A Winter's Day at Westonbirt & other poems, by CJ (Jonty) Driver (reviewed by Gillian Southgate)

 

The  focus of the title poem in this collection are the trees at Westonbirt Arboretum in Gloucestershire, which is viewed as a microcosm of England in 2020.  The poem contrasts the nineteenth century arboretum with the country as it now stands, poised to undertake new direction and growth, but still subject to political buffeting. Different facets of national identity are reflected in the diversity of the trees; ‘some stubborn, strong and awkward,’, some ‘apt to spiral out of shape.’ Each tree is catalogued, each is compatible in the context of a small English park. Like the country, some trees are vulnerable, but there’s a note of optimism about the future; the oak tree referred to in stanza one is fenced in, ‘as if it knew by now how not to fall’.

The poet encounters on a path a group of children who ‘make no attempt to fraternise’, but the trees go on growing together, indifferent to human insularity. In political terms, ‘we’ve circled round the paths and find ourselves precisely where we were before.’ But these lines are also a metaphor for our never having learned the lessons of mutual dependency, something the trees have long both known and benefited from.

The second stanza begins: ‘So, think about this place in England now’. An England, the poem affirms, ‘hemmed in with silly rules…. but passionately free.’ The final line acknowledges that no-one knows where we are going next. This is true of our personal, as well as our political future. The only certainty, the collection will reveal, is the fact of death, which topples nations, people, even trees in the course of the years.

There are nine more poems in the group. The garden theme continues in ‘Old Oak’ where the last line signals that the tree of life is in time cut down for us all. By contrast, ‘In a French Garden’ life itself is seen as flagrantly alive in the troupe of hoopoes with ‘panaches furled, then flared’. ‘Last Lesson’ is a tender, regretful poem in which the poem’s retired schoolteacher comes to understand the human urge to shape and force into conformity the teeming natural life around us. In old age, her judgements have softened, disappearing ‘like end of season daffodils’ and she laments not having left well alone, and allowed her plants and pupils to flourish.

The rhymed poem ‘Song of the Sparrows’ is elegiac, the writer accepting the threat of death in a plague year, even in the face of sparrows busily occupied in preparing for their next generation. Similarly, the poem ‘In the Lodi Garden’, fixes the readers’ eye on  vibrant images of a public place in New Delhi, but there is a dying fall in the last quatrain, sibilant sounds and the symmetry of organisation expressing the sacred nature of life ‘gathered in a garden.’

The final poem is a haiku.  The poet views, in full summer, a tumbled wisteria wearing the white of snowfall, a reminder of winter, and of the passing of time.

The coherence in the collection is in the themes of nature, enduringly alive, and the mind of man, who knows his days are numbered. From the general we move gradually to the particular, the white wisteria bearing within its blossoms the seeds of death. The poetry is enhanced by Jonty Driver’s delicate paintings employing a tree motif which ages with the seasons. It’s a fine collection, encompassing abundant life, transience, inevitability, and acceptance.

 

(This poetry pamphlet is, as with Jonty's other recent publications, reviewed below, available through Artwrite in Rye (Website artwrite.co,uk)