Detail of book cover from Good Ground Beneath My Feet: Poems from Iona, by Martin Hayden
Good Ground Beneath My Feet: Poems from Iona, by Martin Hayden
Author: Martin Hayden. Review by Jonathan Wooding
The Quaker poet Martin Hayden won’t mind me saying that he reminds me of the ‘old men’ in TS Eliot’s ‘East Coker’: ‘Old men ought to be explorers | Here or there does not matter | We must be still and still moving | Into another intensity’. He’s on the move, you see, throughout this collection of translucent poems, and often hair-raisingly so. Even in the final poem he’s driving through a rainstorm along a mudtrack, ‘wobbling over its pitted drive’. And his opening poem? Well, he’s collecting passengers from a ferry, ‘the engines striving to hold | against the one-way muscling of the sea’. Still and still moving? Well, yes, Martin Hayden’s voice seems to me a still, small voice at the heart of a quaking world.
