Learning about loss

Annie Fisher reviews 'The Wind and the Rain' by Anthony Wilson (Blue Diode Press, 2023)

I suspect the person who benefits most from a review of a poetry book is the person writing the review. It’s the reason I write them – it makes me take time and engage fully. There really is no substitute for this, and Anthony Wilson says as much in one of the opening poems in his new collection:

Like the poet
who asked me at a party

if she should have heard of me
if you need to know what these poems

are about
you aren’t really interested.

(from 'To My Rain')

But since I’m here to write a review, I should probably make a stab at offering you a summary. I could say it’s about the death of a mother; about the bleak internal weather of grief; about the toll dementia takes; about memory; about the true cost of a certain type of private education; about the gift of language; about poetry; about gratitude. It’s about all these things, and more. I’ll try to give you a flavour of this quietly-spoken, deeply personal book, which I came to love as I spent time with it. 

Aesthetically, it’s a thing of beauty. It’s printed on quality paper and feels good to hold. The cover illustration (by Devon still-life artist Lucy Runge) is painted in subtle tones of blue, grey and lemon, and foregrounds a jug and two small bowls, their glaze catching the light. There’s something calm, almost monastic about the image, which is then picked up by two well-chosen epigraphs from Sarah Manguso’s 300 Arguments:

How long since the willow went?
On quiet days her laughter ripples there,
The piles of dead leaves frittering.

*

There will come a time when people
decide you’ve had enough of your grief,
and they'll try to take it away from you.

The collection’s title echoes Feste’s song from Twelfth Night, and I have the sense that Anthony Wilson takes on the mantle of ‘fool’ in these poems – not as trickster (although there is wit and playfulness) but in his readiness to speak in disarmingly simple language ("You were good, / though difficult, / and now you’re gone") and to write about one thing while speaking of another ("But this isn’t about cricket, this is about death") and, above all, to allow himself to be candid to the point of sounding childlike ("I’m not a good sibling / or son").

Anthony Wilson takes on the mantle of ‘fool’ in these poems, not as trickster but in his readiness to speak in disarmingly simple language [...] to write about one thing while speaking of another

Rain, beloved of many poets, is a recurring theme here. It sets the mood, as in a film. At times it becomes a character, Rain. This is from 'To My Rain':

I am falling
pretty much

continuously
and in stair-rods.

That I manage this
without crying

is my secret

And from 'The Small Rain':

The rain’s a lost child
wandering the zoo

at midnight
with only wolves for company.

It’s as if he and the rain are one. Rain is both a refuge and a symbol of overwhelm. And, of course, at an environmental level, rain threatens to overwhelm us all. This is Rain talking in 'Hymn of Rain':

I’m a drum, I’m a siren,
I’m an orphanage.
I’m the remnants of a village
clinging to a straw roof.

In the opening poem, 'Train', we hear Wilson’s thoughts as he travels back to his home in the West Country through a deluge: "I travel into it / learning about loss / as I go." And we travel with him – into the isolating, exhausting, seemingly irredeemable world of bereavement, where poignant memories resurface unbidden, where the "shame-dreams come, the shame-dreams go," and where we must find our own salvation. For Wilson, in the short term, this means watching all six series of Kenneth Branagh's Wallander through long and sleepless nights. In the longer term, and ultimately, this means poetry.

Wilson is, above all, a generous and gracious poet, quick to give thanks to the poets and poems that have sustained him in difficult times

Many readers will know Anthony Wilson’s blog which gave rise to his best-selling Bloodaxe anthology, Lifesaving Poems– a collection of the pieces he would never want to be without, and which helped him through cancer treatment. Lifesaving Poems was a way of saying thank you to poetry. For me, that same spirit of gratitude flows through The Wind and the Rain and is, more than anything else, what I take away with me from this humbly-written book. Wilson is, above all, a generous and gracious poet, quick to give thanks to the poets and poems that have sustained him in difficult times. Several are mentioned by name in the work, and many more in the long list of acknowledgements at the back of the book which reads like a sort of litany, with a ‘Thank you’ before each name.

Wilson’s gift for gratitude may be his mother’s greatest legacy to him. In the poem 'Mother / Son', we learn that even when dementia had all but destroyed her, his mother still gave thanks:

You prayed long graces
right into the heart of it
when it had all but eaten
you up
the insatiable beast of it gobbling
you daily –
but not this

                Father God
               we thank you
               for all the good things
               you give to us
               and we remember
               all the good things
               and those who do not have enough
               you are so good
               and we bless you

and then from somewhere
that nothing could touch
your grandchildren
each of them
by name.

---

Annie Fisher's background is in primary education, initially as a teacher and later as an English adviser. Now semi-retired she writes poetry for both adults and children and sometimes works as a storyteller in schools. Her most recent publication is Missing the Man Next Door (2024) from Mariscat Press. Two previous pamphlets were published with HappenStance Press: Infinite in all Perfections (2016) and The Deal (2020). She is a member of Fire River Poets, Taunton.