Cherry Blossom, Derek Parkes
Red Squirrel Press, 2019 £6.00
Life through a lens
Reading through Cherry Blossom by Derek Parkes feels like being taken through a photo-album of snap-shots from a speaker’s life. The author presents us with vignettes of family and loved-ones, nostalgic and current, in straightforward fashion. Nearest and dearest are presented along with their frustrating idiosyncrasies, but they are in this album because they’re loved.
We are left to make connections in our own minds in response to these portraits. The opening poem (‘Diving in the Shallow End’) is delivered by a speaker whose body forms a ‘fleshy Zed’ in preparation. Taken in context with the other poems from the collection, it’s an exhortation to take on those challenges we may fear more as we age. The image of the speaker, balanced in trepidation on the edge of the pool, might prompt us to react, each to our own.
Other poems such as ‘Cherry Blossom’, ‘Burns Night’, and ‘Bookends’ present windows on love and loss. The ‘Black Tie’ once preserved in cellophane after its occasional use, now hangs on the tie rack with others. It is ‘slowly moving to the front as I age / and death becomes part of life.’
The speaker’s ‘Sisters’ are captured at a family reunion looking like age-old tormentors. And that this is taken in good-humour is neatly presented. End-rhyme is not used in this collection, with the exception of one poem and here — only in the summing up:
like when they say
(and they say it all the time),
that my poetry isn’t poetry
because it doesn’t rhyme.
The poet also uses a specific technique occasionally to shift us from the still of the snapshot to something more film-like, as in ‘Pimm’s No 1’:
She dropped news with the ice cubes.
The girls
were with
their father
that weekend.
A sprig of mint grew in the glass.
But ‘Tuscan Eve’ is perhaps for me the best example of the poet’s skill in transporting us through depiction. The scene is drawn in detail. Everything here is contentment — even the gecko’s chirruping is a ‘clockwork love song.’ Quite so — a moment captured with perfect timing
Mhairi Owens
Stings in the tail
The poems in Derek Parkes’ recent pamphlet linger in the mind like personalised messages from an empathetic friend. His subjects are in themselves mundane, but treated with respect and a wry humour that recognises life is a comedy, not a tragedy. He leaves us with the feelings evoked by honestly shared experience, feelings often confirmed by skilful last lines with tragi-comic stings in the tail.
Even in ‘Dead’, a poem that tells us he felt nothing in the presence of his father’s body (‘but I could not cry over this empty shell. / This wasn’t my dad), it is in the last line that he gently punches us in the gut:
We only see human spirit when it’s not there anymore.
Likewise in ‘Black Tie’, he recounts the occasions on which he has worn one, and just as we are enjoying the narrative thread he has been weaving, he brings us up sharp to
Now it adorns my tie rack
slowly moving to the front as I age
and death becomes part of life.
But death doesn’t dominate this nicely judged selection box. The poet is much more likely to amuse in his vignette-like observations. In ‘Pimms No 1’, for example, he builds our expectation that a drink is going to lead to trouble by the words ‘The girls were away for the weekend’ spaced suggestively, staggering down the page, before the killer last line: ‘I never drank its like again’.
Derek Parkes’ previous life as a writer of short stories is evident throughout, but particularly in the title poem ‘Cherry Blossom’. The smell of shoe polish leads him to sketch a moment on a Sunday morning — a moment of family life as if remembered by his teenage self. His young self observes, his mature self records in lines of unstated understanding. It reads like a Vanitas, a still life painting which means more than it portrays — like these poems.