Lost Love, Robin Helweg-Larsen (ed)

Sampson Low, Potcake Chapbooks, 2022      £2.60 + p&p  

What rhyme allows

Lost Love is a small anthology of seventeen poems all of which use rhyme to explore their subject. You could keep it in your pocket and take it out for quiet contemplation or maybe even impress someone at a social gathering — a bit like reciting a limerick! — although not all the poems have an easy rhyming structure, and they are very different from each other.

Perhaps it’s easy these days not to take rhyming poetry seriously, but as I read I realised how versatile it is, the breadth of emotion it can carry. A lot of these poems land a punch as they close. So, of course, there can be anger at the ‘loss of love’; ‘Triolet to a Perceptive Girl’ by David Whipman ends:

I cannot hide my soul from you.
They see so much, your sparkling eyes —
That’s why, you nosey bitch, we’re through.

Quite a shock that, after the lilting rhythms that have preceded it. Alternatively some of the poems show a humorous view of the situation which is more relaxed. For instance, ‘Love Story’ by Richard Fleming ends:

I thought myself in love but I was wrong.
I loved you only when your hair was long.

Then there’s the old chestnut of how sentimental a poem can be. The poem ‘Smoke’ by Michael R. Burch ends with the lines:

The endless days of summer’s haze I still recall today;
she spoke and smoky skies stood still as summer slipped away

I felt the rhyme here gave me permission to enjoy what might without have seemed too sentimental?

Perhaps most interesting is the way rhyme can help put forward an argument — a philosophical point of view — a bit like in a Shakespearean sonnet. These are the last four lines of Gail White’s ‘Into the Fire’:

All the loves given, even reluctantly,
are still our loves. Let’s not make little of them.

They form the empyrean that burns on
when sun and moon and stars have packed and gone.

Anne Bailey

Un-light light verse

The subtitle to this anthology is ‘Poems of what never happened, and of the end of things that did’. Then, on the back-cover of this palm-size chapbook, the reader is informed:

All the poems are formal. These poems are memorable in part because they rhyme and scan, as all truly memorable poetry does. We subscribe to the use of form, no matter how formless the times in which we live.

I am not woman enough to step anywhere near the debate concerning the role of form in contemporary poetry — or in poetry of any period for that matter.

However, regardless of their formal execution, another aspect that makes these poems memorable is the fact that the harder they seem to be jaunty and sassy and devil-may-care, the sadder they make me feel. The harder they seem to crack jokes, the less I feel like laughing.

For example, in ‘Glimpse of Love’ by Vera Ignatowitsch, after being beguiled by someone shy and demure — after finding her reticence alluring — the narrator confesses:

Pursuit revealed, in time, that Cupid
had simply sent me someone stupid.

And in ‘So It Rolls’ by Cody Walker, after speaking of someone described as intellectual but ineffectual —

She says she won’t leave him for reasons sexual, but
in effect she will.

Under their brave exteriors, the people in these poems are hurt, vulnerable and — dare I suggest — they are (as we have all done) lying to save face. And talking of face, the narrator of ‘Triolet to a Perceptive Girl’ (by David Whippman) says

They penetrate my thin disguise;
I cannot hide my soul from you.
They see so much, your sparkling eyes —
That’s why, you nosey bitch, we’re through.

Hands up anyone who’s laughing.

And if you are, is it a body-shaking belly chuckle? Or is it a rueful sigh-laugh of recognition?

Sue Butler