Michael Vince’s generous, intelligently reflective Legwork impressed me deeply. It’s a book that repays careful reading and rereading. I’ll try to say why by looking at some poems in the opening section, ‘Around Greece’.

Poems in it recall short expeditions within Greece, exploring by bus or on foot. They present small incidents with a fullness of life that makes reading them an immersive delight. They make encounters and events we might normally think of as trivial shine with a kind of archetypal, even numinous light while remaining thoroughly grounded in the day to day realities of rural and insular Greek life. One side of this achievement, of course, is a matter of vision. The poet can see this luminous significance in ordinary things. That involves generosity of feeling, intelligence, empathy and a selflessly receptive imagination.

The other side is sheer technical skill of a kind that is both polished and modestly self-effacing. Vince’s syntax and metre don’t call attention to themselves but it’s through their subtle and continuous work that we come to share his vision. Throughout the book, most poems are written in short lines and long sentences. The poet uses this combination to achieve a double effect. The continuity of the sentences makes us feel the interrelatedness of the poems’ details and creates suspense as to what will come next. At the same time, by breaking the flow with line endings Vince frames individual details and emphasises words in a way that makes them shine out distinctly, not becoming subsumed within the larger movement. Complementing each other, these effects of suspense as to what will come and framing when it does give each detail a sense of emphasis.  ‘Lamb’, for example, begins

In an island village, high up,
half abandoned, where goats perch
among ruined houses, we walk
along a winding street, watched by
suspicious cats, greeted by
the occasional dog acquainted
with tourists. On a doorstep
a young woman sits with her pet
seated beside her, a lamb
with a lead and collar.

How much more circumstantial could writing be? But a striking part of the total effect is how unlocalized the experience is. We never learn who’s walking with the poet or which island they’re on, let alone which village they’re in. And so without losing their particularity the scenes and qualities Vince describes take on archetypal resonance and evocativeness, whether they be physical things like mountain, sea and sky, bread, animals or people; abstract but specifically named concepts like generosity, which is beautifully and playfully dramatized in the poem of that name; or still more abstract ideas tacitly suggested by the arc of the poem as a whole, as ‘Lamb’ suggests the ambiguity of our relation to the animal world by reminding us that the eating of lamb is a ritual of the Greek Easter.

Currently, though, my very favourite poem in this section is the enchanting ‘Spa Town’, which combines longer, more undulating lines with freer imaginative play. After eleven lines describing a small spa town or village in the heat it focuses on one patient. I’ll need quite a long quotation to suggest the delicate interweaving of tenderness, humour, irony and compassion as it does so:

Here we watch one, an old man in pyjamas
stroll out unsteadily down a concrete pier
towards the ocean, followed by a ginger cat,
tail up, pacing to keep company. The man
turns back several times and mutters,
exchanging nods with this attentive creature
who hasn’t come here for its health. They look
like a couple out for a walk, taking the air
on holiday. When they reach the end of the pier
perched above the waves, the cat sits
and grooms. The old man lights a cigarette,
and convinces himself that nobody can see,
while the ginger cat waits, much like a nurse,
or a child out with grandpa, who comes each year
for coffee-less, wine-less days. The old man
gazes out, where the healing waters mingle
with the bitter salt. He takes laboured breaths,
then turns. He says the word, the cat agrees,
and they both begin their slow return to the shore.

Such sensitively evocative observation expressed in simple language is a pleasure in itself. So much, for example, is implicit in the way the suggestion of ease in ‘stroll out’ is countered by ‘unsteadily’. Beyond that, there’s a moral as well as aesthetic beauty in the way the poet effaces himself from the scene, letting the poem be completely filled by the old man and his situation. It almost feels as if we’re seeing it and reacting to its emotional suggestions for ourselves, and this makes for a peculiarly intimate, lingering involvement. In fact, of course, all our impressions arise from the poet’s choices about what to notice and focus on, and from the similes he floats. Successively comparing the cat to wife, nurse and grandchild brilliantly superimposes a series of easily visualised imaginary scenes on the actual one, each with its own emotional resonances, and in the actual scene our sense of the old man’s fragility and self-consciousness is quietly heightened by contrast with the cat’s self-containment and the graceful physical ease that the narrative seems to imply. Finally, in keeping with what I said earlier about the archetypal resonance of these poems, images like the bitter salt, the ocean and the shore seem fraught with symbolic suggestiveness, making us feel the old man’s conscious closeness to death in a way that’s the more haunting for being indefinite.

The book is divided into four sections, ‘Around Greece’, ‘Fish’, ‘Visiting Relation Can Be Difficult’ and ‘Far Shore’ – titles which in themselves suggest how the poet interleaves gravity with quirky humour. Although I’ve concentrated on the Greek poems that dominate the first section and the beginning of the second, the book covers a range of subjects and approaches them in different ways. I’ve remarked on Vince’s obvious intelligence. Often this appears as a shimmer of implicit reflections on the physical scene the poet presents. Sometimes it takes a more cerebral, conceptual form. ‘Fish’, ‘Legwork’ and ‘New Boots’ explore abstract concepts by developing a single comparison. ‘Legwork’ is of particular interest as it’s the title poem. In fact I read it as among other things a description of the book’s approach to writing. It begins

Going over the same rough ground
seeking an answer, it’s a matter
of setting things out, finding the route,
as a distance walker first lays out
maps, and fetches from the loft
boots and sleeping bag, makes lists
of food to take, buses to catch,
glances at the weather forecast. What
will happen along the way this time…?

The fact that the poet sees walking as exploration and looks forward to surprises even on familiar ground reflects the openness of mind that I like so much in his work. Far from considering such openness as at odds with thought and deliberate technique, the poet presents planning and care as conditions of the discoveries he hopes to make. In the end, after an arduous climb his allegorical walker must

    follow that gradual descent
shaped by long past laborious days,
now that an ache in calf and thigh
embodies the process of legwork.

The way the poem redeems ‘embodies’ from cliché is a joy in itself, and points to something fundamental about the procedures of the whole book. Even in developing explicit abstract concepts or exploring elusive ripples of reflection, all these poems embody the experiences and ideas they present in densely, vividly and grittily concrete images. At the same time, to go back to what I said earlier about how often his images have an archetypal resonance, although only a small number of poems explicitly focus on pursuing elusive ripples of reflection, they nearly all have a tendency to expand into them. ‘Burning’, for example, vividly describes how the poet and his companion laughed when they realised that what they thought was a catastrophic blaze was only the moon rising behind a hill; then describes how his father saw the Crystal Palace burn and how people called the disaster ‘the end of an era’, not wanting to see it as ‘the first step into a new one’. The poem ends

                                      Later,
in a country not very far away
and of which we knew a great deal,
firemen looked on but did nothing
as the synagogues flamed; Kristallnacht,
a warning beacon for the coming terror
of bombers in the dark high up
guided from below by the burning.

It’s hard not to see this as speaking to the current instability of the international order. And it seems significant that Vince describes the burning of the Crystal Palace as the first step into a new era, rather than merely the beginning of one. Hovering behind and uniting all the poems of Legwork is the ancient metaphor of life as a journey. It becomes explicit in ‘New Boots’, which takes stock of the wearing out of old habits and even friendships, ending

Places and people, cushioned
at the raw edges, blistered,
how they ache to hobble back
as worn manageable shapes
when it’s all too late, and boots
once loved are dropped down
heavily, with a painful sound,
into the bin. Then it’s barefoot
that a new journey of self begins.

Am I letting ripples of suggestion carry me too far in hearing a faint echo of the famous ‘Lyke Wake Dirge’ beginning ‘This ae night, this ae night’ at this point?

Legwork by Michael Vince. £10. Mica Press. ISBN: 978-1-869848-38-5. Reviewed by Edmund Prestwich

I would like to thank David Cooke for permission to repost this piece, originally written for  The High Window. You can see reviews of other books by other people by following the link.