Trying to forget is just another means of remembering. Anyone who's experienced bereavement will recognise the paradoxical nature of coping with grief in Ann Kelley's first collection, 'Paper Whites'. How grief feeds on itself, thriving in the early years of loss, before settling to subsist on what it attempts to destroy.

There's an instinctive knowledge of the contradictory properties of grief in Kelley's poems about the death of her son Nathan. One can almost hear a voice behind the poems tenaciously saying, I'm not going to forget. Anything. So I'll remember. Everything. Everything he did.

I had to tell the cats
Like telling the bees.
They knew, anyway,
But saying the words made it real.

Telling the Bees

As the writing of poems made it real. The remembering and recording a way of coping. A way of getting through days overcast by the absence of her son, thoughts of ageing, flashbacks to a former marriage turned sour.

The snow stayed
on the ground
for ten weeks.

Our child circled us
on his trike
again, again and again.


Three walls black,
One white.

Walls


The imagistic ease with which the above poem slides from the haikuesque beauty of the first stanza to the sense of imprisonment, confusion and foreboding in the final two, is characteristic of how Kelley uses her photographer's eye to pick out detail; isolating the focus of concern, in this case, the entrapment felt by young parents.

'Walls' - its vivid imagery, seemingly so full of significance but could just as well not be, is like the half-remembered residue of a dream. 'Three walls black/ one white', is just as shocking taken literally as read into. And this, perhaps, is the key to Kelley's work. The significance lies in the fact she has chosen to record it. Looking for a motive for the choice would reveal whether the object of her attention was observed through the eye of bitterness or love etc. Through the eye of love she looks at Nathan's collection of head-gear - his baseball caps and cowboy hat.

Your hats were like you
Battered, comic, heroic
Eccentric, jaunty, stoic


Time and again in this collection, the accuracy with which detail is selected produces imagery so sharply focused the effect is dreamlike:

Red crabs floated to the warm mauve sea.
Cornish Night in June


Cold bright January -
the butterfly found
behind the mirror yesterday.

Matter Doesn't Die


Heaped dirty snow
on the darkening estuary beach
and the tide flooding fast.
I am With a Small Boy.

A yellow toad has made his home
in a drain where water
from the bath runs warm.
Cliff Garden


Gusts lift the cat flap to let in a ghost.

Waiting For You to Come Home

Two miniature poems, ' The Sick Swan' and 'Black Birds Dying' are dreams. The sick swan represents Nathan and the fragility of life. The unbearable lightness of being:

I carry it all
the long night.
The swan light

as its feathers
but I am exhausted.

'Black Birds Dying' is too good not to quote it in full:

A leafless tree
noisy with black birds
in the winter dawn.

Silence sinks like a knife.
One by one they fall.
Dead birds blacken the lawn.

John Wain, commenting on Larkin's 'Days', said the acid-test of a short poem is whether or not it could be paraphrased. One couldn't rehash 'Black Birds Dying' without diluting it. It is as clear as a woodcut, nightmarish as an Escher print.
It would be wring to suggest that Ann Kelley's poetry is all in the detail. 'Intensive Care', the collection's centrepiece, shows the poet is a dab hand at narrative. It is the story of Nathan's illness seen from three different perspectives: his own, his mother's and, rather surrealistally, his aquarium fishes'. This is not so much a literary device as a way of showing the various strands of interdependence in Nathan's life. I love the way the fish show a reciprocal concern for him.
There are also poems which have an incantatory quality ('The Fish the Stone', 'Waiting For You to Come Home') where the poet seems to be lulling herself out of her fear, willing her peace of mind to return.
In a haunting poem - 'Meeting My Australian Brother After Twenty Years' - Nathan returns as an adult. Whilst visiting her brother the poet is struck by how much he resembles her son. Visit/ visitation:
It was strange delight
to find him grey-haired and sixty
when I had seen him dead in his twenties
such a short year ago.

Absence so strongly felt has given Nathan a strong presence in this collection. We move, in George Barker's words, 'from mourning to morning.' That's its achievement. Its wonderful achievement.


Michael Bayley,
29 Budock Terrace
Falmouth
Cornwall TR11 3NE
01326 313108