"The end of the age of fire" by Peter Clive (Lulu, 2021): Review by Charlie Gracie

This is more than a poet’s reflection on the state of our planet; this is a cry of castigation. There is hope too in this fulsome collection of poems from Peter Clive. Just a little. And that feels apposite, given its publication so close to the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow.

From start to finish, the poems are written with sharp focus. They don’t stravaig across history and landscape and human relationships; they stomp. Clive’s rhythmic and alliterative instincts are strong, and this adds engaging purpose from the very start: see the well-honed Prediction; and the meditative qualities he brings to Dies irae: Drought and deluge, fire and flood, / famine and strife have left an arid Eden. / There are no more graves.

Several long sequences allow the poet to explore central themes in depth: humans have already tipped the scales, cast the dice; the conflation of individual human experience and planetary destruction; the links between ecological and social justice. He deploys religious and other philosophical imagery very well in these pieces. In the title sequence (with twenty poems), XIV asserts: We think there are no miracles. / There is only the absence of miracles, / our perception is that the miraculous is exceptional / rather than ubiquitous. Even, as here, when Peter Clive reaches for optimism, it is muted, contained by his scientific and sociological knowledge and his spiritual instincts. This is not a depressing book: too many of the poems have such overwhelming logic that they inspire acceptance rather than anything more debilitating. That’s a great skill for a poet, to point the reader outward and inward simultaneously, and hold that balance. What despondency there is, is framed in lines that are clean and clear, such as in For Siddhu and Decade, whose opening lines say: Time’s up. / The masks have all slipped. / All evils are revealed, / smirking…

This collection from Peter Clive is ultimately a very human thing. It is laden with contained anger, with layers of history and scientific thinking, with a sense of the inevitability of our condition. Yet, even when it seems we will remain unsaved, he holds on to personal relationships. This shines out of poems like Ashes: You see those stars? / That’s the world burning down / in ten thousand little bonfires. / That’s how much I love you…

The poems in the end of the age of fire are worth sitting with and revisiting. They are engaging and enraging. The depth of Peter Clive’s reflection on the human impact on our one-and-only home planet is a creative gift for the reader.

Charlie Gracie is a poet, novelist and short story writer, originally from Baillieston, Glasgow and now living on the edge of the Trossachs: http://www.charliegracie.scot/

"The end of the age of fire" by Peter Clive is available from Lulu: https://www.lulu.com/en/us/shop/peter-clive/the-end-of-the-age-of-fire/paperback/product-vnr4kd.html   

Ex nihilo

We are the mouthpiece of midnight, 

the means by which absence interacts

with all the illimitable instances of itself. 

The sounds we make connect silences. 

They are the growl of distant engines overhead

that leave white con trails between continents, 

threads briefly stitching together mute hinterlands

before they melt into the still more vast blue sky. 

My eyes, coming to rest upon you, evaporate, 

and settle on the ground as an astronomy of frost. 

Time laces up his boots, stands and salutes,  

and leaves a footprint in it as he marches past.

It thaws into a dew, then sinks into the earth,

where the otherwise impregnable dark 

dreams of a rose in Winter, 

and the precarious sleep of subterranean stars

contains new worlds waiting to erupt into bloom,

impetuous, petulant, petal-lipped petted-lips

that whisper curses in the orchards of the Moon

so that the season of silence can worm its way 

into every forbidden apple. Constellations

are the net we cast to catch ourselves, and fail, 

leaving complaint as our only communication.

Better to be silent. Better to listen to silence, 

the hinge of midnight, and walk through. 

Casabianca 2021

The boy stood in the sinking boat

in which from war he fled.

The waves that o'er the gunwale broke

filled all therein with dread.

Yes, beautiful and bright he stood,

but could not rule the storm,

nor, crueler than the cold wind's blast,

the bitter bigots' scorn.

The waves rolled in - he could not go

without the coastguard's aid.

Some called them on the radio

as others hoped and prayed. 

They called "Mayday Mayday Mayday,

we're tempest-tossed and drenched,"

and then they heard the coastguard say

"you ought to try the French".

"Please help us," once again they cried,

"so we may yet be gone!"

- And but the static hiss replied,

and fast the waves rolled on. 

I could go on, and tell of how,

in lyrics fine and fair,

he look’d from that lone post of death,

in still yet brave despair,

but those who sing of splendour wild

we're never really there,

the faithful, gallant, noble child

described from their armchair 

a myth. His needless sacrifice

did not empire preserve.

It is the cost of fear and lies

which nobody deserves.

(27 refugees drowned in the English Channel when their dinghy sank on 24th November 2021, including three children)

Cabbage

Perhaps it's too late. 

The rot has become 

the load bearing part 

of the structure. 

Corruption is built in, 

crime systemic, 

apathy the default, 

ignorance cultivated 

and outrage reserved 

for the expression

of prejudice. 

The state is held hostage 

by an almost imperceptibly 

slow motion coup. 

Democracy is the ruin 

of a cabbage 

after an evening of slugs. 

We need to start again. 

We need to plant seeds

and create conditions 

for them to grow.