In Praise of Aunts

M R Peacock
�7.95

Meg Peacock was born in 1930 and grew up in south Devon. She read English at Oxford, but spent more time on music. After teaching, marriage, child-rearing and working in a children's cancer unit as counsellor she moved to a small hill farm in Cumbria, where she still lives.
Her first three collections of poetry, 'Marginal Land', 'Selves' and 'Speaking of the Dead', received exceptionally favourable review coverage. Here may well be another.

Published by :	Peterloo Poets
Published Date :	January 2008
Pages :	70
Format :	138mm x 215mm paperback
Illustrations :
ISBN :	9781904324492

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Review

In �Milking Time� Meg Poeacocke describes an old cow coming in to be milked. Its movements are sharply evoked in the tread of the line and the contrasting sounds. Everything is slow and heavy, tired, nearing its end after a long life:
�An old cow swaying homewards crushes
The exhausted grass of October
Pace by pace.�
In the milking shed, beneath the electric lights, attached to the milking machine:
�She finds her place. Electric bulbs mark
Her blacks and whites, mechanical throats
Strip her and lighten her, a pale juice
Seethes, becoming measurable.�
There is a sense of the end of a life, its sadness and its loss, even though life goes steadily on:
�She feeds. Melancholy pools her eye.
She has grieved for each of the eight calves
That have nuzzled her leathery flanks
As each has been taken away�
This is writing of the highest quality, economical, taut, precise. nThe sympathy and understanding are there in the observation, but the prevailing sadness, which is found in many of the other poems in this collection, makes the old cow an image of human old age.
A similar sense of the poem being about life itself is found in �The Bus�. Two old men normally in tweeds, rest their short-sleeved arms side by side on their regular bus journey down �the chequered valley�, �familiar as a kitchen�. As always the talk is of gardens and vegetables, but, just as their bus journey is coming to an end, so is another journey:
Eloquence is fading now. A few more weeks until the time
Of caps, oiling of tools, storing away, and winter to be endured
Like a sleepless night.�
�In Praise of Aunts� celebrates the anarchic spiritedness of those who rejoice in their age.: �in silent riot, keeping a card up a knickerleg . . . not wincing at stickiness�. They may be dead, but they �pedalled across my dream�. She will praise these �old children in your upright childless bones�.
She can speak of:
�How nimble the old are balancing
as the world gyrates beneath them fast faster�
But she loves anything that hesitates like a parchment lead that settles against her cheek �as damp and cool /as a child�s kiss� And then �We slip away�.
A Gardener, �A level sun, . . . settles � there � on your bending back � is �diligent among the little days�.
Wherever she looks there appears to be something elegiac. However, she also knows the bulky Taurus, constellation and powerful beast as it stands �at the high gate / of winter and alone�.
�In Praise of Aunts� is a very fine collection of poems. Observations, exact and evocative of animals and people and the changing world about her serve as mirrors into her own feelings and sense of self. A beautiful, sensitive and thoughtful book.

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