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At immigration I put on airs and styles… I look only ahead and walk straight-back, like my grandfather. Speak like he spoke to foreigners. In his best moods, he would put on the mouths of all the Englishmen he’d met, playing the Queen and how she gave him his MBE – Pa. (‘Legba’, p. 45) Delores Gauntlett’s work echoes much that I’ve liked in the American formalist, Robert Hayden. In her poems that feature the figure of a father wrecked by a war, scarred into silence, I often hear, playing in the background, Hayden’s famous ‘Those Winter Sundays’. That poem opens in the reverie of observing a father wake to the ritual of work: Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. Gauntlett’s ‘A Song for My Father’ (p. 24) begins in a similar conceit: Against the yam-vine quiet of the garden a nightingale stirred with my father: the lift and fall of the pickaxe, the heaving throat of the hidden bird exacting the subtleties of song. This would become the memory of high grass. Near the end of Hayden’s poem he cries, ‘What did I know? What did I know!’ It is a lament that appears in Gauntlett’s own work: ‘Though what did I know at eight/ about the bends they crossed’ (‘Pocomania’, p. 34) What Gauntlett shares with Hayden is not only a preference for pentametric lines, but the powerful craft of nostalgia. Gauntlett does not long for the past (as Dionne Brand would put it), steering far away from sentimentality. But what she invokes and evokes so effectively, is a year that has already gone: Now, under these scorched foundation stones, lies the unstirred clay steeped in grandfather’s life: introduction xv

At immigration I put on airs and styles…

I look only ahead and walk straight-back, like my grandfather. Speak like he spoke to foreigners. In his best moods, he would put on the mouths of all the Englishmen he’d met, playing the Queen and how she gave him his MBE – Pa.

(‘Legba’, p. 45)

Delores Gauntlett’s work echoes much that I’ve liked in the American formalist, Robert Hayden. In her poems that feature the figure of a father wrecked by a war, scarred into silence, I often hear, playing in the background, Hayden’s famous ‘Those Winter Sundays’. That poem opens in the reverie of observing a father wake to the ritual of work:

Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze.

Gauntlett’s ‘A Song for My Father’ (p. 24) begins in a similar conceit:

Against the yam-vine quiet of the garden a nightingale stirred with my father: the lift and fall of the pickaxe, the heaving throat of the hidden bird exacting the subtleties of song. This would become the memory of high grass.

Near the end of Hayden’s poem he cries, ‘What did I know? What did I know!’ It is a lament that appears in Gauntlett’s own work: ‘Though what did I know at eight/ about the bends they crossed’ (‘Pocomania’, p. 34) What Gauntlett shares with Hayden is not only a preference for pentametric lines, but the powerful craft of nostalgia. Gauntlett does not long for the past (as Dionne Brand would put it), steering far away from sentimentality. But what she invokes and evokes so effectively, is a year that has already gone:

Now, under these scorched foundation stones, lies the unstirred clay steeped in grandfather’s life:

introduction xv

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