Barbara Cumbers
poet and geologist
https://londongrip.co.uk/2016/02/london-grip-poetry-review-cumbers/
A review of A Gap in the Rain, by Michael Bartholomew-Biggs
A first collection by Barbara Cumbers confounds the old idea of “two cultures” and shows a happy blending of scientific and poetic observation.
A Gap in the Rain
Barbara Cumbers
Indigo Dreams
ISBN 978-1-910834-01-5
72 pp £8.99
A poet assembling a collection has to decide on the placement of the poem which gives the book its title. There may often be a case for this poem coming later rather than sooner so that the collection’s poetic argument can build up to some point of particular significance. However the title phrase of Barbara Cumbers’s first collection A Gap in the Rain is waiting for us on the very first line of the very first poem ‘Wet Through’: I am a gap in the rain / which flows around me. This poem, made up of thoughts while walking through a downpour, is a very suitable opening to a book in which Cumbers is often observing and analysing her own progress through various environments and situations. As a scientist (a geologist) she is accustomed to looking below the surface of things; hence, even as rain flows round her outside she is also well aware that
Most of me is water,
the trees in a distance too far
to offer shelter are mostly water,
as are the rabbits, their ears
flattened like broken umbrellas.
Observation here is working at three levels: the chemical composition of the objects in the landscape; the strategic appraisal of (lack of) opportunity for shelter; and the poetic insight which spots a resemblance between rabbits’ ears and umbrellas.
In this collection, Cumbers seems more often than not to be walking in landscapes or working in a laboratory. ‘Field Notebook’ combines the two as the poet reflects at her desk on observations made on a previous occasion in open country. The seemingly casual mentions of ‘you’ who found the pink spider and were always there suddenly become more significant after the revelation that these are notebook entries made on the day you left. We can then understand the importance of the marks on sketch maps like kisses on letters.
The stoically rueful tone of ‘Field Notebook’ returns in various forms. Cumbers is honest about admitting that scientific work is not always exciting
Does it matter what isotopes these rocks contain?
Do I care? ...
... The day is very long.
. [‘Autumn Day in the Isotope Lab’]
Attempts to escape from routine do not always work. In a notebook stray phrases // nestle among columns of figures / and never become poems. And even the act of exploring spectacular landscapes can demand an effort of the will and a bit of self-motivation: Of course it was worth going on, of course it was – (‘Rainbow Bridge’). Sometimes however the habit of accurate observation and the poetic imagination combine very effectively, as in an old-fashioned hotel
It’s a seafaring room, its floor
remembers the waves
...
The mirror’s silvering shows
where salt has splashed it
[‘At the Mermaid Hotel in Rye’]
Notwithstanding the skill evident in Cumbers’ perceptive, meditative (and sometimes slightly detached) accounts of urban and rural settings, it comes as a welcome change when she ventures into something more speculative. ‘A Vision of the City’, based on a remark by David Attenborough downgrading the importance of human beings in the natural world, imagines various London landmarks in a demonstration of the truth that ‘people could disappear tomorrow and life would just go on.’
Peregrines nesting on ledges in the cliffs of Bevis Marks
indulge their aerodynamics in the updrafts of London Wall.
Pigeons regret this, along with the lack of breadcrumbs.
(Pigeons seem to be the only creatures that would miss us!). More darkly imaginative is the poem ‘Lithium’ which expresses the effects of medication in terms of landscape. Once I would have worn a dress of daisies and danced … but … you didn’t know how close the clifftop was. Now however … the grass lies cropped short / all the way to the horizon. / I can see for miles – for flat and level miles. More striking still is ‘Thirst Fugue’ which is modelled on the form of Paul Celan’s ‘Todesfuge’ and speaks of the situation in the occupied territories of Palestine. It is difficult to convey the power of this poem in a short extract but here are some of its haunting repetitions
.... thirst is a settler in Palestine
he dreams of Zion he strips us at checkpoints
he commands that we wait he commands he commands
that we walk for our water your clear pools Ibrahim.
This fine poem occurs at about the mid-point of the book and is followed by some more fanciful pieces based on myth and fairy tale and then by vividly sympathetic observations of animals, birds and insects. A hedgehog is an old bootbrush of benevolence; wasps are black and yellow drunkards sizzling on their backs. We hear a stag beetle lecturing some his younger wet behind antennae fellows on the futility of flight. And a flock of lapwings flows / like iron filings near a moving magnet, /in and out of visibility /… until the field strength fades. Some of these poems suggest that Cumbers is not squeamish: she appears quite willing for both wasps and spiders to sit on her hand.
One of the later poems, ‘Puddle’, provides a pleasingly unifying link to the book’s opening one, set in a rainstorm. This psalm-like piece rejoices that God has blessed all puddles / and made us in his image; and it sits intriguingly alongside other poems which seem more sceptical about the role of a deity when it comes to human affairs (The man in the sky / put me in a lottery). In the enigmatic ‘Portrait of a Marriage’
A boat is rising in the garden
like a whale coming up to breathe.
...
The woman sees her garden
diminish. She hangs the washing
in new places....
This seems to be transposing the story of Noah into modern times – especially when we learn that the woman is teaching her children a strange religion / whose god is of desert and dryness. Such a return to the theme of rain would be characteristic of this quietly satisfying book in which each poem is subtly linked to its neighbours by a key word or image and the poems themselves are well-crafted and as carefully shaped as a scientist’s diagram.
.. Michael Bartholomew-Biggs
A Gap in the Rain: Barbara Cumbers, Indigo Dreams, review by Greg Freeman
Thursday 18th February 2016 10:54 pm (first posted 12th February 2016)
Barbara Cumbers is a poet whose work makes you think of sudden inundations and new landscapes, the slow movement and shape-shifting of continents. Her first full collection, ‘A Gap in the Rain’, (Indigo Dreams) looks at the land with a geologist’s eye – she is a former lecturer in the subject with the Open University. In ‘Borrowdale’ - “Ask the mountains their story/ and they’ll tell you – slowly” - the lines of the poem are laid out like a range of Lake District peaks. ‘Two Currents Meeting’ also has a particular shape to it, as it looks out at the Channel beyond Dungeness, and ponders the sliding shingle:
This is where we stand - at the cusp of currents,
the depths swept clean beneath conflicting flows,
The weight of stones moved upwards …
Just along the coast Cumbers ponders how Rye, a medieval port, has been left high and dry by the movement of the sea: “It’s a seafaring room, its floor/ remembers the waves …/ Two full miles from tides/ that swept up Dungeness …/ we are landlocked/ in a sea of grass.” (‘At the Mermaid Hotel in Rye’).
Down-to-earth humour often accompanies the depiction of geological history. The poet attends a lecture on the ocean of Tethys, which existed before the Indian and Atlantic oceans: “Not my field, but it’s a change/ from reading in the library.” The lecturer’s voice is soporific, and she fights the onset of sleep: “I jerk my chin from my chest./ The Mediterranean forms as continents move,/ dries out, then floods again. Maybe/ it will rain tonight – they said it might.” (‘Tethyan Carbonates and their Influence on Oil Reserves’).
Similarly, she marvels at the wonders of the Grand Canyon and the story it tells of Earth’s history, as well as the average tourist’s attention span: “Six minutes, a ranger said,/ is all most people take to look.// Six minutes./ Two thousand million years.”
These are not picture-postcard poems; the remarkable ‘Rainbow Bridge’ is about a dangerous if not reckless journey through a flooded desert, seeking “that high arch to nowhere”. She and her companion survive it, but afterwards go their separate ways: “We felt/ no joy in our safe return, we moved/ jarred bones with care, shambling/ from the sodden pier with shaking limbs”.
Science is invoked in ‘Relativity’, likening a relationship to a lab experiment involving monkeys: “Do you remember that experiment where baby monkeys/ could cling to wire that fed them, or to fur that did not?/ They all preferred fur. Cruel you called it,/ as if warmth were merely a matter of temperature”.
But with the science comes God, too. In ‘Credo’ Cumbers is almost cross with herself: “It should annoy me that it’s so ingrained/ that belief clings somewhere to the outside/ of logic, sending rootlets into crevices”. Yet music such as Bach’s B Minor Mass or the St Matthew Passion - and science – seems to shore up such belief in the poem: “The curvature/ of melody lifts like a leaf changing colour/ in the wind, spreads like a ripple in space-time / to fill the universe with the concept of deity.”
The poetry of Barbara Cumbers is intelligent, questioning, and often amusing, and addresses with clarity the kind of subjects and notions that some readers might otherwise find difficult. The curiosities and beauty of science and the natural world are everywhere in this collection, making it unusual and very worthwhile.
Greg Freeman