An Unclouded Eye: A Review of IN OTHER DAYS by Roger Craik

Whether it’s the sprawling oak of a contemporary Odyssey, or a mere seedling like Stevie Smith’s Croft, a poem must earn its right to the name. Readability—that is, a rhythm of sorts to carry you through—is a given, along with originality and expressiveness; but for the thing to have substance, surely two qualities are essential: it should have integrity, it must have heart.

Roger Craik, Professor Emeritus of English at Kent State University, Ohio, knows this; knows his craft inside-out. The poems here are not dramatic, not intended to startle or outrage; they are not clever, tricksy poems delivered from under a mortarboard, nor are they prissily poetic or drowning in molasses. Disappointingly perhaps to thrill-seekers, polemic-eaters and those of a righteous or overly sentimental disposition, you will find here only poems that are considered and quietly commanding. There is an unobtrusive artistry at work in the construction of them, a building up of colour, detail and honest feeling. They will come back to you again and again; not to bite you, but rather to whisper glories in your ear, understated glories of remembrance and love.

Craik was born in England, in the county of Leicestershire which was, and is still, largely rural. The character of the place is effectively summoned in the early poems by the naming of villages—Peatling Magna, Peatling Parva—just as people from his boyhood are fixed in time simply by their names; wonderfully resonant names like Marjorie Marlow, Brownie Neave and, magnificently, Florrie Mist. Local history, personalities and events are casually dropped into the mix for detail and atmosphere, and to give us a real feel for the environment in which Craik grew up. Nostalgia can be precarious for a poet, it can all too easily soften the senses and distort the truth, resulting in a poem lacking backbone, lacking interest to all but the writer. But Craik is far too good a poet to fall into that particular trap; his is an unclouded eye reflecting experiences that are, perhaps, in some way common to us all. I’m thinking of the poem “Lewes,1966” where he is playing alone:     

The taut green
tennis ball spinning from my fingertip,
spanking the hot patio, half-volleying
up against the brickwork and

soaring in the sky all over England

to clasp itself in my palm
again and again and again.

The repetitive, trance-like throwing of a ball by a youngster contemplating the coming of a world of danger and possibility, represented by a vast sky, is a nice image skillfully presented.  

He goes on to recall a series of quiet moments of revelation, testament and emotional impact in a way reminiscent of someone pulling over in the car to take a moment, to reacquaint himself with those things that have contributed to his character; a sort of reset, I suppose. Among a fascinating miscellany, we learn of his travels in Turkey and of the detached voice of an old man calling on his god while walking through reeds in the mist, and of a moment of loneliness in Romania. There is an elegantly composed deliberation on the gymnast Olga Korbut competing in the ill-fated 1972 Olympics in Munich, and a lyrical hymn to Burrough Hill, with delicate reference to his self-realization. Craik moved to America in 1991, and “New Year’s Eve,1999” is an engaging contemplation of the old country and his ancestry peppered with fragments of family history, and ending with the exquisite “The last of the sun / is crimsoning into the world.” I was taken by a curious poem telling of an outsider moving in to the village and complaining of cocks crowing and cows (described wonderfully by a local as chorus girls) mooing, which contrasts with a rather sad consideration of an adolescence fueled by the songs of Leonard Cohen, his voice “graveling down the years”. 

That phrase prompts me to offer, without context, another of the author’s pleasing illustrations: this time his description of the pronoun “we” in one of his pieces:

Plump gelatinous
capsule of a syllable
smooth as halibut liver oil.

If that little aside doesn’t define a real poet, then I’m not sure what does.

Above all there is a subtlety, a hesitancy almost in these poems. A sense of the unidentifiable, of something behind the veil, is presented time and time again, and it’s a device, if you can call it that, which is hugely effective. This quality of suggestion is nicely demonstrated in the poem “That Early Evening” which sees the poet walking with a girlfriend along a disused railway line in his native Leicestershire fifteen years ago. He can still picture the cows and their calves lumbering over, these guileless creatures at the gate:

each one’s brimming luminous gaze
drawn to me, drawn to me, betrayed.

It’s oddly touching, and the inventive but entirely convincing language (the cows “in a jostling hotness, nostrilling hard”) catches the moment and enhances the mood beautifully.

This holding back gives way, as it were, only in the last lines of an affecting poem about his mother’s illness. He reflects one Christmas on the number of cigarettes she has smoked over these thirty years, and those she has yet to smoke. How they are:  

… slowly killing her, in the other room,
while I’m half-drunk on gin, writing this in tears.  

We get to hear more about his mother in the final poem of the collection which deals with her subsequent death and funeral in an almost conversational but deeply tender manner. It’s opening lines are a remarkable summing up of mourning:  

This is no grief I have ever known. 

It is as if
a child has drawn a wandering unbroken line

through all the days
I am still to live.

The honest simplicity of the words only serves to make them more meaningful, more entirely apt. They embody those very qualities mentioned at the top of this review.

Long after the work of more showy poets loses its sheen; after the cliches have worn themselves thin and the clever conceits have surrendered their fragile appeal, these nuanced and dare I say it relatable poems, with their thoughtful and sympathetic grace, will stay long in the memory. In Other Days is a finely drawn and unhurried remembrance magnifying the tangential and hinting at the quietly momentous. It is an impressive piece of work.