My Father's Pot and Other Poems - Review

Ink, Sweat and Tears Poetry and Prose Webzine March 3rd 2010

Reviewed by Carolyn Richardson, poet and a senior lecturer at the University of Cumbria. See also Cake, Lancaster University's Literary Magazine.

Harriet Torr opens the creaking door onto her mainly rural life, from childhood to later life. There is a rocking rhythm to the lines and metred stanzas here – reminiscent of Yeats and also very much of Pound. Throughout there is kind of leitmotif of time, not just the measured metre of lines, but in the use of the clock image “My Father’s Clock”, the use of time-descriptive words ‘minutes’ ‘days’ ‘a belt full of years’ and the indirect sense of time in ‘waiting with longing’. A little more than half of the poems in this volume are written in the past tense – conveying the draughty corridor of time long gone ‘a backlog of memory’.

Torr should be more widely read and acknowledged but maybe that is perhaps simply a personal take on this work (I grew up with Yeats, Lawrence and Pound). But I hope that other readers find Torr to be a consummate poet, totally at ease with her subject and highly skilled in ‘taking a line for a walk’. Perhaps fashion and times change? Hers is a quiet calm contemplative world, not without its violences and intrusions admittedly – as in “Jungle” and “The Balloon”, but a lost world of 1950s wireless sets, subsistence living in country and town among the privations of post war England.
 

A Lawrentian world, dominant father included. A world of extended families,outside privies and the titular ‘my father’s pot’ under the iron bedstead. I could read a great deal of this writer and always find something engaging in the scenes her poet’s squint eye captures.
 

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