The golden October days seem to be over for now. The sky is overcast and rainy. I never left the house yesterday, and I don’t see any need to venture out today either. I am quite content to sit by the fire and catch up with some reading. I have been reading Allow Me, Poems 2000-2020 by the Canadian poet Rhonda Batchelor. This is the third volume of poetry by Rhonda that I have in my collection, after Bearings from 1985 and Weather Report from 2000. I discovered Rhonda’s poetry because she is a Van Morrison fan. The previous two volumes are sprinkled with references to Van’s songs such as Healing Game, Common One and I Cover The Waterfront. This new collection is no exception. The title of the anthology Allow Me is also the name of a beautiful instrumental track on Van’s Poetic Champions Compose album of 1987. Music is obviously a great source of inspiration to Rhonda. As well as Van there are also mentions of Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell in the lines of these poems.
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| Bearings, 1985 |
I am probably not the right person to attempt to write a review of this work because I’m not an expert on poetry by any means. My knowledge of this art form is very limited. I like Robert Lowell’s poetry, but that is because we studied it at school for A level. We went through the poems line by line and had the meanings explained to us. I also like some of the Beat poets such as Gregory Corso and Lawrence Ferlinghetti who I discovered via Jack Kerouac and some others associated with them like Gary Snyder and Frank O’Hara. I also like Charles Bukowski and John Cooper Clarke because I find them very readable and often extremely funny. I understand a lot of W.B. Yeats, Keats, John Clare, & William Blake and have tried reading Seamus Heaney because I know how important he is, but unless somebody explains the meaning to me it often goes completely over my head.
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| Weather Report 2000 |
The poems I enjoyed the most in Rhonda’s latest collection include those relating to her travels in Ireland. I thought McHughs perfectly captured the atmosphere of a crowded Belfast pub. I could also relate to One Month Back From Ireland. I know that feeling when you are home after a trip to Ireland where in the local pub you still drink Guinness hoping to recapture the magic, but it is never quite the same. First Fox is also wonderfully evocative of the Irish countryside. Celtic Ray is a nice poem inspired by Van’s song of the same name where Rhonda sits in her house in Canada and dreams of a turf fire in Ireland. There is a lot of humour in Rhonda’s poems. Plenty Of Fish is hilarious. The poems are very accessible and not too high brow for someone like me. I think I only had to look up one meaning, which was to find out what a gibbous moon was. Most of the poems concern relationships and are extremely personal, and often painful. It almost seems intrusive to comment on them. There are universal truths though. Anyone who has experienced bereavement or the ending of a relationship (which is nearly everyone) can relate to them. I found one poem called Petals particularly moving because I think I know who Rhonda is referring to. I have enjoyed reading these poems on a dark rainy October afternoon. If you would like to read it for yourself Allow Me is published by Ekstasis Editions Canada Ltd. You can find it here- http://www.ekstasiseditions.com/
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