James Arthur's ​Hundred Acre Wood

Reviewed by Carla Scarano D'Antonio

(Anstruther Press, 2018)

​The recent chapbook by James Arthur published by Anstruther Press develops the themes of his first collection, Charms against Lightning (published in 2012), adding thought-provoking overtones. His poetry questions the human place in this world, shifting between ordinariness and ampler prospects. This view encompasses innocence, fatherhood, failure, displacement, and unusual, sometimes disturbing, imagery.
 
In the search for answers to fundamental existential questions and to the reasons for human frustrations, the journey in his first collection goes from existing as a mere shadow of a being to the awareness that it is not possible not to be a person. This realization entails the risk of losing a prior identity and points to the wish ‘to keep alive, longer, and ferociously’ (‘Tropical Bats,’ Charms against Lightning). The ambitions of the ‘shadow’ seem to be resolved in the quotidian in the last poem of this collection, ‘Summer Song’. However, this ordinariness also suggests a wider horizon and broader expectations:

I feel tall wind rising up to take
and bear me far away

(‘Summer Song’)

The poems in Hundred Acre Wood develop these themes further, both in content and in form. The quotidian is achieved and fulfilled in fatherhood. The poet’s relationship with his child is expressed in reading children’s books together and in references to fairy tales. The apparently innocent world of childhood reveals unexpected angles, precarity, and the inevitable vulnerability of being human:

… Don’t forget me, says the boy to the bear,
who has no wish to understand
 
what he does not already know.
​
(‘Hundred Acre Wood’)

The deep bond between father and son traverses Winnie-the-Pooh’s fictional land and expresses its essence in everyday life when the father listens to his child singing in his room. This gives the narrator a sense of life, a possible temporary answer to his questions, a symbolic rock to grasp at. However, children’s books also have unsettling sides, as in the book about ‘a newborn cricket’ that ‘makes a chirruping’ when you turn the last page. The noise intensifies, never stopping until the father decides to open up ‘the book with a sturdy paring knife’ to stop the buzz. He metaphorically kills the fictional creature whose ‘death cry’ sounds real for a moment, though it is produced by a metal device. The surreal aspect of this cry invites the reader to linger in the fictional world that is ‘real’ for the child, in his attempt to ‘tell the difference between himself and other things,’ to make a sense of ‘reality’ through fiction.
 
In ‘Wolf’ the fairy tale of Little Red Riding Hood is re-interpreted from the point of view of the predator, the impenitent bad wolf. He suggests exciting alternatives to the predictability of the girl’s life:

By now you must be married to a woodcutter
or to a woodcutter’s son
but I am still entangled in the forest of your hair. Come back;
strip me of this nightgown, and I’ll show you
how to raid a chicken coop,
how to step around a snare.
​
(‘Wolf’)

​There are clear sexual references that cannot be camouflaged under the grandmother’s nightgown and that are made even more apparent in the mesmerising power Red Riding Hood exercises on the wolf:

I’d devour every grandmother in the world
to get back into your basket.
…
My enemy the moon looks down at me like a cauterized eye
as I creep into the village
 
and softly call your name. Little scholar, little flame,
shy girl in a crimson cowl, let me unfasten the buttons
that you have done up to your collar.
​
(‘Wolf’)

Victim and victimiser are entangled in the same net, trapped in a story that interweaves with two other stories: ‘The Three Little Pigs’ and ‘The Boy who Cried Wolf.’ According to the wolf, the disturbing world of fairy tales mingles with surreal ordinariness that eventually looks artificial:

… It just makes me crazy,
seeing little pigs building up their houses
with hickory sticks and straw.
​
(‘Wolf’)

Therefore, the wolf is not only the predator and the villain, he is also the outsider who questions the pretension of righteousness, exposing incongruities and contradictions and reclaiming his position among the living. He is the part of humanity that encompasses both good and bad sides, body and mind, spirituality and sensuality. The rich imagery displayed in this poem point out the aggressive and transgressive attitude of the wolf, as well as his vulnerability, his inability to adapt to the fabricated rules of fairy tales.
 
There are clear references to W.H. Auden in this quest to find a more credible identity in our fragmented world, as well as in the suggestion to comprehend mind and body in an inclusive vision. It is an attempt to understand the world where we live in spite of mistakes, failures, uncertainties, and disappointments. The superheroes such as Achilles, in Auden’s poem ‘The Shield of Achilles,’ or Captain America will not ‘live long,’ as Auden claims; they will be buried in their costumes, as Arthur remarks in his poem ‘The Death of Captain America.’ In fact, in the modern world there is no place for heroic acts or epic journeys, which are artificially re-created in theme parks or nostalgic Renaissance fairs. The transformation does not pass through ancient myths but across the quotidian and finds its significance in fusion with the land, which is a physical re-appropriation:

My grandmother’s gone. Before she died, she lost her words,
her house, her name, but for me, she’s still a hard woman
walking downhill at dawn, long into autumn,
to skinny-dip in her weed-chocked, freezing pond.
A hedge of wind, a wall of suburban snow –a  
my father’s father’s ashes are in the ground
in southern Ontario.
​
(‘A Local History’)

A wider dimension and broader aspirations come back in other poems, testifying to the unquenchable human ambition to attain a higher and more fulfilling universal order that might resolve the fragmented, unsettling everyday experience: 

… something more abstract gliding on the surface
of the open water’s mind.
​
(‘In a Rented Cabin in the Haliburton Highlands, Oriented Toward Algonquin Park’)

​Poems such as ‘Wind’ and ‘Roar’ involve this wider perspective that might be attained through imagination:

at times downtown
        riding over galleries of air
so full of high excitement howling
I borrow an old woman’s hat
       and fling it into the road
 
arriving with news of the larkspur
       and the bumblebee
at times embracing you so lightly
in ways you don’t even think of
       as touch
​
(‘Wind’)

The versatility of Arthur’s poetry goes from well-structured couplets and tercets to unpunctuated freestyle. The narration flows from one verse to the other and pauses in the middle of lines, which are often marked by full stops and question marks that question the reader’s certainties and invite them to re-think things. The final poem, ‘Ararat,’ moves in unending enjambments that express Noah’s reflections on his adventure. He interrogates once again the unresolved contradictions of being human, the isolation in a world that is sometimes obscure, doubtful, a question mark.

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Carla Scarano D’Antonio lives in Surrey with her family. She obtained her Degree of Master of Arts in Creative Writing with Merit at Lancaster University in October 2012. She self-published a poetry pamphlet, A Winding Road, in 2011. She has published her work in various anthologies and magazines, and is currently working on a PhD on Margaret Atwood’s work at the University of Reading. In 2016, she and Keith Lander won first prize in the Dryden Translation Competition with translations of Eugenio Montale’s poems. She writes in English as a second language.
 
Visit her websites:
http://carlascarano.blogspot.com/
http://www.carlascaranod.co.uk/