3 HappenStance Collections

If they had any souls, most publishers would sell them to the devil, Bill Gates or a consortium of Thai businessmen if it ensured that their output was described as ‘fashionable’. The weekend papers are full of it: top ten talents under thirty, top thirty talents under ten, what is ‘happening’, as if the whole world wasn’t happening. In this context, we must cherish publishers like HappenStance who look askance at all this sturm und drang and focus instead on finding and publicising writers whose work they believe in, regardless of whether they fit any particular demographic segment or target market. Primarily a chapbook imprint but expanding into books of late, HappenStance produce elegant, tailored editions whose pages showcase many of the enduring qualities of home grown poetry: an emphasis on craft and structure, a quiet, self-effacing voice and, above all, an eschewing of smoke and mirrors in favour of a clear-eyed focus on the tangible, everyday world, its myriad tiny mysteries and miracles. HappenStance poets remind us that there is wonder everywhere and that the way to the empyrean is via the quotidian.

Janet Loverseed’s work embodies these qualities. Her voice throughout The Under-ripe Banana, her first collection, is controlled and unwavering, never brash or gauche, never playing to the gallery. Each phrase is weighted, each line calibrated. Some of the poems here deal with highly emotive subjects – the passage of time, changing relationships, old age, death. These themes are the bread and butter of poetry but it is surprising how many poets can’t butter bread. Janet Loverseed definitely can and you would never find her reaching for the jam jar just for the sake of it. Each poem knows what it is trying to do, does it and then leaves. My two favourites were Touching and From this Stopped Train. The first describes an observed scene between mother and son as the son draws “the best tiger in the world”, yellow and green with bright blue eyes and a pink smile. The second has echoes of Edward Thomas’s Adelstrop where the world is seen anew from a halted train, across the “noon-bright fields” where the calves are following their mothers. Janet Loverseed talks elsewhere in the collection about learning to accept herself, learning to believe that “…it’s quite all right/to be the kind of person/who just hangs about all the time,/thinking.” This chapbook suggests that time was well spent.

On the evidence of Rebuilding a Number 39, also a first collection, Marilyn Ricci has also spent a long time looking and thinking. These elegant, spare poems show that she has a particular feel for character and an ability to delineate it economically. The companion pieces Mams and Dads illustrate this, highlighting the differences between two children by contrasting the looks and character of their parents. One mother is “…young with fluid limbs./Wavy hair floats down her back.”, the other “…older with short hair./Eyes glow green and blue”. One looks like Jean Shrimpton while, the other, unable to look like a movie star, has to content herself with cleaning the oven while another movie star, Bob Hope, entertains her family at the local cinema. In the end, though, the two women are more alike than they first appear, each exhausted at the end of the day, laying their aching bodies down to sleep. The poems in this collection are set in tea rooms, cinemas and parlours, places where nothing much seems to be happening but there is drama if you know where and how to look: in the arrival of a coal delivery, in the smell of hops, in a teenage boy’s baleful glance at a waitress whiles his mother chatters, telling us all we need to know about what their relationship is and what it will become. But every now and then a streak of surrealism surfaces, as in Consuming Passion, where a woman renovates a rowing boat in a kitchen that may be on earth or may be somewhere else. These off kilter moments, dotted through the book, fizzing and flaring like fireworks, illuminate the elegant, miniaturist narratives that bind together this collection and the characters that inhabit it.

L.P. Hartley said that “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” Much of the first half of Nearly the Happy Hour, D.A. Prince’s first full length collection, is concerned with mapping this country, documenting its customs and practice, reconstructing and repopulating its vanished towns. The collection opens with Writing Just About Parsley, wherein Prince archly assures us that is all that she is doing. But nothing in these poems is just itself. Everyday items become charged, imbued with significance, like relics salvaged from a wreck or votive objects: a knife that was used to kill pigs that says more than words ever could about brutal realities, a length of string, passed around from person to person, triggers a mediation on scarcity and abundance, the contrasts between the make-do-and-mend attitude of the past and today’s ever-accelerating consumer cycle. Melancholy drifts through this collection like bonfire smoke across a suburban garden on a dark autumn afternoon. We might not see it, but we can always catch its scent. In School Photograph: 1957, we are taken back to a bright summer where children pose on “…the grass shaved close, cut/and cut and cut all through the growing months.” This, we are told, is “…how they sit before it all went wrong.” In The Long Question, the poet hovers around her old family home wondering “whether they still use that same leaning post,/grey and runnelled, with its nail for bird tits/and a half weathered coconut”. The poems towards the end of the collection move towards the present tense, but the past always lies beneath them, a persistent current tugging at the rudder. We return to images again in Taking the Photo, this time a rehearsal for a photograph to be taken after death. This too, we feel, will become significant, part of the warp and woof of past and present, memory and experience. D.A. Prince has a background in light verse, her work having appeared in The New Statesman and The Spectator. The skills she has honed in this area stand her in good stead here, for these poems, despite the inherent seriousness of their concerns and their intense, almost hypnotic, attention to detail, are taut, readable and never outstay their welcome. They also, however, repay close and repeated reading, yielding a different harvest with every visit. If we can say that HappenStance has a house style, then D.A. Prince’s work exemplifies it: finely crafted, lean, familiar and at ease with the technicalities of poetry, aware of itself and what it is doing but always guided by emotion and the desire to transmit that emotion to the reader. HappenStance poets aren’t interested in building towers bristling with clanging bells proclaiming themselves across the misty marshes. They are watchmakers, working with precision tools, painstakingly constructing exquisitely complex tiny machines. Just as we only really notice a watch when it has stopped, we are only aware of the value of this quiet but robust poetry, so in tune with the native genus, when we contemplate its absence. Let us hope that HappenStance keeps ticking for a while.