Lucy Ingrams – Poetry Owl

I am surrounded by nice poems, nice poems in magazines, online, in books that come my way for review, nice poems at open mics and in workshops, nice poems sent to me for my podcast, Poetry Worth Hearing. It is very rare these days to come across a poem that is egregiously bad. Perhaps because of the rise in creative writing courses, nearly all the poems that hit the light of day are well written, like cardigans that are properly buttoned up or sums that come out even. I even write nice poems myself, at least some of the time. So what is it about nice poems, often to be found in books or magazines with excellent production values and attractive artwork, that makes my heart sink?

Niceness is not necessarily associated with form, but it is difficult to suppress the sense of weariness sometimes occasioned by neatly shaped villanelles, pantoums, sestinas, sonnets (of course), specular poems (whose title puts me off because it sounds so gynaecological), haibuns and haiku. Then there are prose poems – lots of them. Form doesn’t have to be nice; Steve Ely’s The European Eel is written in a sort of blank verse which is rhythmic, powerful, often jaw-breaking and definitely not nice. Richard Price plays with the sonnet form in a way which acknowledges and renews tradition.

Nor does niceness have anything to do with subject matter. I have read nice poems about mass extinction, Gaza, the breakdown of relationships, the ending or absence of love, terminal illness and death. And I have read electrifying poems about the wind in the trees (‘wind whip’ by Lucy Ingrams), love for a child ( ‘The air that he breathes’) by Richard Price, love for a parent (‘sentence’ again by Lucy Ingrams).

Perhaps niceness is sometimes connected to predictability – when you know what the next word will be, how the line will end, what the rhyme will be, where the turn will take you. These poems are nice because they confirm you in what you know, instead of taking you somewhere unsettling and new. This is just as true of poems of political outrage as for poems that celebrate babies or trees.

The poetry scene at the moment is rich and varied and though poets tend to see themselves as the Cinderellas of writing, it has perhaps never been so easy to get published, if not paid. Little magazines of the print variety spring up and wither, curated by heroic editors until they give up when money and energy are exhausted. Online outlets, cheaper to run, are everywhere; some of them even have readers. Small presses are mushrooming, partly because of digital printing. Even as Arts Council Funding dwindles, publisher-poet financing deals are on the up and up. The teaching of poetry-writing has also expanded enormously, often as more established poets attempt to support themselves through a combination of academic work, teaching poetry courses and judging competitions. Competitions, of course, are excellent fundraisers and they attract an abundance of nice poems.

Some presses are more associated with niceness than others; some presses publish poetry that is spiky, incomprehensible, experimental in appearance, poetry which could not be described as nice but nevertheless rarely lifts the heart or even the hairs on the back of your neck.

Nice poems are often very accessible, partly because of the predictability factor already mentioned, but accessible poems do not have to be nice. Think of the tiny gems in Thomas A Clark’s poems in that which appears or the immediacy and clarity in Victoria Kennefick’s new book Egg / Shell.

Some not nice poetry makes you work a bit harder. I think of Gail McConnell’s Fothermather where traditional forms and experiment are used to explore and express her own feelings about parenthood in a same sex relationship. Padraig Regan and Seán Hewitt in different ways express a queer sensibility and aesthetic in poems which are not nice but do send prickles along the skin.

Nevertheless, you do not have to be gay or Irish to escape niceness and, in truth, even the nicest books often have some poems which are not nice and which justify the purchase price. So what is it that lifts poems above mere niceness? It can be the poet’s urgent need to speak, the feeling that there is something they need to say. Niceness is too often a product of workshop prompts or themed issues of magazines. No doubt these are useful in helping poets to practice their craft, especially those who know they want to write but don’t know what to write about. Sometimes a prompt can trigger memories or associations which help the writer to produce something which is truly their own and thus transcends niceness.

Another factor which takes a poem beyond niceness is scrupulous attention to language, to words, the combining of words and their relation to what is not language. A third characteristic might be the willingness to take risks, both personally and linguistically. One poet who does that, I believe, is Jane Burn. Here is an example: https://modronmagazine.com/a-poem-by-jane-burn/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR3U7FmNm2d1vGIMeF54MEQb9kGwZ3Q9MmnABl8ACnTZ30x2qANchhDALZY_aem_eWjfP2csgRyPZOwhe6RWNwThere is also the indefinable something which raises a poem from the rut, call it inspiration, duende, what you like, when the words do come together in a singularity which is the voice of the poet but which communicates with the reader or hearer to take them to a new place.

I have not quoted any poems which I consider to be nice; to do so would be invidious and I am aware that I am swayed by bias and mood. I have referred to a number of poems and poets I think are not nice. Again, my choices are arbitrary and personal, conditioned by recent reading, but I append a selection of their publications.

Jane Burn, Be Feared, Nine Arches Press, 2021; and a new collection, Apothecary of Flight, forthcoming from Nine Arches.
Thomas A Clark, that which appears, Carcanet, 2024
Steve Ely, The European Eel, Longbarrow Press, 2021
Seán Hewitt, Rapture’s Road, Cape Poetry, 2024
Lucy Ingrams, Signs, Live Canon, 2023
Victoria Kennefick, Eat or We Both Starve, Carcanet 2021; Egg / Shell, Carcanet, 2024
Gail McConnell, Fothermather, Ink, Sweat & Tears, 2019; The Sun is Open, Penned in the Margins, 2021.
Richard Price, Late Gifts, Carcanet, 2023
Padraig Regan, Some Integrity, Carcanet, 2022

I came to Light-fall by Lucy Ingrams (Flarestack Poets, 2019) after hearing the poet read. I was immediately struck by her attention to text, to meanings, sound and cadence so that every syllable seems to justify its location. Most of these poems are set outside, in the woods, in the fields, near the sea but the texts work at different levels, hinting at human stories and drama played out in a context where natural detail is of profound and felt importance.

‘Today’ is constructed around an opposition of self and a loved other where:

you watch the sea from the doorway, while I study grasses…

Self (the poet) is content to focus on close-up detail outside and ‘come back tuned to fine-jointed staves,/ shy-coloured panicles.’ The other, however, looks out to sea and notes the loss of the horizon; together they mourn as ‘a low fleece/ of fog wraps the chord-line between’ sea and sky. Ingrams’ ability to combine figurative language with scientific exactitude ‘shy-coloured panicles’ gives her writing extraordinary authority. The musical imagery is an undernote suggesting the loss and recreation of harmony between the couple which is led by the speaker who shows the other ‘the frail/fastenings, like hair, weaving Earth to the air’ so that their shared vision becomes whole gain, or ‘regains curvature’. It is not clear what the subject of this final verb is; it could be the Earth or it could be an unstated whole which is either a human relationship or a view of the universe. As we reach the end of the poem, we realise that we have been reading a slightly deconstructed love sonnet.

Indeed, many of the poems are unobtrusively love poems where emotions are worked out through the language of the natural world. In ‘Signs’ the poet demands to read nature as a code, echoing the childhood game of pulling petals off a daisy to discover ‘whether you loved me loved me not’. Ingrams plays with and contrasts the covert meanings in the signs written in letters with the natural language of ‘fields/hung with signs of their own’. The poem reaches no conclusion but it adds lustre to love through the beauty of the images which are looked to for answers

sure only

I’m not whether you love me love me not

flowering stars on the blackthorn bars and at dusk

Sirius setting Leo rising or neither and both.

This is an example of the poet’s attention to lineation and spacing, which I have not managed to repeat accurately here. She is careful to use the way the text appears on the page to bring out its emphases and music.

‘So will there be apples’ is another love poem which seems to open with the hopefulness of spring: ‘all thought of / him rinsed with light… the hedges whisper in / new viridian dialects’. In the second stanza, doubt sets in with the desire for rain ‘when will it rain?’ and the threat or promise of fire ‘this blue match / to a log – flame licking /the emerald evenings.’ The third stanza invokes with all its connotations the mystery of the ‘greenwood’ which has somehow been there all along. Love becomes dangerous as perhaps the object of love is dangerous, or unnatural ‘”frost in May”‘ and the fire of passion is in danger of becoming a ‘conflagration’ but the protagonist of the poem persists in her quest despite the dark warnings of her friends: ‘she goes out she goes looking’. What is she looking for? – love, the forbidden apple, the mysterious promise offered by the greenwood?

‘Ship carver’ is a tribute to a craftsman and a reflection of the poet’s love of the sea which uses sea-related imagery with astonishing skill to convey the dedication of the carver to his work: ‘coiled shavings …foam at the door’, ‘dusk closes over, swift/as the sea takes a skiff’. Somehow the poem evokes maritime history as far back as the Vikings as she describes how the woodcarver dresses ‘a prow for the wind’s/hoops’ and all this although he is working in a ‘workshop keep / seventy miles from/the tidemark.’

Ingrams excels in conveying emotion through the phenomena and cycles of the natural world. In “August letter’ she appears to be grieving for someone who is lost to her, probably through death. She celebrates the meaning of August, as a pivotal point leading to winter:

‘I peer into its tunc/and trace a tiny counterpoint: snow hyacinths on a tablecloth,/winter coats on chairs pushed back, the smell of pears.’ I’m not sure about ‘tunc’; I assume it’s Latin and not as the online urban dictionary tells me, ‘male genitalia’. Occasionally, I feel Ingrams takes her adventurousness with language too far; I was also uncomfortable with the adverbial coinage ‘latticely’ (‘Blue Hour’) although I knew what it was saying. Here, conversely, I’m not sure what the word is saying but I enjoy its sound and positioning.

I will quote the last three stanzas of ‘August letter’ which brilliantly combine images of nature, ourselves in nature, light, death and loss.

The evenings here are long still, are they with you? Yet I find

I plant mine up with candlelight, burn apple wood – watch

the mirror catch and flush.

This month’s like that, a flare I want to boost. That even so

will carry summer out upon its bier. My fingers flutter like

the leaves to think of it.

In the dream, your hands were empty – full of your touch. If you

were here, I could put mine out and you could take them.

Lucy Ingrams has already won The Manchester Poetry Prize , 2015, and the Magma Poetry Competition, 2016. This is a pamphlet of outstanding quality from a poet whose work continues to develop and excite. I very much look forward to a full-length collection.

Tag: Lucy Ingrams

Nice Poetry

Light-fall by Lucy Ingrams