This is Michael Daniels’ first collection, the traditional slim pamphlet with the added benefit that the publisher, Poets House Pamphlets, Oxford, has produced a fine object, printed on good paper, with understated subtle art work to enhance the text.
A note informs the reader that Ravenser Odd first appeared as a sand or gravel bank at the mouth of the Humber in the early 13th century. A settlement was established there. It enjoyed a bad reputation, until it was finally erased in a great storm in the 14th.
It’s the stuff of folk tales, made better by the fact it might be true, and while the enemies of the settlement might have seen its destruction as devine retribution, today as the note states, it’s easier to see it as a symbol of nature’s indifference to human concerns.
The poems are all written in Terza Rima. Anyone who voluntarily writes in this form has to be admired for making their own life difficult, but the success of Daniels’ attempt is evident in the way the rhymes don’t intrude. The poems move smoothly, and there’s no sense that a rhyme has been forced or the lines padded to fit the form. The verse is spare, in keeping with the feel of medieval chronicle or folk tale.
The sequence begins:
What is it to be held in mind
by someone else, to dwell as ghost
or presence there? The drowned recline
in chambered mud, yet still we host
them in our heads, subdued and dim.
It isn’t us who need them most.
Economically, Daniels moves from here to sketch in the development and final destruction of the place. Two passing ravens provide a bird’s eye view of the new land. Then there’s a feudal Lord; ‘…life was his to make the worse,/he was their breath, their bread, their meat’, the restless power of the sea, the gradual erosion of the land, until the dead are ‘liberated’ from their graves and washed ashore. The two ravens see the final calamity:
The people’s final prayer rose up,
petitioning their lonely god.
The ravens read their trembled lips
to scavenge scraps of uttered word,
then spat them back as raucous noise,
disemvolweling all they heard.
This is a small impressive collection. The poet’s own website contains files of him reading his work, with evocative visual images to accompany the readings.
https://www.michaeldaniels.co.uk
Update: March 2023. There’s a longer version of this review at :
https://brazen-head.org/2023/03/28/verses-for-a-vanished-town/