An ode to fish and chips, corn dollies and driving Ringtons tea vans, Wendy Pratt’s seventh poetry collection is a greasy but glorious celebration of the coastal working class. Her deliciously joyful outlook on life oozes gratitude and a sparkling sense of humour, hitting as sharply as the salty ocean breeze.
Pratt grew up in Scarborough on the North Yorkshire coast and once worked in a cake factory before discovering her taste for poetry. In Thirteen Ways of Listening to a Blackbird, I am moved by her account of labouring in windowless basements as “the dull beat” of a conveyor belt keeps time like a dismal clock. But while money is short, laughter is plenty. My heart leaps as she barrels down a hillside pretending “to be a dog. I was a dog. I willed myself to canine.” I’m amused when she lets a blackbird poo on her washing, refusing to spoil its song. It is a warm and welcome prelude before her poetry takes a darker turn.
I am mildly alarmed by the morbid fascination with half-eaten birds and crushed shrews. Pratt documents in microscopic detail their “last meal of berries / spread red in a small island / on the tarmac” – a symptom of her work in another former profession as an NHS microbiologist perhaps. But this reflection is soon revealed to be a coping mechanism – along with her meditative walks through the modest wilderness of the Wolds. The rough contours of chalk hills seem to soothe the memory of clinical enclosure.
The author has written openly about losing her baby daughter because of medical negligence, but here the focus shifts to her father’s passing. In My Dad on the Dark Side of the Moon, surgeons “tried to reel my dad back from the black emptiness” but “could not get the traction / needed”. Meanwhile, in Intensive Care Unit Two, the poet’s “mother is a wren at his ear, calling and calling”. I am haunted by this image for days. Soon after, the thrill of racing down slopes like a dog is suddenly transformed, with sophistication, into a metaphor for howling grief that turns her into a primal animal.
Smell is one of the hardest senses to describe, but it is one of Pratt’s strengths. As her grief deepens and her animal senses sharpen, aromas become more present, as if attempting the impossible and compensating for her loss. From the smoke of hot lard rising from pudding tins to the grease of the chip pan, and even the extraterrestrial “deep alien scent of mud”, these poems can be read with the nose as well as eyes.
Occasionally, I do wish they could be more like blackbirds and not cut out before they’ve had a chance to take flight. I want to hear more about the metal detecting Pratt mentions as a metaphor for treasuring the simple pleasures in life. She sees “miracles” in everything from “the snail in the wet dew” to “the fat pigeons in the road”:
This is joy.
In these moments I feel as the earth must feel,
and I feel as the glacial till must feel and
what it might be to exist only in sensation.
By the end of this humorous yet heartfelt collection (“we are a family that jokes / through our trauma”), I find myself rooting fiercely for this rural household and their “aspirations to have something other / than soil beneath their fingernails”. Besides soil there is hope and a humbling sense of resilience: “I remain and remain and remain.”
• Blackbird Singing at Dusk by Wendy Pratt is published by Nine Arches Press (£11.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
