Reviews

 

Slowly as Clouds

 

A great book. The narrative is compelling and I like the way Jane throws us between her parents and the land.

‘Slowly As Clouds is a stunning meditation on mortality fused with incisive lived eco poetry. Somewhere between grief and growing this is a hybrid book where a rubber sling in sex club becomes the long hand on a clock and the clock face is your face or the surface of the world. Wise, alive, and wild. Highly recommended’

Joelle Taylor: Winner of the 2021 T.S Eliot Poetry Prize

 

The sensory and the sensual dance together in this collection of lively, lyrical, lovingly-crafted poems. Campbell’s strengths are her empathy and her embrace of life, which imbues Slowly As Clouds with a deeply compassionate sense even as the poet’s joyful energy fires through. Observations of the natural – seasonality, community, sharing, sex – sit alongside evocations of the unnatural, the tragic, and the political, and this extends to suffering and sadness, including the abuse of a child. These are, quite rightly, direct and unsettling pieces, showcasing the poet’s steely gaze and ability to transmute the terrible, through verse, into stories that shed light on humanity’s darker aspects. They stand in contrast to the alliterative, spell-like quality of some of her other poems, proving that Campbell is a poet of great range as well as ability. Many of her pieces relating to nature feel as if they’ve been spun into being – formulated around feeling, drawn from keen observation – and they come to the reader with all the perfection and wow-ness of a flower, sunset, or spider’s web. There is a strong holistic, whole-made sense to these, which perhaps stems from the poet herself living so close to the land. Mother Nature feeds her; these poems, in turn, feed us. Juicy and rich, heartful and hymnlike, finely observed and gorgeously wrought, this is a collection that, in its mixture of joy and sorrow, quite simply sings.

Mab Jones: BBC radio presenter and author of Take your Experience and Peel It.

 

 

Jane Campbell’s poetry has edge: it glints rather than glows. ‘Degrading’ is one such example in this raw, uncompromising but strangely beautiful collection. The poem recounts a group of girls surrounding the young poet demanding she prove the arrival of her first period. The ending brilliantly transforms this humiliation into a triumph: ‘recasting them / in perpetuity / slow for their age.’ 

The theme of change or metamorphoses is present in many of the poems, particularly those to do with parents or lovers. Campbell pays tribute to the political activism of her mother whose frailty in age is a spur not to forget how she impressed her daughter ‘with the importance of rights / that once they had bite were revoked.’ But this tribute has a darker feel in ‘Fairy Tale’ where the speaker apologises for tormenting her parent. 

Campbell’s portrayal of her father follows a similar trajectory. At first he is a monumental figure, ‘an army of hands and feet’ but then we see him shrivelling in a hospital bed, while the poet envisages his evolution into a ‘butterfly, then rabbit, then antelope.’ The ending of this poem, ‘Metamorphosis,’ is not only exquisite but also a demonstration of Campbell’s knack of finding new and unusual rhymes. 

There is sober realism in the poems about love; a celebration of its joys in ‘May moaning from our mouths,’ and an acceptance of its sorrows. There is a particular poignancy in ‘Let Go’ where though desire has run its course that ‘doesn’t mean / I don’t still love us.’

Campbell is highly versatile. She can write a shocking futuristic poem like ‘Always Alice’ and a gentle, almost Hardyesque one like ‘Wishing Well’ which should be included in any future anthology of English poetry. An ever-present consciousness of mortality does not sour her sense of life’s abundance. ‘Compost Loo’ shows that even waste is a form of enrichment. 

About the reviewer
Gary Day is a retired English lecturer. He is the author or editor of a dozen books including a two volume history of modern British poetry. He had a column in the Times Higher for a number of years and has been actively involved in amateur theatre for many years.