A radio show I sometimes tune into has a long-running feature where listeners write in about objects that have fallen on them from out of the sky \u2013 a slice of white bread, an unopened Mars Bar, jar lids and bottle caps, once (or did I imagine it?) a lady\u2019s watch. These surrealist bombers are presumed to be birds, hence the feature has come to be called \u2018crow drops\u2019.<\/p>\n
One of my favourite kinds of poems has something in common with the \u2018crow drop\u2019. Usually short, always unexpected, these are the poems which arrive from out of the blue and leave you slightly dazed at the sudden strangeness of the world.<\/p>\n
Sometimes a single word is enough for a poem to qualify. In Ben Verinder\u2019s brief and beautiful elegy for a recently dead father, \u2018Signs of Life\u2019, the word \u2018audacity\u2019 lands in the final line of the poem with the full force of loss:
\n\u201cA wide window overlooks the harbour town\/ right across to his front door, which I will unlock\/ to the audacity of objects, clothes wearing his cologne.\u201d<\/p>\n
How dare these ordinary things exist when my loved one has gone; a sentiment many of us will have experienced in bereavement, compressed into eight letters which, for this reader, transforms the whole poem.<\/p>\n
This is something I\u2019m always in search of when reading or writing a poem \u2013 the image or phrase or idea which is both strange and true which reminds you, as Louis MacNeice puts it in \u2018Snow\u2019, \u2018That world is suddener than we fancy it.\u2019<\/p>\n
Daisy Bassen\u2019s poem \u2018On Dreaming of Dollhouse Furniture Found Buried\u2019 is pure crow drop. That title for a start \u2013 the weirdness of \u2018Buried\u2019 suggesting a deliberate, possibly ritual act, while \u2018Dreaming\u2019 opens up the potential of the subconscious. What follows lives up to the title\u2019s oddness, though crucially, this oddness doesn\u2019t strike me as contrived, but genuinely startling.<\/p>\n
The ghosts of other writers are here, appropriately enough in a poem which ends with \u2018The distance the dead have gone\u2019. Emily Dickinson flits past in the subverted syntax (\u2018We make our miniatures for the comfort,\/ upon occasion, grand,\/ of the doll\u2019s china teapot\u2026\u2019) while there\u2019s a hint of Hopkins in \u2018All that is little, whittled, wonderful \u2013 \u2018 but what Bassen ends up making is ultimately her own. The poem as a whole is as distinctive and strange as the tiny rocking chair she pictures \u2018alien\u2026In the palm of your hand.\u2019<\/p>\n
Of course, what lands on us from the sky isn\u2019t always a gift (though even bird poo is, in some cultures, a sign of good luck!). And poems can do many valuable things other than surprise, but I will always be drawn to poems that catch me off guard, that make me look up, baffled, as to where on earth (or rather off it) this thing has come from.<\/p>\n
Esther Morgan<\/em><\/p>\n You can purchase Rialto 98 here<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n