A Sudden Mirror: Collected poems, by Roger Iredale

Author: Roger Iredale. Review by Peter Jarman.

This well-crafted collection of poems is a distillation of its author’s experience and reflection acquired through travels all over the world. The poems conjure up images of people and their plights that are especially relevant for Friends concerned with truth, peaceful relationships, and the alleviation of poverty.

Roger’s poems have been broadcast by the BBC and have often appeared in this magazine. They alert us to current perils, as with ‘Noah’, which appeared here in an issue devoted to COP26 and climate change. They quicken in my mind as I recite them to myself, with a special quality of rhythm and movement. Often, one three-line verse travels on to another, gathering form and direction while maintaining rhythm.

I especially treasure the poems about southern India: the ‘belly, mouth and eyes’ of a scavenger in Mysore’s market, who ‘fingers me as I buy’. Celebrating Easter in a graceful church in Madras, Roger notices that ‘out beyond the open doors, suburban trains ran by between the slums’. The contradiction between the triumphant ritual and the squalor outside means one is ‘confronted once again with all the old dilemmas of ourselves’.

The poems also echo ‘the eternal wailing of needless suffering’ through work and war. Roger comments on a Welsh slate mine ‘whose motive power enslaved three thousand men and killed them slowly, hacking slate that bunged their breath with dust’.
A villanelle about the invasion of Iraq has two refrains: ‘We needed friendship, not an attack’ and ‘you were warned what would happen if you invaded Iraq’, yet ‘your generals displayed a distinctive knack of killing civilians at a hell of a rate… you left us in ruins, you didn’t come back. There was nothing you thought you couldn’t create with bombs’.

There are gems about the joy of travelling – hence the train engine and carriage on the cover. Take the one about the night train from Brindisi to Paris. Leaving as a ‘man spat olive stones’, ‘someone shunted Italy beneath our feet’. The ‘train runs hot through vistas of electric wire and hammered steel’, through Milan and Dijon to arrive at Paris with its ‘porters mute with routine’. Simultaneously, a train departs on its ‘nightly legend’ ‘bridging time on patterns of the dark’.

Among allusions to life and death, a poem portrays a sycamore tree by a graveside, and Roger reflects that the corpse will be resurrected by ‘his transubstantiation into tree: roots, hairs, fibres bear him up towards the sun through all the warm ascending beauty of the leaves’.

This review is a mere glimpse into poetic elegance.

Copies of the book can be purchased from rogeriredale@yahoo.co.uk.

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