Frances Presley has been a major force in British poetry over several decades. Her Collected Poems (Shearsman Books 2022), which is in two lengthy volumes, records her remarkable achievement as an adventurous, explorative and intellectually sophisticated poet. The two volumes consist of a collection of her previous shorter volumes—which I will refer to as sub-volumes—demonstrating both the evolution of her work and continuities within it.
The poems in Volume 1 are complex and challenging right from the beginning. They are notable for their feminism, anti-capitalist sentiments, explorations of place and engagement with ekphrasis conveyed in a way that is political but not polemical. They are wedded to a modernist style that courts open form, discontinuity, the juxtaposition of disparate materials, use of found text, the mixing of genres and linguistic play through sound and semantic association. This style is coupled with an elusive, morphing subjectivity for which the voice is never constant, and the perspective can be both distant and close-up. Presley’s poetry is also characterised by a lack of narcissism and confessionalism, and an aversion to clichéd tones, constructed emotional climaxes, rounded endings or punch lines. The poems, resoundingly oblique, never entirely give themselves up: they do not surrender to paraphrase, a take-home message or a single point of view. There are often narrative elements, but these are not usually cohesive or teleological.
In Volume 2 most of these earlier characteristics remain, particularly the linguistic experimentation that sometimes extends into different dialects and languages. But in Volume 2 there is also a deepening engagement with landscape, its markings, its ecology and its industrial interruption. This is coupled with an increasingly minimal style that emphasises gaps, spaces and visually striking uses of the page. Presley’s methods of writing in this volume are improvisatory and situational but also research orientated, documentary and historical. In fact, research is so fundamental to Presley’s work that one could appreciate her writing as an exemplar of the practice-led research, research-led practice paradigm, whereby research, theory and practice are interdependent, each generating and assisting the other (Smith and Dean).
The poems in the first sub-volume of the Collected Poems, which has the racy title The Sex of Art 1973-86 and is itself divided into several sections, hinge to a large extent on travel. They focus on time spent in the US and Germany, setting into motion an interest in location that goes right through Presley’s poetry. These poems draw attention to racism, colonialism and censorship. However, the political angle is always subtle and supple, such as in ‘Pennsylvania Wilderness’—an early poem that is nevertheless striking and self-assured:
Coming down to the Susquehanna
(‘Pennsylvania Wilderness’ 1.17)
through the burnishing gaming forests
of late Fall
I saw youth
with an outdated headband
poised in the wind of an outstretched rock
“Are you the new ghost of Susquehanna?”
I inquired with sly hope
But the smile as his head turned around
was empty
and he asked us only for fresh water
Sexual politics are also to the fore in her writing, for example in the prose poem ‘Le juste milieu’ (1.39)—a poem marked, like many others in the volume, by sharp discontinuities between sections. In this poem male attitudes are satirised in a male-female dialogue because a man’s idea of “the right balance” is not necessarily the same as that of a woman. Other concerns include how far art, and in particular abstract art, can catalyse social change. This is debated in ‘Anniversary poem’ (1.49-51) when the narrator is in dialogue with a friend who does not value the work of Jackson Pollock:
“I know his work” she said, “he does those things a child of five could do. I’ve got some reproductions. I’m sure I have.” She got out of bed at two a.m. to go and look for them. “What is the value of this?” waving a colour supplement at me. “I could do better.”
(‘Anniversary poem’ 1.50)
“It was an expression of inward desires and motivation. An attempt to free them.”
“But what use was any of it? Of what importance to anyone else in society?”
“They were committed to social change, they…” I had my doubts too, but she was redirecting my attitudes.
Other poems in this volume suggest the tension between affect and style in writing (‘Carnal Knowledge’ 1.28 and ‘Style is excused by fever…’ 1.29). There are also poems that explore the elusiveness of finding balance and stability in a changing world that requires bending and adapting (‘Le juste milieu’ 1.39-42). ‘The Shooting of Pechorin’ proposes that “yours is the balance / because you know you know yourself” (1.26). But maybe this is the parity that needs to be found in writing poetry between the personal and impersonal, representation and abstraction, the immediate and the past, nature and culture, body and mind: a parity that in turn erodes such binary oppositions.
In The Sex of Art there is also an emphasis on different kinds of community marked by class, ethnicity and gender: the protagonist in ‘Sari’ is trying on a sari while “in the living room / the men / are solving the new maths” (‘Sari’ 1.68). The Sex of Art introduces us to Presley’s strong attraction to the visual arts, which is often present as theme or technique, or in collaborations with artists. Here the poems range from a perspicacious and touching rendering of the gendered interactions by children with a Tinguely sculpture (‘Tinguely’ 1.78) to paintings of women by women. They include a poem that writes back subversively to Judy Chicago’s iconic—and itself subversive—The Dinner Party (‘The Dinner Party’ 1.80-1).
The poems in the next sub-volume Hula Hoop 1986-1989 continue the discontinuous techniques in The Sex of Art but there is less emphasis on travel: rather the work is powerful partly because it is redolent of British period iconography, ranging back from the Thatcherite Britain of the eighties to the trade union strikes of the winter of discontent in 1978-1979, and further back still to ‘Summer holiday’ (1.107), the Cliff Richard song of the early 1960s. ‘Summer holiday’ is as close as Presley comes to writing a bildungsroman poem: a not-so-nostalgic return to the sugar-sweet escapist culture of Alma Cogan and Cliff Richard. Hula Hoop often fosters ideas about the importance of community that challenge Thatcher’s notorious assertion that ‘there is no such thing’ as society. Particularly elegiac and moving is ‘Boat Train’ (1.108) about an uncle who had been in the navy, was not feeling well and presumably died. This, and other similar poems throughout the Collected Poems, made me realise that I welcome it when Presley’s work becomes a little more personal and works against the suspicion of the personal which has often been dominant in experimental poetics.
Hula Hoop includes several poems about sculptors and sculpting which, like some of the poems in The Sex of Art, demonstrate Presley’s strong attraction to the visual arts and ekphrasis. The allure of the visual arts is also to the fore in the following sub-volume Linocut 1989-1995. The title poem (based on a print by Jun Shirasu which is on the front cover) is typical of Presley’s ekphrastic poems more widely in being both representational and abstract, highly visual and yet also difficult to visualise. Like others she has written in this mode, it is full of dynamic, often physical actions—“the tree reaches up”, “hands reach up”, “the fingers of the tree touch the ceiling”—belying the static nature of painting, drawing or linocuts (‘Linocut’ 1.125). This volume also demonstrates Presley’s continuing strong engagement with female artists, in particular, Leonora Carrington and Méret Oppenheim, both surrealists. The poems themselves intermingle surrealism and realism, the metaphorical and the literal: “The Alps were sharp and varied again today from the pink of sunrise to the banded colour of sunset. They are like high cloud formations, and yet they are real mountains, I could be there” (‘Masks’ 1.131).
Despite their ekphrastic stance the poems in this sub-volume, as in others, are heterogenous in style and content, spreading out into many different directions and encompassing diverse ideas. ‘Coal’ (1.148-9) is a resonant poem about the working class, family, illness, death, memory and the United Kingdom in the post-war period, “all the women are / wearing long new look coats” (1.149). It collects itself round the idea of mining (both literary and metaphorical in the sense of mining memory) and adroitly weaves together metonymic images of blackness, smoke screens and coal. The mother with “coal black hair” makes a cameo appearance in this poem and returns in ‘Significant moments in the life of my mother’ (1.150-2): a poem all the more tender for not being sentimental or overdone. Important too is ‘The Nunnery Walks’ (1.157), about walking in and engaging with the environment: it seems to foreshadow Presley’s future strong emphasis on landscape writing. I have, elsewhere, talked about the genre of the ‘walk poem’, which I see as “performative, improvised and creative” (Smith 61). In such poems walking becomes linked to linguistic creativity and “creates associative links which forge new spaces and relocate mapped space” (61). However, my work on walking was directed at urban spaces while Presley makes her own distinctive contribution to the ‘walk poem’ in terms of walking in the landscape. For more about walking and writing in the landscape, including a discussion on this aspect of Presley’s work, see Harriet Tarlo and Judith Tucker’s 2017 essay, “‘Off path, counter path”: contemporary walking collaborations in landscape, art and poetry’, listed in the references.
Sandwiched in at this point are three smaller but important collaborative sub-volumes, Automatic Cross Stitch 1995-1996; Private Writings: Vermont Journal, September 1996; and Neither The One nor the Other 1998-1999, all of which demonstrate the poet’s growing commitment to working with others. In line with Presley’s enduring feminism, Automatic Cross Stitch, a collaboration with artist Irma Irsara, takes up the activity of sewing so often identified as women’s work. It suggests that the resultant clothing often inscribes women’s histories in a way that overtakes its own materiality: the girl’s dress “is a palimpsest / an overlay of loss / of memory / time and / landscape / where is the dress?” (‘the girl’s dress’ 1.192). This sub-volume evokes the exploitation, poor wages and bad conditions that characterise the fashion industry and its victims who are often immigrants, using a variety of techniques such as found text and wordplay. It includes photos with quite concrete, though non-specific, images by Irsara of fabric, rolls of thread, hangers or sewing machines that interweave effectively with the poems. Private Writings: Vermont Journal, September 1996 (the title perhaps an interrogation of whether writing for a poet can ever be private) raises, in its first title-less poem, the question of why selfishness permeates everything and how “that feeling of self always seems to / haunt me” (1.209). This resonates meaningfully with Presley’s non-egoistic approach to poetry writing, and her enthusiasm for collaboration, resulting in this case in some provocative drawings by Peterjon Skelt. Some of these collaborations have self-referring elements. Neither The One Nor The Other, written with Elizabeth James, quotes a line from poet Ulli Freer, “there is no ego in collaboration” (1.231). It evokes the merging of selves that is both the joy and challenge of working creatively with others.
Though the writing continues to be diverse, the latter part of Volume 1 contains three sub-volumes, Somerset Letters 1993-2001, Uncollect 1998-2004 and Myne 2003-2004, all of which foreshadow the poet’s greater emphasis on environmental poetry in Volume 2. In Somerset Letters the commercialisation of the countryside—the Butlin’s camp at Minehead—raises its ugly head. Minehead appears regularly in the volume, as well as in a poem of that name, often as the basis of Presley’s characteristic wordplay: “myne”, “mine”, “mind”, “mynadd” (‘Minehead’ 1.255). It symbolises the beauty of the landscape and its historical landmarks, and conversely its erosion and commercialisation (holiday camps, amusement arcades). In ‘Conductor’ (1.309-10), a poem from Uncollect, Presley responds to Jane Prophet’s ‘The Landscape Room’—an art installation composed of 120 ‘electro-luminescent’ cables suspended from the ceiling of a boiler house with water flooding the floor—by writing in situ in response to it, “My poem was written blind, and then later as an attempt to decipher and recreate the scrawl” (1.322). This poem, written in an environment in order to commune with it, precedes many other poems created in an improvisatory way in different locations in Volume 2 of the Collected Poems. Myne also points to Volume 2 in the relative sparseness of the writing and its focus on the Somerset landscape.
In Paravane 9/11/2001-9/11/2002, another sub-volume from the latter part of Volume 1, the poet becomes urban flâneur/flâneuse and digests the results of violent political protest—for example, a medieval church (St Ethelburg) which has become the site of an IRA bombing (‘Post Scriptorum’ 1.292-3). In ‘Subject: Re: Semtex. Posted by FP’ (1.290-1), the word semtex (a plastic explosive) morphs though intricate wordplay into all kinds of textual allusions, as in this short extract from the beginning:
semi text
(1.290)
seme
seam
semantics
se
man
teme
Later, the wordplay becomes more extreme:
semenal
(1.290)
semsem
sesame
simsim (Arabic)
This leads us to ponder (amongst other things) the complex relationship between protest and writing. On a different note, ‘Fluid Canvas’ (1.288-9), refers to dance as “not quite landing/not quite arriving” (1.288), which is an equally perceptive way of thinking about the writing and reading of poetry.
Volume 2 continues many of the concerns and much of the style of Volume 1 but is more heavily geared towards the landscape, and the monuments, artefacts or natural features upon it. These poems employ spatial design on the page to chart the relationship between landscape, body and language. In the introduction to the 2011 anthology, The Ground Aslant: an Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry, editor Harriet Tarlo calls the marrying in contemporary poetry of rural environments with experimental, explorative poetic techniques ‘radical landscape poetry’. For Tarlo, the word landscape encapsulates both “the land itself and the ‘scape’ which acknowledges interventionist human engagement with land” (7). For her, such poetry connects with Robert Duncan’s ‘opening of the field’ and Olson’s concept of ‘the field’ in his essay ‘Projective Verse’ (Tarlo Open Field). She defines ecopoetry as generally more overtly referential, and sometimes more polemical, than ‘radical landscape poetry’, yet nevertheless argues the two areas (ecopoetry and radical landscape poetry) can overlap. In the introduction to The Ground Aslant, she also distinguishes these two approaches to environmental poetics from pastoral, which she sees as too heavily invested in 19th century concepts of ‘pure nature’ and a sentimentalised rural life:
More recent ecological thinking now understands that nature, although it strives for equilibrium, does so through a process characterised more by change than stasis and this contributes to the shift away from any “supposedly authentic or pristine state of nature” (58). This radical landscape poetry works in ways close to this thinking, the poems themselves embodying this sense of constant change. This is a poetry full of questions, uncertainties, self doubts and self-correction.
(12)
The research that triggers and sustains Presley’s projects is made more overt in Volume 2, with increased detailed notes about sources, which I really appreciated. When reading Volume 1, I spent a lot of time looking up references on the internet, but I preferred to have this information close at hand. In the first sub-volume, Lines of Sight 2004-2007, the sections ‘Stone settings’ and ‘Longstones’ emphasise a particular type of stone setting specific to Exmoor. In these sections, and in the sub-volume Halse for Hazel 2008-2014, Presley draws extensively on the work of the amateur archaeologist Hazel Eardley-Wilmot, showing again her interest in women who have made an impressive contribution to a field of endeavour intellectually, artistically or scientifically, but are not widely known. As a preface to Lines of Sight, Presley says that “Neolithic stone settings are arrangements of upright stones placed in roughly geometric patterns or apparently randomly. They are unique to Exmoor, where they are by far the most common stone monument” (2.14). The roughly geometric shapes are often reflected in Presley’s poems which, in the case of ‘Stone settings x 3’ (2.19) and ‘White ladder’ (2.20), are shaped in columns that reflect the architecture of the stone settings. The exploration of the landscape, the searching of the unknown, can be read as a metaphor for the writing of poetry and our interactions with it: “I am familiar with the map, but there are no marked paths” (2.23).
Some of these poems are affiliated with the walk poem genre, mentioned earlier, where a poem enacts the poet’s movement through the environment. Sometimes these walks may be with others or part of a collaboration. For example, ‘Withypool tracks’ (2.30-1), includes fragments from a conversation about traversing the landscape, “What I suggest we do is we walk up to this crossing point to give us some idea of the distance involved, then we can hack – bash – our way up to there” (2.30). Again, this sense of exploration without a defined end-goal can be seen as analogous to the process of writing. Similarly, the references to “lines of sight” (‘Brer’ 2.22 and ‘Withypool Circle’ 2.23) have metaphorical implications, for lines of sight are often blurred in the creation of poetry and the resulting poems are sometimes oblique. In the section ‘Longstones’ Presley’s predilection for linguistic exploration and play, in this case for archaic words and Exmoor dialect, is again on display. A notable poem in this same respect is ‘Hare’ (2.58) with its accompanying glossary entitled, “VOCABULARY for explaining uncouth Expressions and interpreting barbarous Words and Phrases”, which is full of unfamiliar and luscious sounding words such as “rouzeabout” and “rubbacrock” (2.60). Some of the poems in the ‘Stone settings’ and ‘Longstones’ sections form part of a collaboration and multimedia performance with Tilla Brading. Fragments of conversation are clearly taken from interactions with Tilla, inscribing the process into the finished product.
The section of Lines of Site, ‘Female Figures’, was Presley’s poetic response to Jena Osman’s multimedia project on figurative statues in towns and cities. This section contains many fine poems about female experience and female power. Starting with a moving poem about illness, ‘Onde’ (2.79), written in medieval English and using Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love as a source, the section also includes ‘Speaking by Letters’ (2.85-6), which consists of material collaged from the letters of Queen Anne. This found material provocatively disparages both the Whigs and the Tories, claiming that “if I should be soe unfortunate as to fall into ye hands of ether, I shall look upon my self tho I have the name of Queen, to be in realety but their slave” (2.85). It demonstrates that even a supposedly powerful woman such as Queen Anne was worried about manipulation and domination by powerful men. ‘Female Figures’ also includes poems about statues of Sylvia Pankhurst, Queen Anne and Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher acquired power but did not use it to further the lot of the underprivileged, and Presley dedicates a poem to the decapitation of her statue by a protestor (‘Capital Attack’ 2.94).
Like Volume 1, Volume 2 also contains many enriching collaborations. Alphabet for Alina 2007-2011, another work with artist Peterjon Skjelt, forms a sharp contrast to Lines of Sight and involves sonic and semantic play on letters of the alphabet creating a brilliant rolling effect that generates new meanings, such as in this riff on the letter ‘a’:
apple a pull a tree A lina
(2.132)
leans her aap pull an apple an
ape sun ap rise across a cross be
tween cox and box her sunset keep
her kept such red to last such red to read
a tart start heart wood this year
the sun gone set or unripe apples
for supermarkets not my favourite
checks to come and live in caravans
pays less than factory work leaf eaters
whose apples who eats this
apple do not snow white do not
white out my reading burst let her
breathe let her choose between apple
and mirror of the apple her s/own character
In this section we breathlessly move from the redness of the apple to the apple pickers with low pay; to Snow White who collapsed after eating a poisonous apple; to our right to read and interpret as we please, “do not / white out my reading”; to ideas about reality, mimesis and identity, with many other ideas nestling in between or moving across these. The nine vignettes of an apple by Skelt, building from core to whole apple, are an excellent fit with the words.
Each section is dedicated to a letter of the alphabet but unlike Christian Bök’s Eunoia (Canongate, 2001), every word does not start with the highlighted letter, allowing more freedom within the alphabetic constraint. The imaginative, quirky drawings by Skelt (themselves a mix of genres from realism to surrealism to hyperrealism) sometimes have obvious connections with the poems, sometimes more oblique connections. This sub-volume is a very sophisticated take on the children’s picture book.
One of the centrepieces of Volume 2 is Halse for Hazel, which is unique for its emphasis on trees. It is about the secret language of trees, diversity in nature (tree varieties and formations) and the historical loss of woodland. It is also about movement within the landscape particularly amongst trees, “birch migrated / turned several times / around itself” (‘birch migrating’ 2.225), “their endless break to the ground / lost branches” (‘King’s Wood’ 2.195), evidence of historical activities on the landscape such as the making of a communal fire (‘burnt mound’ 2.199) and the way the landscape changes over time. Sometimes those transformations are evolutionary, sometimes they are human-made, forced and damaging. The sub-volume interweaves many different kinds of trees (yews, oaks, palms, hazel, whitebeam, beeches) in different spaces, orchestrating a multi-species and multi-locational tree world. The trees, like writers, transmit colours, textures and patterns, “white spindle / swallowed in red” (‘rowan’ 2.202) in formations that are intimate and comradely, “these branches together made / an interlacing” (‘Culvercliff’ 2.203). The trees, again like writers, also display a circumscribed expressiveness, “fenced and speaking out” (‘Bampfylde Clump (The Round Ring)’ 2.198), as well as energy and force of will, “cycad pushes us back” (‘cycad’ 2.229). At other times the trees seem rooted but broken, an impression that is reinforced in “Percevall wood” (2.255) where tree fragments (bark and branches) are interlaced with documentation about disability benefits and the brokenness is mirrored in poetic fragmentation. In most of the poems, the visual arrangement on the page creates a free-flowing, windblown and scattered effect:
fractured
(‘burnt mound’ 2.199)
stones charcoal
waterlog
preserved
narrow combes streams move around
must have timber
beech hedge unbroken expect gaps
laid up let go
the width of the combe beyond the limit
pit heath
embrace
This visual design also plants the possibility of reading the poem in multi-directional, non-linear ways that breed alternative readings.
Halse for Hazel (which also includes enhancing images by Irma Irsara of trees and parts of trees) consists of three sections ‘halse’, ‘col’ and ‘hassel’, all alternative words for hazel. The three sections are centred on trees, their varieties, characteristics and histories, approaching them from different angles and in contrasting contexts. In ‘halse’, Presley draws again on the work of amateur archaeologist Hazel Eardley-Wilmot and on Exmoor language to which we were first introduced in Lines of Sight: halse is Exmoor dialect for hazel, both a tree and the name of the archaeologist. In the poem ‘dru’ (2.191) the Exmoor trees and their relationships with each other are reciprocal with the twists and turns of Exmoor language. Likewise, the poem ‘halse’ rehearses the vagaries of the Exmoor dialect which brings about sonic / semantic reversals, “dyre for dry / crips for crisp” and “halse for hazel” (2.192). The poems range widely (and wildly) in time and space, demonstrating the ubiquity of trees. In ‘col’ the first poem ‘controlled burn’ (2.219) refers to “ogham”, a medieval alphabet “sometimes called the ‘Celtic tree alphabet’ after a High Medieval Briatharogam tradition ascribing names of trees to individual letters” (2.280), while the section ends with a contemporary Scottish landscape full of hazel trees. ‘hassel’ meditates on the artificially induced changes in the evolution of oak trees (‘Oak change’ 2.243), while the poem ‘leaf notes’ (2.262) combines poetic repetition with variation to evoke biological diversity: different species of whitebeam. ‘Atwood afterleaf” (2.265) focuses on the botanist Martha Atwood’s discovery of sorbus Bristoliensis (Bristol whitebeam) in the 19th century, again bringing the influential activities of a relatively unknown woman to the fore. Halse for Hazel also includes a playful and evocative collaboration with Julia Cohen, ‘Ribs and Leaves’, which has many memorable images such as “you lived in a house drawn / from pencils” or “the pitch of a public address / bathes children in tarmac” (2.269).
The subsequent sub-volume, Ada Unseen 2012-2017, is one of my favourites within the Collected Poems. Its main subject is the fascinating and impressive Ada Lovelace (daughter of Lord Byron). Lovelace, who is now considered to be a pioneer of computing, worked with Charles Babbage on his Analytical Engine, which foreshadowed the modern computer. She is yet another in the long line of women with innovative ideas that Presley brings forward in her poetry, though better known than some of the others. Presley weaves ideas about Ada’s personality, relationships, studies and interests (including music and flying) together with the house in which she lived and the surrounding landscape. Sometimes Presley (with Tilla Brading with whom she again collaborated) superimposes Ada’s mathematical concepts and diagrams on the landscape to map out walks or to create artefacts, such as the hexagon made of fallen branches which is the subject of the poems ‘irregular hexagon’ (2.315) and ‘hex remnant’ (2.316). Here, thoughts and ideas about Ada’s works, research about her life, and interactions with the landscape, are all mixed together. ‘Typography of terra infirma’ (2.320) charts severe landslips due to global warming through imagery and visual design (letters descend down the page with subsequent spacing of phrases creating a fast vertical descent). Here, as elsewhere, research and experience of the environment form a basis for poems that are often discontinuous, fractured, full of spaces and gaps.
Ada is ‘unseen’ because there are many unknown or hidden aspects of her life, but the theme of seeing and unseeing carries over into other poems that are not specifically about Ada. The section ‘Unseen’ refers both directly and indirectly to the poet’s eye operation, for example, in the three-section poem ‘bubble vision’ (2.377). The first section charts the (blurry) experience of sight after the operation:
if I look ahead there is a showing a band of light rises
(2.377)
up from the screen through a head of hair tree wigs
and a white marker s white flimeering
It is followed by a more factual section that is centrally formatted to create a visual design on the page. It takes us from a bubble in the eye cavity after the sealing of a retinal hole to the astronomical phenomenon of the Bubble Nebula (2.379). The third section conveys different perspectives about sight. While charting the importance of eyes, ‘bubble vision’ plays down some of the romantic connotations of the eye:
the eye is not the window to the soul
(2.380)
but a complex optical system
Ada Unseen ends with the very entertaining and astute, ‘Ada (internet cut up and paste)’ (2.395-8), which, I should disclose, is dedicated to me. It stitches together different search finds for the term Ada, from a programming language named after Lovelace to the Association of Drainage Authorities (ADA). It includes many amusing allusions to Lovelace that can be found on the internet, including an Ada Lovelace Edit-a-thon at Brown university “where volunteers will ramp up Wikipedia entries for female scientists” (2.397). The cut up and paste makes a droll comment not only on the ubiquity of the term ‘Ada’ but on the vagaries of Google and Wikipedia and the knowledge they espouse. While there is often humour in Presley’s poetry, this is one of the places where it is most to the fore.
The final section in volume 2, Channels 2018-2020, which is more about water than land, opens up new directions for Presley: although her poems have alluded to waterways before, this project is particularly centred on them. She says, “most of the sequence was written on site and in response to the coast, making use of visual design, verbal and typographical parallels and slippages” (‘Notes on Channels’ 2.461). Here again she writes in a way that is improvisatory and site-specific. She is also interested in the political issues that arise from the estuaries: “how they are being shaped and formed, both by climate change and political disruption of various kinds in the UK, especially post-Brexit” (2.461). This sub-volume is divided into four sections ‘Severn Estuary’, ‘Solway Firth’, ‘Thames’ and ‘The Wash’. A number of the poems, for example, ‘Brexitland’ (2.456), ‘glyph’ (2.458) and ‘Wash’ (2.455) juxtapose the landscape with references to Brexit, demonstrating the inescapable entanglement of nature and power. ‘what flints are found’ (2.454) is a poem with felicitous repetitions and unexpected conjunctions of the phrase ‘what flint’. But flint can be sharp and spark fires, and the poem uses the flint-as-image to allude to the indifference of the middle class to poverty and suffering as well as the “unceasing chitter of protest” (2.454).
These poems are a fitting end to the Collected Poems because they continue many of Presley’s interests in ecology and landscape but also show new directions in moving from land to water: another take on ‘radical landscape poetry’. This willingness to always be on the move, constantly trying new directions and collaborating with different people, make Presley’s work genuinely experimental and explorative as well as likely to contain new surprises in the future. But Presley’s Collected Poems is also impressive for its heterogeneity, the fact that throughout her oeuvre many different ideas and styles jostle together. Smoothness and sameness are often celebrated in the poetry world, but it is in heterogeneity that we are most likely to see genuine experimentation and change. Presley may be a radical landscape poet, but she is also a poet of many other colours. This varied approach to writing is highly successful because of Presley’s unusual technical control, poetic imagination and intellectual curiosity, as well as her ability to make practice and research speak eloquently to each other.
[i] Frances Presley and Elizabeth James, Neither The One Nor The Other (Collected Poems 1.232).
