First published in the Times Literary Supplement
An incomplete and often unreliable photographic record is the starting point for many of Jane Routh’s reflections in The Gift of Boats. Sometimes old snapshots are misleading. If the poet remembers “the exact shade of pink” her bike was painted, why is she “smiling and proud” next to a black Raleigh in “Memory’s Bicycles”? But when a picture could recover the lost “faces for names” in Routh’s notebooks, she finds “memory’s camera not even unpacked for ordinary days”. Getting the shot means being prepared at any moment and that is not likely, Routh suggests, in middle age, “when memory’s seen it before / and isn’t laying much down”. In these poems, taking a photograph is an event in itself, which alters its subject, except for the rare master “so light on his feet / as not to disturb even the air”.
While a poem on the page does not disturb the air, Routh’s poems ask to be read aloud, making much of plosive and onomatopoeic disturbances. Many begin with a jolt (“Better scuttled”, “World comes knocking”) and gather momentum through the modulations of alliterative lines (the “re-caulked and commodious hull”). With a broken photometer in her pocket, Routh embraces photgraphy’s imperfections and its blind spots. The darkroom replace associations “of endings, of night, of fear” with “the dark of beginnings / an orderly dark you know / your way round in” in “A Day’s Work”. Routh sees the risk in bringing something out of the dark or up from the depths. A boat would be better off “scuttled” than filled in with concrete and turned into a gaudy garden ornament amid a “square lobelia sea”, she insists in the opening poem.
She voices similar anxieties in “A Lewis Chess Piece, Her Grievance”. A queen piece, unearthed from the Hebridean seabed and now on display in a museum, recalls the deep blue of her underwater home in the spare language of someone who is already “begin[ning] to forget” the details. The poem has a mathematical elegance; Routh even mimics a chess move over the line break when she tells “how light castles / underwater”. Routh’s poems play their own tricks with snapshots, glowing with all the contradictions of a “cloudybright” photometer reading.
