Victoria Gatehouse is a zoologist, award-winning poet and children’s writer. Her poetry has been broadcast on BBC radio and published in several leading magazines. Her pamphlet The Mechanics of Love (Smith | Doorstop) was selected as a Laureate’s Choice by Carol Ann Duffy. In 2003 she was highly commended for the Gingko prize.

Taking her cue from the Ogham script, an early form of Celtic alphabet, Gatehouse focuses on the names of its individual characters and their reference to various trees and plants, such as beith (birch), fearn (alder), saille (willow) and duir (oak), to construct a sequence of poems whose roots go back into antiquity. The trees themselves may be of ancient standing but the poems which commemorate them have plenty of sap in them to make for a most absorbing read.

Gatehouse has a good eye for titles that draw the reader in.  A quick glance down the contents page gives us some idea about what is to come. Titles such as ‘My Daughter’s Hip Bones,’ ‘The Dog who Played with his Shadow,’ ‘Rainforest in a Shoebox.’ and ‘Burning Mouth Syndrome’ intrigued me from the start.

Her subject matter is equally original and memorable: beech woods in autumn, childhood memories of playing hide and seek in bracken or lying in a hammock in the back garden, a pair of party balloons landing in a field, dowsing for words with a forked hazel rod, planting hedgerows and stumbling across a farm in the Pennines where, “alongside cartwheels and Belfast sinks,” a farmer has made a success out of growing marigolds in a row of urinals fixed to a wall.

Mythological and folkloric undercurrents permeate this collection with references to Dionysius who used ivy to ensnare women who spurned him in worship, Daphne who turned into a laurel after being pursued by Apollo, the protective properties of rowan crosses bound in red thread and the belief that elder trees are a gateway to the faerie realm.

Descriptions are finely tuned. The heart of the hawthorn bride is “a yellowhammer in a grotto of thorns”, a passing jay with an acorn in its beak has “blue-black jewels stitched into its wings,” the “cold-petal blossoming” of a blackthorn lights “the frayed edges of solitary lanes,” grasses on roadside verges are “spent-up and leggy … a little out of control … flayed by days of rain,” a moth is a “lit-bulb junkie, / wrecking herself on your porch light,” and leaf-cutter ants “have clearly / bitten off more than they can chew.”

Gatehouse’s zoological background surfaces in poems about pandas, orangutans, Indian blue peacocks and the Alaskan wood frog. Specialised vocabulary such as “lichen plaques,” “phloem,” “chlorophyll and haemoglobin” and “mycorrhizal chains” add variety and colour without hindrance. ‘The Principles of Conditioning’ takes a long, compassionate look at Pavlov’s dogs, ‘Rainforest in a Shoebox’ hints at “the lopsided pain of endangered things” and ‘Smoking is not Normal Behaviour for Orangutans’ takes a long hard look at the process of rehabilitation and recovery from one of the many unspeakable cruelties dealt by mankind on the animal kingdom.

In ‘Reservoir Gods,’ a poem full of the dangers that teenagers often run into, Gatehouse writes with a conviction that is as powerful as the impulses of the young who are out on the edge of an adventure all of their own:

 

     They pay no heed to warning signs

     about deep water and toxic blooms

     of blue-green algae. These are dangers

     which don’t concern them, any more

     than the fears which make us step

     back as they pass, all swagger

     in a hit of Hugo Boss…  

     ….

     Come winter, they’ll hunch into hoodies

     test the ice, perhaps, with Christmas Nikes –

     but for this summer at least, they know

     themselves to be immortal.

 

These poems, acutely observed and rigorously controlled, offer up an intelligent and compassionate view of the natural world in language which makes this collection a real pleasure to read. Highly recommended.

 

Victoria Gatehouse: The Hawthorn Bride, Indigo Dreams Publishing, £11