News and Events

Leonard Clark: every voice - review

19/11/2024

Poet Stewart Carswell grew up in the Forest of Dean. He lives and works (at time of writing) in Cambdridge where he organises the Fen Speak open mic nights. His work has featured in numerous poetry magazines and journals including Under the Radar, Ink Sweat and Tears, and The Storms Journal. He has had two collections of his own poetry published: Knots and Branches (2016) and Earthworks (2021). Below, Stewart reviews for us the new collection of Leonard Clark's work edited by Dr John Howlett.

Every Voice is a new Selected Poems, bringing back into print the poetry of Leonard Clark. It features a selection of Clark’s poetry from across his life, from some of his earliest poems, through to his best-known work, and some uncollected poems from an unfinished manuscript.

Leonard Clark grew up in Cinderford in the Forest of Dean before moving away as an adult, never to live there again. Nevertheless, the Forest and his relationship with it left a deep impression on him that he would draw upon and form a backdrop to some of his poems.

His early published work sees him trying out different styles and themes. Some of the better poems from this era show Clark starting to explore poems about people and their landscapes, themes that he would develop and expand upon later on. Using locations that he was living in and visiting at the time, ‘Scaleber Beck’ (near Settle, in Yorkshire), sees the poet starkly connecting place and experience:

            This is old buried ground.
            Ghost echoes of sudden stopped breath

It is in his collection English Morning and Other Poems, however, that Clark’s poetry undergoes a transformation, with a sense of him becoming the poet he wanted to be, and adopting his own distinctive style and voice. Whether coincidence or not, this collection is also the first of his that features poems explicitly about the Forest of Dean and his own personal past there (such as ‘Headlong, Like Comet’) or the deeper past of the industrial heritage of the Forest. ‘Charcoal Burners’ features one of Clark’s strongest poetic endings, with him connecting his own experiences of the Forest with its industry, as the poet witnesses:

            the ancient miracle that turned to black
            By forest alchemy the tenderest green,
            And hears above the well’s small chattering tongues
            The voices of old fiery boughs.

The poem ‘Every Voice’, from which this selected poems takes its title, was regarded by Clark as his best poem. Featuring a dawn chorus, this poem explores Clark’s most prominent themes of nature and divinity, with the collective resurrection of life following the quiet light of winter.

            I heard some fields whispering together,
            grass blades bending beneath familiar skies;
            it seemed every turf was trembling
            with wordless praises.

These images of life, nature, and renewal are picked up later in ‘English County’, with a landscape during harvest (“a tractor puffs away the morning, / crisp barley gathered in”) while Clark:

            breathe[s] some of its divinity now,
            am washed by it as these hills are washed,
            know that Love is shining here, everlasting.

The typical English landscapes that Clark visits here, as well as the plain language he uses to convey these complex and universal images, is reminiscent of poets such as Edward Thomas and Philip Larkin. ‘The Pea-Pickers’ exemplifies this, featuring as it does a stopping train journey.

Elsewhere in this book, Clark frequently turns his attention to the natural world and the animals within it, writing poems that capture the individual of the animal. In ‘Mole’, he imaginatively explores the domain of a mole, the ‘little black lord of the underworld’:

            prince of the sappers I have excavated the whole of Europe,
            hills and tunnels advertising me all the way to Japan.
            My four strong ounces drive forward at speed.

Clark only revisits the Forest with his poetry in some of the final poems, selected from An Intimate Landscape. Written during the latter stages of his life, these poems extensively and nostalgically explore the Forest, with Clark ‘gripped by the fever of homesickness’. Perhaps after Clark’s autobiographical writing of the Forest published in the 1960s, he felt it was now time to express more of his own life in the Forest in his poetry. Here he tries to justify his return to the Forest:

            What impelled me to go home.
            Was it to walk abroad with the dead?
            Discover again roots that may never have been there?

An Intimate Landscape sees him writing at his most direct and most moving, writing about the place that he ultimately knew and loved best. These poems capture evocatively the Forest and its identity:

            At the top of the town
            where the wind blew fresh and free,
            a great panorama, the bowed river
            sparkling through red meadows and farms,
            the white cathedral tower commanding,
            belonging it seemed to another country.

Stewart Carswell, November 2024

Leonard Clark, Every Voice, Selected Poems is edited and introduced by John Howlett, with a foreword by Bob Clark (the poet’s son) and is published by Greenwich Exchange, London. The book is being launched on Saturday 7th December at The Wesley in Cinderford, Gloucestershire, details here. Signed copies will be available for sale at the launch event, thereafter copies will be on sale at The Dean Heritage Centre and other local retailers.

Archives