Blog No 130 - "Thicket": Harry Owen's new poems

For the information of imperfectly-educated readers, Harry Owen is an immigrant to South Africa from darkest England, erstwhile Poet Laureate of Cheshire, and quite likely the most genial promoter of poetry south of Seamus Heaney. Entering the so-called sunset years has not prevented him forging a second marriage, lodging in Grahamstown/Makhanda, and falling deeply in love with the thorny and shaggy wildness of the Eastern Cape. He has published several volumes of fine and affecting poetry, both his own (notably Non-Dog, The Cull and All Weathers) and anthologies of others’ (For Rhino in a Shrinking World and Poems of the Grahamstown Diaspora). As one of his many ventures to insert poetry into everyone’s lives, he ran for several years a monthly poetry-reading evening, dubbed Reddits. A wonderful free-for-all space in which greying locals recited Robbie Burns alongside township rappers, established poets intoned alongside students trying out. Somehow Harry would keep things under control, with always just the right word of encouragement, solemnity or jokiness.

Sadly for us, Harry and his wife have emigrated to another country – that is, Stellenbosch – a “land of plastic grass/ and birdlessness”. This has been a serious emotional wrench for him, as several poems in this new volume, Thicket, attest. Reddits readings continue, but they’re not quite the same. Come back, Harry, all is forgiven! In fact, he was back recently, to launch this collection, coinciding with a whole “Thicket Festival” happening in nearby Bathurst. The Eastern Cape’s Albany Thicket is not just a generic term: it has become a scientifically-recognised biome in its own right, with its own unique assemblage of biodiversity, of endemic species of bird and tree, mouse and mole. Harry Owen’s loving observations of the region’s landscapes, flora and fauna, and especially of birds, forms the core of this collection. Individual poems focus on the cicada, cobras, bougainvillea, a mantis, even a moth called the Cycad looper.

The richness is perhaps best summed up in “Amakhala Venn” (Amakhala being a nearby game reserve with which Harry formed a special bond). There, startling colours clash and overlap, as in a Venn diagram, and one gains hints of “the way the world once was, the way it yearns to be.” This is ‘Nature’. the matriarch, “mama, mother”, a world of “watchful calm” in which “the guileless impulse of animals” offers a stance less torturous than the human.

But Harry does not succumb to a vacuous Romanticism. Whatever soul-food quiet nature might provide, it doesn’t come cheaply or unalloyed: Harry acknowledges the existence of the electrified fence; and “how would we feel/ without it? Be honest now.” The thickets may be where snakes cavort and mate in wild independence, but it is also subject to hardship, as in the poem “Drought”, and it’s full of spines one has to grasp. Not an easy world. That call for honesty is another persistent feature of Harry’s life-view, and it goes along with his accessibility; there is no modernist or postmodernist trickery here, no portentous obscurity.

One can feel a little more at ease in one’s garden, perhaps. A number of these poems are set in or derived from, the Owens’ property in Makhanda, happily endowed with some shadowing trees rich with life. One can glean some sense of ease here, as in the poem “Sapiens”:

Dusk is drifting in and the air feels

autumnal, chilled, as now you stand,

peeing, under a sneezewood tree

in the garden where a black-headed

oriole joins you in joyful retreat.

Two dogs play, “wise beyond words”. But even here unease intrudes. For example, in “Scraping the Leaves” Harry, mid-contemplation, compares us humans to an olive thrush scratching frenetically through a leaf-pile:

Are we so very different? All through life

we scatter someone else’s stale debris

around us, hurling dry twigs to the air.

We flail to survive, and habit’s the long-

established way of doing it. But fed,

safe, watered – must we still insist on scraping?

These destructive habits, which we dignify or excuse as “normality”, may be just “that damaged smear of life we’ve become accustomed to”, like a smoker’s hack, “wasting us all away.”  Quite a few poems have an air of elegiac mourning for non-human lives lost, and sometimes an edge of rancour at human-induced damage. Moreover, Mother Nature is liable to get her own back, not least likely via plagues such as Covid-19. Harry echoes the great eco-poet Douglas Livingstone in “La Corona”: “The earth comes fighting back, and who can blame her?” He is not as misanthropic or vengeful as some, mostly feeling just “a deep sadness, regret. Frustration.” Few if any South African poets since Livingstone are writing with such ecologically-informed accuracy and engagement, even activism (his edited collection For Rhino in a Shrinking World is just an extension of in-the-field engagement with famous wildlife vet William Fowlds). ‘Nature’ is not some detachable entity ‘out there’, but an intertwining of processes and presences that helps make us who we are.

Humans don’t always treat one another much better than they do the natural world, the rhinos “dead,/ orangutans cremated for palm oil,/ and our rancid oceans choke[d] on plastic”. Harry reserves a particular brand of outright condemnation for the depredations of corrupt politicians and officials. In “Slough Revisited”, a poem modelled on satirically jaunty rhymes by John Betjeman, the grubby trash of Grahamstown is explicitly targeted, its “sick municipality” full of “parasites whose serpent tongues/ keep singing their mendacious songs”.  But the poem is also a call to a different kind of solidarity and self-sufficiency, and a call to “vote them out”.

That’s unusually political for Harry, but it also speaks to the variety of verse forms and subjects Harry can persuasively tackle, from visits to England to generous tributes to fellow poets, including the late Mary Oliver and Chris Mann. Such seriousness is offset by touches of characteristic humour. He takes self-deprecating delight in noting that a “nightbird”, calling mysteriously in the dark, in fact turned out to be a fruit bat.

The coastline also features regularly. Harry and Chrissie would retreat periodically to a house at Chintsa, near East London. There, the ever-present, “uniquely various” sea casts the poet into meditative states. The beach provides long walks on which to observe the agamas and the oyster-catchers, the shells and the wind-patterns on sand, its hidden rocks and incoming storms. On that beach, too, Harry found himself rather surprisingly suffering a “cardiac event” – a heart attack. Superb care in East London saved his life, the period of hospitalisation being the subject of a prose piece that opens Thicket. If he had not faced up to his mortality before, boy, now he certainly had to. Grappling with ageing, the fragility of the body and of being, the imminence of death, is one strong theme of this collection. Questions around what he has achieved, why he exists at all, who he has become, circle back repeatedly.

As one might expect of this energetic but humble being, at once enterprising and self-effacing, he fails, or perhaps refuses, to come to definite conclusions. In “Mantis” – a poem perhaps owing something to Ruth Miller’s poem of the same title – the insect, with the “cursive scrawl” of its thorax and its “voracious perspicacity”, trapped against glass, throws the poet into analogous confusion: “Are you trapped, lost? Or are you here by choice?/You twist your head and glare at me./ We are alone. What is it I do not know?” The attitudes are highly variable, moody: now he feels we are as “essential” as any other organism, at another point entirely “inconsequential”. He can feel himself “blessed”, even as he questions, “But who am I?/ Who have I ever been?”

A question that sets one up for further creativity, and a question for each and every one of us. A searching, vivid, open-ended volume of poems for any and all of us.

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Thicket is available from Minimal Press, www.minimalpressbooks.co.za