Between the Words

Helena Nelson reviews 'Object Permanence' by Anne Berkeley (Garlic Press, 2025)

Angler

A man carries a lantern across the beach.
He slogs through the shingle, taking his light
to the green umbrella at the water’s edge.

His footfalls recede in the boom of swash
as he reaches his pitch, his lantern shadow
hunched from the rain like the first man
who sheltered an ember against the night ahead.

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‘Angler’ is from Object Permanence by Anne Berkeley (Garlic Press, 2025) – big thanks to Michael Laskey and Anne Berkeley for letting us reproduce it. You can buy Object Permanence, and other Garlic Press books, through the shop on Michael Laskey’s website.

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If you grew up with C S Lewis’s Narnia books you may recall the Wood between the Worlds. In The Magician’s Nephew, our hero puts on a magic ring and finds himself ‘rushing upwards’ through water into a pool in a wood, a wood dotted with numerous similar pools. Each pool in this wood leads to a different world:

The trees grew close together and were so leafy that he could get no glimpse of the sky. [...] It was the quietest wood you could possibly imagine. There were no birds, no insects, no animals, and no wind. You could almost feel the trees growing. [...] This wood was very much alive. When he tried to describe it afterwards Digory always said, ‘It was a rich place: as rich as plum cake.’

Object Permanence reminds me of that wood. The collection as a whole is quiet, but it’s intensely alive – simmering. Individual pages appear unassuming, even ordinary. But they’re not.

‘Growing Up’ , for example, transports the reader to a setting eerily familiar. Everything must be happening in the past, but it’s in the present tense. Although this may be the poet’s own experience, it’s carefully (beautifully) de-personalised. There are two characters, ‘the mother’ and ‘the child’, and only two words are spoken – and not until the penultimate line. Four six-line stanzas focus on one brief event. The child gets out of her cot in the attic bedroom where she’s supposed to be napping. She climbs onto a chair and peers through the window down to where her mother is gardening. She realises her mother doesn’t know she’s being observed. This allows her suddenly to see “how we are all separate and alone”, so much so that she calls down to her parent to establish a connection. Shocked, the mother looks up. We see what she sees: “the child out of her cot standing on a chair, / tall girl from the future”. The mother is shocked by the danger, the reader startled by a collision of time zones. When the poem concludes, it’s all still happening. It always will be.

‛November’ is even simpler. One little twelve-line poem, easy to miss. And perhaps you might not get into its world if you didn’t have the cultural reference. But I did, because this place is part of me. As soon as I read the first two lines (“The morning after, there was always fog / and we hunted for the empty shells”), I knew this was the day after Bonfire Night, the strange flat time that followed the conflagration on November 5th, which used to be (forget Hallowe’en) one of the main highlights of our year. And yes, it was always misty, wasn’t it? And if it fell on a Saturday or Sunday, we would wander round like lost souls, gathering the spent rockets: “We lined them up, damp trophies”. So we did, so we did. I had forgotten. But it flooded back, the triumph of hope over experience, me and my friends “always / hoping there’d be more inside than soot.”

‛When she came back she leaned against the door’, on the other hand, takes me to a place I don’t know, a tragic and terrible territory. A baby has died, a boy, and the awfulness of the fact is suppressed by shutting it down, by closing “the lid / on the small white box my father carried”. No explicit mention of death. Commas disappear and lists crowd into each other, reality blurring. Numerous repetitions of the sound ‛shut’ make the pain open again and again and again. It won’t be shut down. Oh, this poor mother! “She shut the fridge the oven the washing machine the order book. / She shut the questions the questions.” Heart-rending.

‛You Only Live Twice’ evokes another world altogether. We’re in an English antique shop, in the late sixties. The Bond film is on at the local cinema, and the title reflects what’s happening in the writing too: an apparently insignificant moment re-lived. But why do we recall certain things so clearly when most of the detail vanishes? Here, one of the poet’s former customers “fidgeted, picking up the Derby shepherdess, / put it down again without comment, / winced at the silver épergne (William Eames, 1807) / and then at the price of it”. Sometimes we don’t see what’s really going on. Here, together with the narrator, we work it out. Neatly, and with satisfaction.

In ‛Angler’, there’s an entirely different setting, and the poet isn’t even there. Just a nameless man. No fancy poetic tricks, and only one adjective – ‛green’. But this piece is perfectly judged, surely? It’s intensely evocative, a strange place outside time:

His footfalls recede in the boom of swash
as he reaches his pitch

It could be any fisherman by any sea anywhere, anywhen. Also more than that. When a poem works as well as this, it’s hard to write about. What you want to do is take the reader to the text and say, “Here it is. Go on. Read it.”

The collection concludes with two longer texts, the first of which extends over six pages. I’m wary of long poems, but there are wonderful exceptions. ‛The bowser’ and ‛Object Permanence’ together comprise a powerful ending, marvellous and strange. The eponymous bowser (until now I’d no idea what a ‛bowser’ was either) is pictured on the book jacket rusting in a field. It’s a huge old water tank, or it was, before the rust set in. You may have seen something like it before, a farm relic, and felt no curiosity. Read this and grow curious. Anne Berkeley writes about a decrepit old tank like other poets write about love.

Before I say any more about ‛The bowser’, let me revive the concept of ‛object permanence’, since it’s relevant to other poems here too, not least ‘Growing Up’. If you studied psychology or childcare, it was in the chapter on Piaget. A baby, according to object permanence theory, cries when its mother/carer goes out of sight because it thinks she’s ceased to exist. But as the baby develops, it learns how things continue their existence even when you can’t see them. The term is (unsurprisingly) attractive to poets. In the 1990s Peter Manson and Robin Purves ran an experimental poetry journal called Object Permanence. Alas, that little magazine no longer exists, though there are copies kicking around (for a price). In Anne Berkeley’s book, the bowser continues to exist in its farm field, although she has misremembered its location. She wants to photograph it. It seems extremely important to her, although we don’t know why. From the start, features of personification suggest that she and the bowser have more than a few things in common:

Stubborn mindset. Not even machine.
I long to bang its side, hear it resonate
to tell how empty it’s become

She does find the old water container, and as she lists its components, we experience their beauty, syllable by syllable. It is an assembly of disjunction: “manometer (broken), volume gauge (illegible), / wheelhead gate valves, pressure dome, / external pipes, faucets, hatches, butterfly nuts”. Broken things convey nostalgia. It’s inescapable. As the poem moves onwards through short lines, stanzas and sections, the bowser ceases to be ‛it’ and becomes ‛you’:

I found you tilted one morning
broken axled.
Daylight pricks laceholes in your funnel

*

A train passes
and the water
shivers

*

The atmosphere is seductive, mysterious. Then suddenly the bowser speaks. At first we think it is the poet’s lyric ‛I’. But no, it’s the tank itself:

There was a time when I was full
in all my dark chambers
my valves and spigots lucid
my sweet water drawn daily

[...]

And I in my fullness
and cast-iron contentment

It is a testament to the power of the poem that this works, that the structure of the whole, punctuated by little asterisks, can carry such dramatically different voices while building towards a lyric climax in the style of a Keatsian ode:

O stubborn tank of stale water
o lumpen iron emptiness
o grim beacon of loyalty and decay

‛The bowser’ is magnificent and fun and a joy to read aloud. It would make a fabulous performance piece for one of the ‛poetry choirs’ currently springing into existence. The poem that follows, the last in the volume, slips back into twenty-first century first-person mode (“I woke into silver / the room unfamiliar”). But here is the bowser again, this time in the poet’s mind, alive and present if not visible. Something extraordinary happens in this wood between the words. You won’t need a magic ring to find it.

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Helena Nelson is a poet, critic, publisher and the founding editor of HappenStancePress and Sphinx Review. Her first collection, Starlight on Water (Rialto, 2003), was a Jerwood / Aldeburgh First Collection winner. Her second was Plot and Counterplot(Shoestring, 2010). She also writes and publishes light verse, including Down With Poetry! (HappenStance, 2016) and Branded (Red Squirrel, 2019). Her most recent collection is PEARLS: The Complete Mr & Mrs Philpott Poems (HappenStance, 2022). She is Consulting Editor of The Friday Poem.

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