bout time colin got some loud credit

tho i wouldnt have put it quite like that myself

good stuff & well done

L

-----Original Message-----
From: Tony Frazer <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Date: 16 August 2004 14:17
Subject: Review of Colin Simms' "Otters and Martens" in the Yorkshire Post


This review by Ian McMillan appeared on Saturday 14 August in the
Post's Magazine:

Nature’s remedy

"Otters and Martens' by Colin Simms (Shearsman Books)

I’ve just come back into the house from the garden where I've been
reading, or rather performing one of Colin Simms's poems aloud.

Mr Lowe next door stopped mowing his lawn for a second to look at me
over the hedge, and Ernie, next door at the other side, gazed up into
the air as though someone was shouting to him from a hot‑air balloon.

I'm sorry I had to inflict this on you, lads, but that's what have to
do with the work of Colin Simms: give it voice. And when you read it
aloud you get a real feeling for his rhythms and his vocabulary and his
syntax and the whole of his language.

Colin Simms is a member of that much­ derided club, The Nature Poets.
If you ask people who don't write or read poems what most poems are
about, they'll often say ‘Nature’; they imagine that nature poetry is a
kind of soft poetry; a poetry that says hello to the trees and the
flowers and then dribbles out little verses called “Ode to the Tulip”.

Of course most nature poetry isn’t like that: look at thework of Ted
Hughes or Sheffield's own Terry Gifford.

For them nature is tough and brutal; there's more spilled blood
spilling petals there. Colin Simms, though, is unusual. For a start,
he's a naturalist as well as a poet, based at times in Yorkshire and
other parts of the North of England. He’s published, over many years,
thousands of articles and scientific papers, and up until now his poems
have mainly been published in small editions by smaller presses, a
method of publication Simms has deliberately chosen.

Now, though, we've got a fattish book from Shearsman Books and the
poems are glorious. Here’s the whole of “Sea Otter”: ‘raccoon
fingering
/ wet cocoon / animate bundles / slow blue bubbles / the whisker barbs
whistle / taps at my breathing / heaving seas' troubles’ and on the
page the lines move about a little like an otter would in the water.

In a sense that poem is Simms‑lite, but it contains all his concerns:
rhythm, the piling up of words on each other (raccoon / cocoon; bundles
/ bobbles and the need for the language to reflect, to become almost,
what it's talking about.

Here’s Simms in full flight. Listen to the music: ‘lochside
silverschistsand disturbed-to-black below distributed / pattern-padded
pewter-grade velvet hollows grains added otter pattern / wind off water
levelling sibilant beveling gritscreen bankscree’.

Now I know that many readers will throw up their hands defensively at
this point and go: "Whoa there!" and turn to something else. But trust
me on this one. Give Simms time. Read him aloud. Celebrate things like
“silverschistsand” where he’s put three words together, silver /
schist
/ sand, three words describing the sand so that they become the sand;
aloud, they become the sound of sand in wind.

Glory in those words "leveling sibilant bevelling gritscreen
bankscree". They certainly sound good in a Yorkshire accent!

And listen how “bevelling" goes with “levelling".

See how gritscreen bankscree describes with a scientist's precision the
rocks and how they are.

Simms's ancestor, poetically, is Basil Bunting for whom the sound of
the poem was also important. But I think that Simms's other ancestors
are the millions of people over the years who've lived in the country
alongside otters and martens and who've described them to each other
with no thought of creating poetry from them, and maybe that's Simms's
greatest achievement: he gives the language of nature back to those who
created it in woods and hill-sides as they struggled to articulate what
they'd seen.

Colin Simms isn't an easy poet, but I think he's a major one, and I
recommend this book absolutely.

Shearsman Books is one of number of presses like Salt Publications and
Etr­uscan Books and West House Books who are publishing exciting and
very reward­ing poetry: watch out for them!

Now I'm off back into the garden to shout a few more Colin Simms poems.