Barbara Cumbers
poet and geologist
In the simmer dim: Barbara Cumbers
Dempsey & Windle
by Greg Freeman
Friday 15th July 2022 8:32 am (first posted 14th July 2022)
I’ve always wanted to go to Shetland. Geologist Barbara Cumbers spent a month’s residency there in 2017, and has visited the islands on several other occasions. Reading her pamphlet In the summer dim (Dempsey & Windle) has only increased my desire to travel there one day.
The title of the collection is taken from the Shetland name – ‘simmer dim’ – for the absence of darkness in midsummer. In the first poem of the collection, ‘North’, Cumbers says:
There is so much light, the midnight sky
Is full of it. Not stars nor moon – just light,
the simmer dim enough to read by
I am drinking light and space.
But she is aware that the “price of summer light is ice, / … and the deep winter dark.”
There is a marvellously evocative poem about the Northern Lights:
Because the night is shining green
It might split open
So I wait in the still and the cold
for the solar wind
to blow the sky apart
(‘Da mirrie dancers’)
For Cumbers, the Shetlands have the magic of a children’s story. And not just any children’s story. As her notes point out, Robert Louis Stevenson visited Unst in 1869, ten years after his father and uncle had built Muckle Flugga lighthouse off the island’s northern coast. Stevenson published his classic yarn Treasure Island in 1883, and included a map that bears a superficial resemblance to Unst. She says:
He could put the treasure
anywhere – it was already here
in the peat of the island,
its crofts and chromium
and northernness, its serpentinite,
all the contorted rock of it.
(‘Treasure Island’)
This passing reference to the poetry of geology – the poet’s passion – is fleshed out in ‘An eccentric geologist describes the ophiolite fragment that form the eastern side of Unst and Fetlar’ (a title long enough to surely make it a poetry competition contender). She lovingly describes what she calls “snake-rock” as “too old to remember the ocean floor/ … has secrets locked away, written in water // it holds as part of itself.”
‘Directions’ describes a loss of bearings on Shetland – “not north or south south/ is safe and north // is nowhere” – while ‘Burning’ conjures up a vision of Shetland’s annual fire festival held in January, when a full-size replica Viking longship is set alight, to commemorate the islanders’ heritage. The poet sees a fishing boat leaving at sunset, and imagines it is heading “to meet Viking gods of ice and fire”.
A no-nonsense pantoum about a ‘Last day’ encounter:
An otter surfaced near me quite by chance.
I needed a piss and crouched beside a wall
sheltered from the wind. A lucky glance –
a whiskered face emerging from a pool.
emphasises the poet’s other passion, for the wildlife on Shetland. There are mentions of ponies, of course, but also orcas, seals, geese, gulls, storm petrels, ducks, ravens, gannets, puffins, and bonxies, also known as great skuas, as well as botanical finds, “plants that live only here”.
I have also loved the TV series Shetland not particularly for its plots – what a crime-ridden place! - but for its scenery. Shetland could be described as bleak – “no trees, no mountains” – but that simplicity is somehow wonderful. Cumbers explores and celebrates the topography in poems such as ‘Island voices’, ‘Hermaness’, ‘Grind o da Navir’, 'A landscape for Sue’, and ‘Bridges’, the latter about how oil money has made a difference.
This slim collection is a picnic of delights. In the simmer dim contains riches; poems to treasure, that take you there.
Barbara Cumbers, In the simmer dim, Dempsey & Windle, £8.50
https://www.writeoutloud.net/public/blogentry.php?blogentryid=123678
In the simmer dim: Barbara Cumbers
Dempsey & Windle
by Nigel Kent, poet and reviewer
This week it is my pleasure to review Barbara Cumbers’ memorable depiction of the Shetland Islands in her latest collection, In the simmer dim (Dempsey and Windle, 2022). I have known Barbara for some time as a fellow member of the Open University Poets’ Society and have long been an admirer of her poetry. It is six years since her first collection, A gap in the rain (Indigo Dreams, 2016), so this new work has been eagerly awaited.
Written in response to a number of extended stays on the islands, Cumbers uses her finely-tuned powers of observation and her aptitude for striking imagery to bring alive their distinctive landscapes and bird life. She is a geologist and ornithologist and it shows. Take for example her poem describing the effects of seasonal change on the appearance of the puffins (Winter puffins). She beautifully characterizes the comic appearance of the puffin with images such as: ‘they have lost their comic noses/ worn all summer’, ‘No longer do they walk their waddling walks…where , if they had canes to twirl, they surely/ would have twirled them’, and ‘no longer// do sand-eel false moustaches waggle/ as they duck and scurry into burrows.’ The verbs, the metaphors and the cadence of the lines work perfectly together. There is an impressive accuracy here, but there is also an unmistakable affection for what she sees.
This affection is also present in her descriptions of the landscapes. I don’t know of a writer better at describing landforms. I’m no geologist but Grind o da Navir grabbed me, making me appreciate the grandeur of the land mass and the magnitude of the physical forces at work in this place. She writes: ‘two tonne blocks,// rectilinear as if cut by machine./ The sea has considered/ a new career as quarryman, its dynamite// exploding rocks to send them far inland.’ The impressiveness of this natural feature is matched by the impressiveness of the writing. We see and hear what she is describing, and we, too, are left in awe. Yet there is more to this poem. She tells us the power of the sea ‘Like old age…teaches me frailty’ and she concludes the poem with the lines: ‘I look around and under boulders/ like a seal woman searching for her skin,’ both images suggesting that the power of nature resonating in this landscape makes her aware of her own mortality, the fragility and limitations of humankind.
Another part of the attraction of this landscape for Cumbers is the connection she feels with its history: its human history and its geological history. In Beorgs of Uyea, Ronas Hillshe sees the evidence of ancient people who once inhabited this desolate, abandoned place: ‘the stuff of the hill revealed/ in left-overs of ice and the scattering of axe factories, flakes shaped// with stone on stone from felsite dykes/ that cross the granophyre/ by folk who have left us little but this.’ Similarly in Burning, in which she describes an island sunset, she recalls the islands’ Viking past: ‘And through the fire// a black ship’s hull is shimmering,/ a distant processionless Up-Helly-Aa/ or a funeral taking the dead to sea// to meet Viking gods of ice and fire who live here still in the peat/ and the salt wind.’ The physical features of the environment prompt her to reflect on those who once inhabited it. They also cause her to reflect on the natural events that formed them. In the wonderfully self-deprecatingly entitled poem An eccentric geologist describes the ophiolite fragment that forms the eastern side of Unst and Fetlar, she sees evidence of the natural events that resulted in the formation of this uniquely impressive geographical feature: ‘If snake-rock could dream, its dreams would be/ of weight and time, of scrape and crush.// Oh, the stress in flattened pebbles…//..In layers of settlement,/ snake-rock carries the stripes of its past.’
In addition to this connection with the past, she observes the symbiosis of the elements of the natural world. Cumbers frequently conveys a sense of their interdependency and suggests that humankind has somehow withdrawn from this relationship. In Utility she describes how nature deals with death: how the cycle of life is dependent on all species and elements playing their part. She describes the carcass of a dead seal: ‘All flesh has gone, no blur/ of flies now clouds the open body. Small/ and thorough scavengers have rasped it clean/…/And now an empty carcass stripped by snails and birds/ is left here for a storm tide to disperse.’ Once she says humankind would have featured in this process but no longer (‘men would once have done – blubber, skin/ and meat all utilized’). That connection with the natural world, that sense of awe and wonder and that respect has been lost for many.
Cumbers is clearly an exception: she feels acutely that connection and reflects upon the potentially catastrophic effects of its loss. The natural world for all its power, is delicately balanced, fragile. In In the simmer dim’ Cumbers captures this fragility in both the opening and concluding lines of the poem: ‘The sky is hanging loose and huge/ tethered lightly to the hilltops-/ a breath of wind could blow it away’ and ‘If I try to hold it,/ it spills through my fingers.’ To preserve this world its fragility must be recognized. Yet in the ironically titled poem, The sea as abstract expressionist, Cumbers shows how humankind is abusing the natural world by polluting it. Instead of the natural colours one might expect to find in this relatively untouched area, Cumbers finds the garish primary colours of plastic pollution: ‘bright blue rope/ frayed ends splayed’, a ‘yellow buoy’ and ‘tattered orange net’. Nothing stays the same forever, not even here. The world of the Shetland Isles she shows is changing, a way of life is transforming. In Bridges Cumbers shows how improved lines of communication between islands are impacting upon the Shetland way of life: the slower rhythms of the island lifestyle is contrasted with the more hectic present as the islands become less isolated and the traffic flows between them.
Given all this, it is no surprise that the collection ends with a poem describing Cumbers’ reluctance to end her stay. She captures this feeling graphically in lines that describe her avoiding the thought of leaving, like a child hiding in pretence from the reality of the moment: ‘I can still pretend it’s a normal day – // I’m on my way to the lighthouse or Jarlshof,/ or could be. Pretend and keep pretending// until I don’t drive past the airport./ This is it. There’s my plane.’ In doing this she also captures my feelings about this collection. Cumbers’ accomplished writing allows me to experience the Shetlands in such a uniquely engaging way that I, too, was reluctant to leave and put the collection down. This for me is one of the pamphlets of the year. Thanks to Dempsey and Windle, one of poetry’s excellent small publishers, for recognizing this and giving Barbara Cumbers this platform. The wait has been worthwhile.
https://nigelkentpoet.wordpress.com/2022/08/13/review-of-in-the-simmer-dim-by-barbara-cumbers/