Jeremy Hilton: Slipstream (Ripostes, Salerno, Italy. ISBN 88-86819-75-7. 56pp, pb, £7.50, €12.) In Slipstream, Jeremy Hilton uses poetry to tackle issues most poets prefer to leave well alone. Although language is his concern, it's never allowed to dominate or embellish unnecessarily the starkness of the message he delivers. His evocations of poignant, tragic or horrific human situations are expressed in the simplest and most transparent of language; his more abstruse and complex forms being reserved for personal reflection, reminiscence and the natural world.

As a retired social worker, the poet would have experienced a world most are protected from, so it's unsurprising that many of the poems in this book take a bleak view of society — a breeding ground for child abuse, exploitation, violence and war — definitely not a place to seek security or refuge. Nature, on the other hand, is portrayed as the healing force, and though seen as no less violent isn't cruel. It's a force that Hilton responds to strongly and very personally in his work. The contention is that in nature the self finds a positive; it's where human spiritual and sexual love belong and, through its power to restore, so does music. In contrast, the social self is revealed as restricted and flawed, occupying only negative space.

The book's first poem 'song of the children of memory' presents the reader with the terrible prospect of the suffering children have endured through the ages. Exploited witnesses of change who, if chance provides the capacity to survive, carry within them the seeds of abuse and cruelty into a future which awaits. But surviving the endless horror of suffering and destroyed innocence is a longing for security and whatever hope that might bring:

     are you the ghosts of people we knew?
were you at Gethsemane, at Kilwa, at Thebes?
we may be the children of memory
     but even our memory fades
give us a sign, have you come to take us home?

A similar longing is expressed in 'and there could be', a poem written for the children in the care of social services; their scarred inner world once again conjures disillusion:

and so I think of them
Jade, Nick, John and the
many others, trying to
reach out through the
hostility of the world
to a place of light and colour
a place of protection an
outside place
that is safe but is not there
when nothing inside
themselves is safe

'in the city of lost visions' is a disturbing narrative about a boy's descent from poverty to drug addiction and death in the city. However, this is no specific city but a cleverly constructed 'everycity' – one identifiable from experience in Britain, also one recognised from worldwide media reports. Nor is it a story about a named child; he isn't black, white, brown or yellow but all races, all nationalities, another victim of a remorseless struggle for wealth.

On a similar theme, 'a town may warp' presents an urban experience, only this time age and gender are withheld. It's a poem which presents disorientation and alienation but whether caused in this new 'everyperson' by economic, social or psychological factors the reader must decide. For me the poem worked as a depiction of the growing isolation of the elderly, a world in which hope is marginalised and the need to connect denied:

You find you've lost the
sense of how many
towns there are or
which dream you're in
and whether
you can ever step
back into the sanity of a place you know

Another theme, the enduring power of music, is explored in 'the cellist' and 'after hearing Nigel Osborne's Sarajevo', two poems dedicated to Vedran Smajlovic, a former cellist in the Sarajevo String Quartet. After fellow members of the Quartet were killed and concert venues destroyed in the Yugoslav debacle, he decided to take music on to the streets of the city and play for the people, even as the violence continued around him. The language of these poems is simple and reaches directly to the reader:

no reality anywhere can exist w/out music
     playing on an open bridge
          vulnerable to dynamite
               or flood
playing to shoppers and careless children
          to the bereaved and the cold-souled
to those with nothing left but hate in their hearts

In 'making love after Bartok' the turbulence music initiates in the listener is resolved, contained, and we return to a world of nature and natural instinct — experienced earlier in the poems 'breath sentences' and 'gravitas' — so a meaningful personal resolution and wholeness can be accomplished.

The book concludes with 'slipstream', an exploration of 'his/her, father/mother, man/woman' gender dualisms. The poem seeks to examine the way gender experience is acquired in a social setting and the psychological/emotional confusions and conflicts this creates. The her/his protagonist explores a process from childhood memory to the approach of death. Employing an interesting interweaving of contemporary collage – song, Toni Morrison, an exhibition of Zimbabwean sculpture, a tv documentary on the white whale – with personal memories and reflections, it creates a complex structure based on individual and mediated
reality. Through recalled documentary and recollections of a Scottish sailing trip, the natural world is again introduced; its soothing presence offering not so much explanation as direction:

like the black seabirds veering shearwaters
wing tips touching the waves with grace
as the calf follows white whale mother
and a man, losing the father
will follow her own mournful song

Jeremy Hilton's Slipstream will invite you to contemplate a many sided life in which, despite the moments of brightness and colour, lurk recesses of recurrent nightmare. However, the depictions of the dark cityscape for me were often less convincing than the evocations of nature, placement of the self in nature and the poet's cycle of personal reminiscence. The bad dreams were constructed accounts of experience; the remainder invited participation. Hope, for the poet, is to be discovered through a guiding force in nature which is represented as assisting, creative and restorative. As reinforced in 'breath sentences' (through Sufi mysticism) and in many other of the poems, only through the fusion of the natural and the individual can any comfort or purpose be derived from chaos.

Copyright © John Couth, 2004. All quotations here are copyright © Jeremy Hilton.