Staking all for revelation

Anthony Lawrence is a brilliant poet whose books are surprisingly uneven: this new volume, Bark, though, is a decided success. The best of his poems are usually those which are built around a confrontation between poet (carrying a fairly heavy backpack of personal trauma) and the natural world. This can be quite explicit, as in the fourth poem of a generally comic suite, ‘Bestiary in Open Tuning’, in which a ‘five metre white pointer / ... made a pass’ at the poet swimming in ‘over a thousand, sun-shafted feet / of Great Southern Ocean’. The double meaning of ‘made a pass’ is significant: there is an erotics involved here, as well as the simple evaluative movements of a predator.

In a pair of poems at the beginning of the book’s second section, the confrontation gets ratcheted up in intensity. In the first, the author is caught in a northern cyclone and spends the night of the storm’s passing huddled beneath table, reading a meteorology textbook by torchlight. The second concerns itself with the various nasty stingers of the tropical shore. The mode is comparative (‘bluebottles are less than a minor irritation’), but at the top are the box-jellyfish which teach us that the word ‘agony’, ‘falls so far short of the mark as to render it redundant’. The poem finishes with a victim who, while waiting to die, can hear and understand waterbirds talking to each other. As in the case of Siegfried, revelations about the natural world are given to those who stake all.