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.
Samuel Johnson, famous for ‘striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone’ in order to refute the pretentions of abstract thinking, may well be one of the presiding spirits of this collection. It is his sharp-eyed no-nonsense stone-kicking that appeals to Hayden. I do believe Johnson had time for Quakers – his good friend the poet John Scott, for instance – so perhaps here is a debt repaid. An epigraph to Hayden’s poem ‘Surplus’ is Johnson’s business-like comment on Iona exports, and where a conventional poet might be rhapsodising about, say, a robin redbreast’s song, here a robin disappears under a discarded washing machine, frightened by the poet’s efforts to flatten cardboard for recycling! See how busy the poet is with that bag of recyclable tin cans: ‘a drag-scrape over concrete, a tug up | with both arms, a holding push with the knees, | a shove with the back, and it’s into the van’. The action becomes a metaphor for the making of the poem itself. Good work is done.
Hayden is unaffectedly content with what is ordinary, and he pays attention to the quiddity, the ‘thisness’ of things. He is properly ‘grounded’, in the thick of good things, particular, and as Wordsworth wrote at the end of his ‘Prelude’, ‘all gratulant’.
As well as being a kind of tracker, our poet is with friends too, conversing as if on the road to Emmaus. I say Emmaus because the conversation, implicit mostly, is not exclusive, not conflicting, but seems to open things up, seems to include a shadowy presence, even if that presence turns out to be a cow and her ‘shielded calf’ in the darkness. And there are the three strangers in ‘Hospitality (2)’: ‘We watch them, bent and blown, | crossing the field, | two or three now we’re not sure.’
Hayden manages all this in lines as clear as a still pool. He’s a modern-day Jakob Boehme, the seventeenth-century shoemaker, and scandalous mystic. Jakob could pay diligent attention to the light reflected in a pewter dish, and thereby be contented, more intensely alive. All seems gratulant, and all is amicable, candid and generous. Hayden is – to use his phrase from ‘God and the Corncrake’ – ‘a plain and doughty bird | on its favourite evening stone in open show’.
