you might ask, but often I read from the back…So in Missed, her opening poem, we meet MAP’s sense of loss for the first time. Never over-stated, it perfuses this and other poems, a sense that the reader recognises with sympathy and common humanity, re-iterating the concept that we are all diminished by our losses. As the drifting leaf falling into her hand

the lightest touch

so her light touch awakens our own sense of events and people lost to us. I recognised

the crow.. smug with bad news

and the

startled magpie…in the face of our bewilderment, confirms the fact of loss.

Yet we are never burdened here with the individual subject of loss, nor does it matter, for her losses, stand for all of ours. And although it is heart-wrenchingly painful, this is not a gloomy poem, for she ends

Ignoring our sternest warnings, hope waves back and will not be denied.

In the title poem, Shadow-play, loss only appears with the last short line, a shame to reveal it here, but in this little poem a scene is set, captured, and is lost, the scene of the garden, which

trembles now with the effort of keeping still.

Two poems speak to me personally, for I know both the places: The Carillon and Cuthbert’s Cave. Bourneville and its carillon is famed throughout Brum, and this poem evokes the atmosphere of Bourneville’s “village green”, an atmosphere which still exists, though fading perhaps as Birmingham’s traffic presses increasingly in.

The quiet ghost of Quaker industry

and

the scent of chocolate which hangs above the factory spillage-pool

brings back memories for me of the green full of daffodils and crocus, the old-fashioned baker selling real cakes, the art college and the Elizabethan Manor House and garden, where I took part in so many art and craft fairs during my years in the city.
And Cuthbert is of course the Northumbrian saint, who was carried by his fellow monks until his final resting place in Durham was reached and made known. Cuthbert is described as one

who found peace at the stone’s core, in the harsher mysteries of birth and blood.

In this lovely poem, redolent of the wild coast of Northumberland, MAP fuses bits of the legend, with a sense of place, and echoes of ritual:

‘though we make ashes for our heads, yet the old ones are present here.

MAP’s poems are written in blank verse, yet they have their own inner rhythm, and here and there a hint of rhyme, which carries the poem along. Each poem is broken into short “verses”, giving a visual structure to each piece, nice bite-sized chunks, easy on the eye and voice. The anthology is a worthy winner of IDP’s collection competition, and I recommend it – buy it, read it……then read it again.

Tina Negus