Review of the reads – September 2024

Yusef Sayed’s review of the reads.

Rural England Through War and Peace by Andrew J.H. Jackson
Published by SLHA History of Lincolnshire Committee, price £29.99 (hbk), £19.99 (pbk)

This latest volume in a series on the history of Lincolnshire published for the SLHA focuses on the diverse work of forgotten county author, Bernard Samuel Gilbert.

Researched and written by Professor Andrew JH Jackson of Bishop Grossteste University, the undertaking was in part spurred on by the discovery of an article in one of the earliest editions of this magazine’s sister publication, The Lincolnshire Poacher, which considered Gilbert’s literary merit.
Having closely studied a large number of Gilbert’s published works (many of which have long been out of print) and biographical details, Jackson provides the reader with a thorough overview of the writings and their characteristic themes and styles.

The study proceeds by looking at three broad periods: Gilbert’s pre-war writing, focusing on dialect poems and a short series of observational journalism for the Lincolnshire Echo; the Great War, when Gilbert left his farming background in Billinghay to work at the Ministry of Munitions in London, contributing unique poems detailing life on the Home Front – including from a woman’s perspective; and his ambitious multi-volume project, intended to capture the people, landscapes and emotions of ‘Old England’. The latter was incomplete at the time of Gilbert’s death in 1927, aged 45.

However, the interest in Gilbert’s work, as Jackson emphasises from the beginning, perhaps lies more in its value for historians and geographers. Both the fictional and non-fictional writing, alongside the poetry, offers a detailed picture of rural England and the fens following drainage and enclosure, through the war and following the ‘Great Betrayal’ that followed. Gilbert also provides a sense of the political currents that were in the air during his lifetime, particularly as regards the safeguarding of the countryside, land ownership and agricultural labour – the radical solutions proposed and the reactionary stances taken.

Jackson’s book provides an informative and thoughtful survey of Gilbert’s writing and confirms that there is potential for Gilbert’s books to find new readers and prompt more research from various academic perspectives. A valuable and eye-opening study.

Beyond the Last House by Robert Etty
Published by Shoestring Press, price £10

Lincolnshire poet Robert Etty’s recent collection, his sixth for Shoestring Press, offers snapshots of times, places and people where the seemingly ordinary reveals striking details, surprises or imaginative connections.

Often presented in free verse quatrains and couplets, there is seldom anything flashy or experimental in the look of the poems. References are made to prosaic things: Rightmove adverts, ‘Trolleys at Morrisons’ and ‘boxed Hornby locos’. But there is a depth and poignancy that comes to the fore, with intimations of illness and the aftermath of loss, as well as the fragility of the local landscape, throughout the collection’s three sections.

In ‘It Takes a Worried Squirrel’, Etty writes of a hedge being dragged out by a local business: ‘The hedge measured two or three hundred yards / and possibly two or three hundred years. / Pimleys set up six months ago.’

Rather than using strict metre and rhyme schemes, Etty’s poetic effects are to be found at the level of individual lines, their sounds (‘a crow pestered a kestrel’), associations (‘Turn to the drifting rain and the ash keys, / the grass path that takes the route of the branch line’) and the emotional resonance of the subject matter, as when the last Viennese whirl in a packet of biscuits is suggested as a distraction from ‘the other thing on your mind’.

Reflecting Etty’s background in the county, particular dialect words are the starting point for certain poems. ‘Worriting’, again dealing with the ways in which people cope with everyday troubles, cleverly echoes Philip Larkin: ‘man hands on worriting to man’. ‘Mantle’ meanwhile shows the specific descriptive value of a verb lost to time.

As if to mitigate against the loss of local vocabulary, Etty frequently creates his own verbs out of the stuff of humdrum life: in ‘Two Cuckoos Fly Over the Local Co-Op’, shoppers are reminded that ‘force of habit has sat-navved them here’.

Repeated reading reveals subtle aspects of the poems’ constructions, and a finer appreciation of Etty’s humour, as life attempts to hold firm amid the major and minor disruptions that threaten it.

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