John Killick

Prose

picture of Q5 From 'The Poetry of Light'

Christine Evans is largely a poet of the rural landscape, but there are numerous poems about people and relationships, and she is very conscious of the wider world of war, famine and environmental issues. Probably the poet with whom she has most in common is Gillian Clarke. They are almost exact contemporaries, and share many of the same preoccupations, including that of the construction of longer poems or sequences. Another positive link can be traced with the work of R.S.Thomas, particularly the poems about farmers ( a good exam question could be 'Compare and contrast Thomas's 'Farm Boy' with Evan's 'Case History'!) A more distant but still rewarding parallel could be drawn with some of the work of George Mackay Brown; in both writers historical and modern references work in parallel, there are strong elements of sensuality and spirituality, and Mackay Brown's exploration of Rackwick is matched by Evans's of Bardsey.....

It might be objected that Evans, by locating herself in a place on the margins of the populated world, and choosing as her subject-matter a way of life which is itself unfamiliar to the majority, has in effect confined her work to a genre which by its nature can only occupy a footnote in contemporary literary culture. If this is indeed the case then that is a sad loss to that culture, which is sorely in need of such a counterbalance to its brittle metropolitan bias, and cannot afford to neglect a talent so meticulous in its observation, so wide-ranging in its reference, and so profound in its intuitions.

( from Quattrocento 5 , 2006 )

picture of Quattrocento From THE PLACE OF THERAPEUTIC WRITING
There is likely to be an element of the therapeutic in all expressive writing. The act of committing to paper what would otherwise be held within the person's psyche constitutes a release and has the potential to improve the individual's well-being in a minor or major way according to the degree of prior suppression involved and the extent of what is to be uncovered. Many of the resulting texts will be of no interest to anyone but the author. There is no magical property attached to the written word despite the strong impression otherwise created in the individual by the act of necessary verbal expulsion. It is perhaps because of this that many creative writers distrust the therapeutic element and deny it is an ingredient in their works. One should take their protestations with a grain of salt whilst acknowledging the lengths they may have gone to attain a degree of objectivity in their resulting creations.

To complicate matters further, there is a separate category of 'Therapeutic Writing' which consciously attempts to access buried emotions and patterns of experience for reasons of mental health, and this is often practised in healthcare settings with the assistance of facilitators. This is highly skilled and exposed work, and has elements in common with the work of therapists in other art-forms: music, art and dance, for instance. Again, there may be no shaping intention in this practice, just the achievement of teasing out the hidden and possibly traumatic onto the page. But there exist remarkable examples where the writer has gone on to work on the primary material, revising and imposing order on the inchoate, until the expressive content has been transformed into an artistic embodiment of shared experience.

( from Quattrocento 1 , 2005 )

picture of The North From 'PROMISCUOUS EMPATHY': THE POETRY OF ANNA ADAMS
Anna Adams has never bothered to climb on any of the bandwagons that were going. Consequently she has been largely ignored by the poetry establishment. So far as I am aware none of her poems have won major prizes and she has never received any awards. She has been missed out of most of the anthologies that matter. She has quietly gone on creating small but significant artefacts in a traditional style over a period of thirty years, building up a body of work that looks increasingly likely to last. She has, however, been quite lucky in terms of publishing history: eight full-length collections, five of which are from Peterloo Poets - Harry Chambers was quick to recognise her talent, and has stood by her since 1979.

The qualities that mark Adams' work are easily enumerated: forthrightness, humour, close observation both of nature and human characteristics, above all clarity, and this extends to argument, diction and form. She has all the qualities that could make her widely popular.

Adams was from the first a ceramicist and artist, and also taught art for a while, which accounts for her highly developed visual imagination. Her verse autobiography A Reply to Intercepted Mail , which was her first published book, only tells readers what she wants them to know: she is not a confessional poet. So, though the poem tells us that it was a serious illness that started her writing, she nowhere states that it was cancer. This she revealed only in an article in Orbis in 1985. There is a very potent image in the poem, and one which recurs in her writings. She is lying in bed in hospital in 1960 when:

             I dreamed that on my cottage window-sill

            there crawled a captive Brimstone Butterfly
            that battered at the room's impervious eye
            with frantic wings, to reach the sun outside,
            while all the time the door stood open wide.

She interprets this to mean that her spirit demands release through the word, and determines that if she recovers she will devote the major part of her energies to exploring her response to the natural world through writing. Out of a destructive force comes a creative one.

( From The North 37, 2005)

john@johnkillick.co.uk

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