Poetry Books

Anchor & Wing Review

Book Review:  Emma Baines, poet and translator.

From the opening title in Anchor and Wing, award-winning writer Mark Lewis finds himself among the gods of Welsh poetry. Dylan Thomas, R.S. Thomas, Taliesin and Hedd Wyn rise iconic in a ‘breaking light’ but simmer too through the familiarity of ‘bubbling cockles’, swirl in the smoke from a ‘cadged cigarette’ then ultimately return to a ‘holy darkness’. As such, In the Beginning was the Word serves as both Lewis’ Genesis and touchstone to the wonders of inspiration and being human, cut to reveal something fleshy and tangible that brings poems and poet to life from the off.

If the bards are his anchors, then love and death, the birds, the sea and their song are the wings on which these poems fly. All the stuff of art and life is here, uniquely crafted to allow Lewis’ own voice to sing. Yet everything in this collection feels also like a conversation, a move towards understanding that is timeless, connected and transcends the individual. In Birdwatching this is keenly expressed through a murmuration of starlings ‘unshackled’ by the ‘constraints of time’, yet wise to shifting seasons. From this elevation, awe becomes visible through the ‘inflorescence of flowers’ or whispering grasses. Death is a ‘change of airs’, a shift, made less final with the presence of a bone-handled whittling knife ‘history notched in fingerprints’. And this is the joy of Anchor and Wing, the enduring possibility of comfort through human connection, shared loss or renewed perspective on the bittersweet complexities of our world. It feels hopeful and inclusive at a time when it is all too easy to submit to despair.

As the collection soars it refuses to be pinned down. There is magic, incantation even, as Lewis summons ‘wisdom smoked out, guilt marked by lavender and sage’ in the poem Black Cat, or through the mantra ‘sing me’ repeated in Birdsong, an essential manifestation of joy as a kind of survival instinct. However, the poems never drift into abstraction but are tempered by a fleshiness that gives them heft. The black cat has a ‘muzzle matted raw with rage’ and the ‘magic’ of renewal after death or each spring emerges from ‘worm fat soils turned writhe of roots to rise’ in Shadows.

The subtitle Poems from the Periphery perhaps gives the best indication of where their power truly lies. It is in the connections we are losing touch with- our animal selves, the increasingly indistinguishable links to our environment, the unacknowledged wildlife surrounding us and the common ground with those we push to the fringes of society. Not satisfied with nudging our gaze however, Lewis reaches in and drags out the humble, ugly beauty of everything we have forgotten or try to ignore, and these are the most raw and confronting poems of all. In Bird he refuses to shy away from a creature ‘gibbeted on a barbed wire fence, beak bound / ancient nobility bleached from your face’, summoning the poetic spirit of Ted Hughes. In Last Orders, a man with ‘skin the texture of a gutted fish’ is ruler of his own time and kingdom, (rooted in a grittiness that transcends our Instagram unreality), while in Cityscape, nature prevails, angry and determined as ‘earth blossoms fiery through the fists of a rose’.

This is a collection that celebrates the wild joy of living in all its forms. Love and humanity emerge in both the acceptance or expression of things as they really are and through a tenderness most evident in the poems of love and grief. Anchor and Wing establishes Mark Lewis as a lyrical wordsmith, with a deep love of language rooted in the bardic heritage of Wales, though shapeshifting, taking flight, as blackbird, robin or firefly. He is clearly a poet’s poet and a human’s human, ‘heart buzzing like a bombilation of bees’.

Poems