Sometimes slim volumes open up much bigger worlds and pack a punch beyond 30 pages of text. The title and the cover of Janus suggest a gaze, both forward and backward. The structure of the book, though enigmatic, invites the reader to explore if there are patterns, and meanings through a series of devices. 

For example, there are two poems for each month in sequence, but a whole range of different years from 1983 to 2021, not in sequence; each poem has a double title – a month/year with a theme and then a motif given separately; the first and last poems sit side by side chronologically and both occupy a living room and its floor.

But it is the words which really matter and if we read the poems aloud in their chosen sequence we encounter many worlds, many points in time, a range of emotions triggered by a range of events. And many voices. Some of the themes reflect intense single personal experiences connected to loss or illness, others react to major life-changing shared phenomena such as Covid lockdowns or Brexit. 

Some are poems written as a lone figure in a landscape while others are very much in dialogue with people around the author. Many are set firmly in the north-east although Brighton and California provide a clear contrast. 

Ayres’ own cultural life is reflected in a response to an exhibition by American artist Louise Bourgeois, a poem ‘after’ Jane Hirshfield and a reaction to a visit to an ossuary in Bamburgh. Her block-poem ‘transcript’ of a dialect tirade by a neighbour to children in her back garden presents an equally strong and authentic cultural portrayal. She uses a variety of forms, such as list poems, unrhymed couplets, long lines and short, a poem in terza rima and all of the volume has rhythms and meters which carry the reader along with force and excitement.

The very first poem hits hard with a sequence of images which conjure the sounds and actions of intense sometimes painful human experience. This sets a tone and a content and a raw encounter with a life, an ever-present thread weaving the volume together. A departing sofa, a holloway, “shuffles”, “winces”, “is coaxed” into a van like an animal. It is alive because it has supported the poet’s life rhythms, “a space where I have nursed and fucked, slept / chemo off and watched a husband leave.” But she now “sit[s] cross-legged on the floor” in that space “inside this shallow grave / this square of sun that wasn’t there before.” In that connection of two images we have both sadness and hope. The volume is energised through such contrasts. 

The poem’s title: ‘January 2015 – a new sofa arrives’ and then the motif Janus sets a tone because it may look both ways but it focuses on the loss rather than on the replacement which is not in sight. The January pairing is from three years previously, a travelling poem rather than a fixed setting. Here the imagery is of a warm, alive and protective landscape: “Piebald fell / setting its flank against the twilight. / I can feel its fervour, its reassurance / warm breath against cold air.” The destination promises much, the potential to contain love “in a cup, a kiss, a candle”. But we don’t actually arrive. In both of these opening poems Ayres looks for better things, but we also feel we should perhaps not trust hope too much. 

The December pairing picks up so much of this. In the first, ‘December 2011 - Remembering Christmas 1986’, motif: Snow we move between several time frames with the author as child, young adult and mother, as daughter to a father who also grows older across the 16 lines. Both “I leave two heads in flickered light” and “A young man and his daughter / pressed like a foal against his flank” recall the January poems and the final line: “by dawn, all paths will be lost” plays with notions of the unreliability of both memory and paths to hope. 

The final poem in the collection is again on the living room floor, as Ayres, alone, organises the Christmas tree lights: “Now each strung head is desperate, locked in a final kiss. / I spider them apart, an afternoon lost to unpicking / set them straight as graves on the living room floor.” 

The volume finishes with the words: “When they wince through the tinsel / my eyes swell. These plucky buds. Another year.” As readers, our eyes swell with her. But, importantly, we remember not just the four poems at the beginning and end of this wonderful volume of sparse but incredibly rich poetry but the journey we’ve been on to get there.

For example, the first February poem, the one in terza rima, also contains an emblem which runs throughout in the lines: “A woman spools until her silk is thick / caught in the twisted spiral is despair / Her secrets are a thread she must unpick / A woman’s life is not beyond repair.” This may refer to the artwork of Louise Bourgeois but it also stands so well for Ayres’ whole review of these life moments. 

Her response to both Brexit and Covid lockdowns run across five poems. The Brexit poem, assigned to June 2016, is a list poem in four stanzas which highlights how very mundane objects hold hope alongside negativity or decline – the first verse reads: “the dandelion growing through concrete / the broken windows birthing stars / the puddles magicking their rainbows / the new skin smiling under scars” and we sense that it might all be ok; but by stanza four we are lost: “the dead leaves dancing on the forecourt / the flyers bleeding in the rain / the motorway howling in the darkness / remain, remain, remain.” And of course we didn’t. 

The second lockdown poem is the second one from March 2020. Again we have a list of potential positives, yet all are presented as ironies rather than comforters and the final irony is of people’s blind trust that “everything’s going to be alright.” Ayres has suffered serious illness more than once and the first October poem ‘diagnosed with breast cancer for the second time’ meets this head-on in a way that ensures those readers who don’t understand this type of life event will at least sense its savagery. 

The entire poem stands as one, so quoting isolated lines is not appropriate. But in the spirit of this volume it is vitally important to say that the partner October poem, also from the same year, ie a true pairing, is a physical walk to a loved spot, Dunstanburgh castle, ruined but surviving after centuries. The final lines: “Your towers clutch the air like drowning / hands, flags and fires gone. Still here” speak for Ayres’ vast resilience.

All the way through this volume she gives us images of beautiful things, to show that other lives are possible and, yes, we see that hope is often held in vain. But that doesn’t take away from her caring for others, her determination to support a sad friend (November 2018 ‘when I say I think about you every day’) - “I mean our backs are blessed / at our kitchen sinks when we slump in a slant / of light we can’t see”- a poem that concludes: “I mean look up / you’re luminous.”

 

Catherine Ayres, Janus, Indigo Dreams, £10

 

Background: Lessons from youngsters in school's poetry group