Reviewed by Ruth Latta
Alighting in Time:
New Poems
by Lynne Wycherley
Shoestring Press
Oct 2024, Paperback, 60 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1915553591
Lynne Wycherley’s latest book of poems takes the reader on an illuminating journey to the English countryside, the halls of academia: to various places she loves. One meets wild creatures, a cherished mentor, a mother with rich inner resources, a couple of literary figures from the past, and some salt-of-the-earth rural people. As a Canadian who writes historical fiction but plays around with poetry, I was drawn to Alighting in Time as a change from the North American poets I usually read, and also because my ancestors came from rural England.
Lynne Wycherley was born in East Anglia, on the edge of the Fens, was educated at Oxford and has published eight earlier poetry volumes. She has also won prizes for her poetry. She has described herself as a “health refugee” living in Devon near a nature reserve. As her poetry and prose articles indicate, she is concerned about the little-known risks of the wireless boom and works to build awareness of the dangers. While her recurrent theme is the threat posed by modernity to the rhythms and solace of nature, her poems are not overly didactic nor depressing. They are uplifting and also reader-friendly; she includes footnotes to explain potentially unfamiliar terms.
Alighting in Time comprises forty-five poems, divided into four groups: “Arc of Light”, “A Fugitive Eden”, “Touchstones,” and “Farm on the Rim.” All have a special spark, and I especially liked “A Fern for Christina Rossetti”, which compares the famous Italian-British Victorian poet to an indoor fern. In her poem, “Spring”, Rossetti writes of ferns emerging when the earth reawakens. She was also a “fern-hunter” and owned a book about ferns. Rossetti, suffered from hyperthyroidism in middle age and led a circumscribed life. In a world where“fern hunters,” use “biometric cameras” and other soul-capturing devices, the author looks back to Rossetti, with whom she identifies, and says, “Let us make our own lens,” presumably their shared poetic sensibility. Wycherley concludes by calling Rossetti “filex femina” – Lady Fern.
Another gem in this first section is “In Praise of Small Weavers,” about mice who craft nests from harvest straw, “weaving us a cradle or a bier.” The fragile efforts of these creatures suggest that we must be reborn into a concern for the natural world, or we may not survive.
In the section, “A Fragile Eden”, poems in memory of the author’s family, “Lullaby Remembered” is outstanding for its description of the Fens reeds, beautiful with the change of seasons, and constantly blowing in a “living song of the light”, in spite of “herbicides” and “hurtling roads.” They are “faithkeepers.”
“My Mother in Moss Agate” shows the author’s mother wearing a green pendant and singing along in the kitchen to Tom Jones, Neil Diamond, Cher and other popular singers. Song and water imagery are vivid; for instance, the pendant was a gift when her waters broke; her grandchildren touch it with “starfish hands”; the mother has a “selkie life,” a “seal-song,” and when she moves from this life to the next, she “swims” through “sea grass”:
A tilde in the tide,
you’ll ripple drift towards us.
Song carried in that greater song.
The light reunited
over your head.
The “Touchstone” segment is a cycle of poems dedicated to the late Dr. Roger Highfield, an historian and librarian at Oxford. This beloved scholar spread “warmth in [his] wake.” His smile “kindled smile” and “a hint of mirth [was] rarely far away. The poem’s title, “A College Carried,” shows his importance to Merton College.
In “As Students Flow,” the author describes the “owlets” who flood into the Old Warden’s Lodgings (OWL) library at “term’s rush.” They have “wildflower faces” and keep the speaker of the poem busy at the computer dealing with memberships accessions, renewals and the like. Beyond the college, “AI hastens, e-life hurls.” The ending, “brave new world. Or Faust’” indicates that, in the speaker’s view, humanity has made a pact with the devil (technology) for knowledge and worldly pleasures.
In the final section, “Farm on the Rim, Devon 2024,” the poem “As Dawn Feathers the Fields” is magical. The author shows the reader “a sky unhusking itself/grey through grey…/ Ink unlatching from ink/the farm hill/hairline, liminal.” She includes rural terms in a song-like way, words like “coppice”, “arable” and “coulters” and place names such as “The Back’ern”, Benjy’s Field” and “Long Cropley.” As the light increases, it falls on Nick’s vegetable crates and Henry’s eggs, which he will candle and see “the sun’s a yoke in vitelline…Fragile.”
“Orion at the Doorway,” is an answer to a question probably often asked of Lynne Wycherley: “Aren’t you worried living out there, cycling in the dark?” The stars light her way; they are old friends that she will “never abandon” for “halogens.”
The poem “Newborn” in the final section is a direct, vivid plea to us to resist new technologies. It begins, “She is not a bar code/nor a QR code\ She was born for face to face, not screen.”
As a writer alarmed by developments like artificial intelligence, who also likes internet searching and word processing programs, I have worried about the social harm caused by screen life, but have thought less about the health dangers of the wireless boom. Wycherley’s, Alighting in Time, impressed me not only for its word play and imagery but also for its message.
About the reviewer: Ruth Latta publishes poetry and writes Canadian historical novels. In her current work-in- progress, centring on a poet and a painter, she is including some of her poems to add to the story. Google her blog: ruthannelatta.blogspot.com