The Poetry of Wendy Webb

(A Review by K.K.Srivastava)

“One of the services a Reviewer can offer readers is to guide them past the clamoring Sirens of Celebrity, through the Vale of Hype, beyond the Morass of Reputation to that rare spot where poetry flourishes. Not necessarily on the territory of the major publishers….”

John Greening in the Hudson Review (Vol LXI Number 2 Summer 2008)


The world of poetry is not a facile and straight world. It is a world characterized by hostile presence of structures, firm and high, crumbling and dwindling, having acute frustrations and severe conflicts, with perceivable areas of darkness and hidden areas of illumination, varied and skewed, but enlightening always trying to bring to the fore buried potential of words. It is a world full of dichotomies: pleasures and perils, love and hatred, gains and losses- all are intermingled but unaccountably. The onus of explaining that unaccountability rests with the writers, a term that mercifully includes poets too. The word ‘mercifully” used here is to remind ourselves that poetry as a genre is exhibiting a decreasing trend all over the world with no big publishers as takers for poetry books and no big readership. It is really a strange world-it’s strangeness makes the texture of life of poets and it’s strangeness forms the warp and the woof of what we call poetry: good or bad. There is really no good poetry or no bad poetry-a poem is a poem as perceived by readers. Perception again is motivated by personal experiences and motives. The fact that even after about fifty years of their having been penned, let me take an example of a Hindi poet from my own country i.e Muktibodh, whose poems, longer ones in particular still continue to be subject matter of great debate and discussion as regards their real motif and meaning, speaks a lot of an unending tendency of readers cutting across all cultures to keep absorbing newer and newer facets of long existing poems. That is one way history of literature ensures that obscurity melts away as time passes by. So aptly writes T.S.Eliot in his poem, A Note on War Poetry-

“In the effort to keep day and night together;
It seems just possible that a poem might happen
To a very young man: but a poem is not poetry—
That is a life.
…………………………………….
…………………………………..
“But the abstract conception
Of private experience at it’s greatest intensity
Becoming universal’ which we call “poetry’

Though a poem has a life but it does not die. It dies the moment people stop reading it or looking at it. No poem thus dies or ceases to exist as none on this earth can ever guarantee that a poem, however obscure and nebulous that might be, will never be read.

In the backdrop of above, I find reviewing a poet’s works is hazardous because the reviewer would hardly be in a position to keep his personal motives regulating his perception of poems at bay and his perceptual processes vis a vis the body of work he intends to review in more than one way will always nag him. This is an argumentative area but those familiar with T.S.Eliot’s well known essay The Perfect Critic, where while amplifying the statement “poetry is the most highly organized form of intellectual activity” he draws a distinction between what he refers to as “appreciation” and “intellectual criticism” the two psychological faculties, and in that context mentions the value of perceptions that he feels don’t “accumulate as a mass, but form themselves as a structure and” a review “is the statement in language of this structure…” will have lesser quarrels on the merit of arguments. Reviews have their own value. They keep poems/poets alive to the readers. A reviewer’s work, oftentimes epitomize more doubts that they dispel but it hardly deters him as this is precisely one of the principal objectives of a review.

I always eulogize poets who by their very nature are reclusive and shun undue publicity.
The poet I have in my mind is Wendy Webb, a poet based in London and one of the members of Norfolk Poets. Her 32nd collection of poems A Mermaid’s Tale is her latest book. Inspired by Blake, Hardy, Eliot, Byron, Keats, Emily Dickenson and a host of many others , Wendy is a prolific poet whose poems have been included in journals/magazines like-Poetry Monthly, Poetic Hours, Coffee House Poetry, Quantum Leap, Poetry Cornwell, Weyfarers etc. She has won many prizes and awards including David St John Thomas Awards (Pantoum, 2001), and WGC Rosette Awards 2008 and Live Canon, Runner Up (2009)

One of the most important features of Wendy’s poetry is her ability to present life with all it’s strife and contradictions as a continuum where she confronts the readers with nature, the God, religion, humanity and all other facets of day to day life. She is thoughtful and reflects on various aspects of day to day life. In her poem Epiphany, the opening lines display a congruous combination of darkness of night and sadness of humanity:

“Late at night and I’m not sleeping, when the wider world is weeping
Bombs and wars and floods that never can run dry
………………………………………..
…………………………………………………
Late night cold souls are passing and new rumoured wars amassing
We can barely grieve the flood that have gone before…”

She writes in a Blakean tradition, focusing on world’s minutest brutality. There is a sense of falling endlessly; logical choices are not legion and you have words and you have memories and you have both sliding up against each other.

In another fascinating poem, Spell Checked in Colour, she reflects on the beauty of colours-

“This poem is red,
so you can feel it’s warm
embarrassment,
crowding among shivering blues
of hearts and clubs,
beating the brains out of terrorists,
exhibitionists and other miner poets.”


In this poem we find unsparing, unsentimental accuracy of lines as we move further and we also have a sense of more developed gravitas with the intensification of language. Things don’t pall. Pleasures and pains are intact.

Another enchanting work of Wendy is A Mermaid’s Tale published in Jan 2010. Norman Bissett, the well-known Edinburgh poet writing the Foreword for the book has this to say,” The poem, dramatizing the conflict between the chill reality of everyday and the world of the imagination could well serve as a prospectus for Romanticism, wtth it’s characteristic, Keatsian desire to escape from despair and here-and now—the hell of the waste land—to a warmer, more colourful more congenial plane.”

In most of her poems we come across a seemingly effortless but inexhaustible inventiveness she deploys intermittently. Like these lines from her poem Blue Paradise-

“Necklace wordy wounds to daisy chains
and love me, love me not, to chilling pearls
on ice blue morning’s paradisal pity.”

Wendy knows that to be an appealing poet: a poet who survives beyond time, one has to be conscious of more than oneself. She believes in poetry as music for survival- rising and ebbing being ineluctable part of it. In her poems, she allows things and events to happen quickly and in succession. There is considerable variety in her poems but irrespective of the sources varieties emerge from, at some point these varieties cohere. This is the most significant aspect of her poetry. Her poetry stems from a self- imposed restraint that seems to be deliberate and meaningful. In her poems, the metaphors and symbols showcase the poet’s brilliant observation powers imbued with her ability to draw meaningful conclusions from every thing observed. In Stopping by At Christmas, she tells us,

“It was that season so sublime
when spirits rose like pantomime
and snow’s imagination fell
to deep and crisp and even time.”

This poem is inspired by Shopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost.

Or let us have a look at these lines from Ghost Of Christmas Past where Wendy hinges her faith on the power of memory;

“So I am only left with memories
of what you once meant; now you tire to past
to comfort my late youthful certainties
that strength could never fail to lift a pen
of flimsy robins rounding snowfall fast
and I am left to write, not why?

A thread of smoothness runs through many of her poems, similar to the ones cited above, deeply imagined, beautifully crafted with wisdom and feeling. That is the reason, in the
review of Wendy’s From Newcastle to Malta Via Land’s End, Claire Knight avers,” Here her muse dips into philosophical thoughts on life; our dream world……evocative imagery of the dramatic scenery” .

Her poems are lyrical expressions and harmonious that meet classical ideas of poetic beauty, seems to be situated at the axis of the wheel, highly symbolic of stillness yet all movements happen there and there only. Once the reader catches the rhythm, lines after lines unfurl themselves leading the reader to the realm of grandeur. She creates and tackles what seem to be uncontainable.

In Angel Of The Morning, she, inter alia, contemplates over the relationship between human beings and God-

“I am the angel of the pine-dressed tree
singing Magnificent eternally,
as Mary kneels annunciation here
where God is fed in flesh in Christmas cheer.

My light beams from the heavens’ starry globe,
where God wraps flurried snow-fall in his robe,
there is no warmth in purity of shine
and yet the Logos came as Sarx-poured wine.”

Poetry is a marginal business and poets are marginal human beings. Poets never live in ivory towers. Delusions of grandeur are never their bed-fellows. They know altering the way the world behaves might be one of their grandest aims but they are not oblivious of their inability to alter it. Still they continue as they realize that inability is not inherent. It is superimposed. This realization is the greatest strength of a good and reclusive poet. And Wendy’ poems compel us to hinge our faith on ultimate victory of poetic beauty over all other forms of beauty, leave aside ugliness.


About the reviewer:

K.K.Srivastava lives in New Delhi, India. He has authored two books of poems, Ineluctable Stillness (2005) and An Armless Hand Writes (2008). Both of his books have been selected for discussion under focus Indian Literature in an international literary conference at Albania from 8th April to 11th April 2010.