The Cold War, Tristan Moss
Lapwing Publications, 2022 £10.00
The gravity of the situation
Before you’ve even opened The Cold War, the title is already suggesting the idea of constant threat. However, despite the threat that’s woven throughout — the threat of parents arguing, of death, of poverty and more — what really stands out for me here is a feeling of thwarted velocity.
In the opening piece (‘Remembering Something I Should Have Practiced’), the poet recalls how once he would hold a limb up in the air and 'slowly forget / that I was holding it there’, before noting that if he’d continued this practice ‘one day I might fly’. Perhaps it seems to churlish to ask what someone might want to fly for, but in the context of the rest of the publication, you certainly sense flying might offer an escape route.
But perhaps the poet is not the only one wanting to escape. In 'Gravity' we’re told ‘When a child / my dad dreamt / of being a spaceman’, before the poem explores what it was that stopped him. Whether this was a fear of flying or a denial of the science behind flight, ultimately it comes down to a different kind of ‘force’ in the final stanza:
So maybe it wasn’t
weight he feared,
but challenging
the force
that kept him
for so many years
on the ground.
There are many further examples of the impact of Moss’s parents on him. However, the final lines of the closing poem, ‘A Space In The Trees’, has a curtailment of gravity, while at the same time ending on a high note:
But for today, I think back
to when there were fields,
open skies and a farm,
where my father looked up
from chopping wood
and smiled at me.
Mat Riches
Simply the images
What strikes me about this pamphlet is its clarity and directness. Written in the first person, half the poems are child’s-eye ‘family snapshots’, the other half reflections, from an adult perspective, on the lives of the poet’s late parents and the fallout from their marital break-up, the nature of which is explained briefly but unequivocally in a piece inserted halfway through the pamphlet entitled ‘Background Information’.
There are twenty poems, many very short indeed, and imagist in style. The pared-back language and quiet tone seemed diffident and insubstantial at first, but after several readings, I was won over by these simple evocations of innocence and experience because of their sharply focused, visual quality. Moss has a gift for letting an image do the talking.
Several poems capture the powerless wish children often have to fix the adult world. ‘The Door To My Childhood’ begins:
I’d trace the grain across the door’s two planks
and see the swirls link up
and often think my bedroom door
had reunited a single piece of wood.
The first half of the pamphlet ends with ‘Echoes’, reminiscent of Basho’s famous ‘Old Pond’ haiku. It couldn’t be more minimal, but the image we see and the sound we hear (a basketball in an empty gym, bouncing to an eventual stop), combined with the title and the poem’s placement in the pamphlet’s arc, make it just right.
I particularly liked the poem ‘2021: One Of My Mum’s Last Meals’ where, as with so many of these poems, the well-chosen image needs no adornment. The poem gently hints at a healing of sorts:
I threw away the loose
browning leaves and eased
apart the fresh interlocking
ones from the lettuce’s heart,
rinsed then under the tap
and dressed with oil and white
wine vinegar.
[…] she finished
them all.
The pamphlet ends with ‘A Space In The Trees’ — a touchingly valedictory word-photograph:
The forest has its own memories
the trickle of a stream,
snap of a twig
[…]
where my father looked up
from chopping wood
and smiled at me.