Folkish
Kym Deyn, published by Nine Arches Press
The lime green exterior of Kym Deyn’s Folkish had caught my eye a few times, with Letty Wilson’s illustration of the Lambton Worm setting the tone for the lively stories within. We are pretty quickly introduced to the “wyrm” through the first sequence of poems; a move that establishes a fascination and fondness for the North of England and its various mythologies.
It did not surprise me to read in the author bio that Deyn moonlights as a tarot reader, since it strikes me as an activity that requires great empathy and imagination, and a willingness to consider strangeness. The worm of the opening poems is sometimes expressed in such a tender and matter of fact way that the evil she does becomes entirely reasonable. After all, a worm’s gotta eat: “villagers hide away / in the night but keep little snacks / called sheep cats dogs cows chickens”. In amongst lyric poems about the challenges of being from - and returning to -The North (employment, destruction of habitat, poverty), to hear the Lambton worm “howl[ing] in the long night for one of [her] own” is to understand the sadness of a solitary creature, no matter how many villagers she has eaten. As perfectly expressed in the final poem, “I’m sorry fairytales are so violent (to wolves and never kings)”.
Sadly “incompatible […] with humdrum,” the worm’s lonely sequence is quickly done. But those that follow are anything except humdrum or isolating. In ‘Scrag End,’ the speaker “didn’t say I was good, only alive,” while in in ‘If Polari was a kind of Birdsong,’ Deyn assuredly expresses that “the landscape is gay because I am”. This is a luscious poem full of “pink mushroom[s] / with infinite sexes” and an ecosystem that “reacts to me in it.” Elsewhere, the long-dead prophetess Old Mother Shipton sees the reader coming “from / all the way back there”, and church stone remembers “the moment a curled shell / became stone,” its “once wetsoft silt”.
At ‘Limestone Quarry, Knaresborough’ we learn that “rocks are insane”, a notion presented with such clarity that we feel its obviousness (I won’t spoil the poem by explaining why rocks are insane). This particular poem is made up of one block of text composed of only two sentences: a set-up and its sprawling eighteen-line answer. This proves characteristic of Deyn’s command of form, not as a repeated device but as an example of confidence. Elsewhere, the author flirts with ghazals and columns; abandons punctuation; makes deft use of couplets and lists; and uses white space boldly, with a sense of the page being a place for play, tricks, or divination. The book is awash with pleasing compound words like “slitherthing’, “wormcry”, “saltdrenched”, along with using ordinary hyphenation elsewhere.
The poems deliver old stories with new freshness, as well as introducing many characters that I had never encountered before, such as Jennet O’ the Dales: or, Lady Jen, Jenifer, and Gemmet in turn. Part of her intrigue is her multiplicity; the sense of incomplete stories carried in birdsong, embellished or lost as they travel across the moors. Throughout, Deyn’s language undulates from the highly musical to the grimly comedic (the titles are excellent), and always with the sensuous precision of language that poetry can allow: “Moss like fleece // spongy with rain.”
My favourite poem, perhaps, is ‘Tempest Prognosticator’, which is concerned with a “leech barometer” currently displayed in Whitby Museum. It put me in mind of a Rhiannon Hooson poem, ‘The Leech House.’ Don’t you love it when poets turn their attention to the strangest of things? Or normal things, which they make us see anew through the strangeness of their attention. Folkish is a gorgeous book that I hope will become staple reading for poets and enthusiasts of the region.
Reviewed by Jenni Hampshire
