Matthew Hollis

Beck

The brim that broke the river came on land.

Its skirts were vast from so much rain and made

the grass beneath it dance, wild hair of the drowned.

We trailed it to the road, where a cattle grid

gulped it down, and where a hedgehog whirled

it its mitten of thorns. Back then, we sought

such life, and found a plank and edged it in

but the urchin would not climb to his escape.

 

By morning the grid had emptied, the wood

had snapped clean in two. You suppose a fox

or brock had dug the creature out.

I wanted to believe he'd made it home.

But faith in faith is not enough.

We go on love alone.

 

-Matthew Hollis

 

I was reading a review of Matthew Hollis' most recent book, The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem, and it sounded interesting, but I wasn't quite sure I was prepared to read a 500 page book about 'The Waste Land'. 😉But in looking up who this Matthew Hollis was, I found a couple of his poems, and decided he was worth reading, so I got hold of and read his two volumes of poetry. I especially liked his second one, Earth House, from 2023, which this poem is from, but his earlier volume, Ground Water, of 2004, was also good.

 

His two non-fiction books are about the poets T. S. Eliot and Edward Thomas. I felt T. S. Eliot strongly present in Earth House, but I would have said he was reading The Four Quartets more than A Waste Land and Other Poems. 'Beck' is sonnet-ish, depending on how strongly typed you like your sonnets. It's fourteen lines, with a clear turn after the eighth line, but it goes from pentameters at the beginning to a trimeter at the end, and if you were to say it rhymes at all, they slant a whole lot. Though I did find the 'made it home/love alone' near-rhyme to be pretty effective myself.

 

'Brock' is derived from the Celtic word for badger, and means badger--I had to look that up. A 'beck' is a North of England word for a small stream, particularly one in a valley. He gives notes about the places the poems represent at the end of the volume. Of this one he says, 'Pelter Bridge, Under Loughrigg, River Rothay, Cumbrae, 13 October 2005.' I suppose the Rothay was in flood on that day, but I didn't look it up.