"Only Recently" by Paul Canon Harris

 

A book of poetry. I have explained before in this book that I don't really understand poetry and that my tastes, such as they are, are traditional, so I am finding it difficult to review this book. 

The poems are mostly written in free verse. The scansion is uncontrolled so there is rarely any sense of rhythm. Sometimes there are end rhymes (and sometimes rhymes within the line) but these appear haphazardly (at least it seems to to me) which gives the impression that they are fortuitous happenstances rather than deliberate. There is little suggestion that the poet is using words for their sound. There is no capitalisation at the start of a new line unless that happens to coincide with the beginning of a sentence so it was sometimes difficult to get a sense of where a line began or where it continued and appeared to begin because of the justification process. 

The poems are explorations of ideas, and sometimes of feelings. Quite a lot of them are linked to the Christian faith, some to Christmas and some to Easter. Some of the ideas resonated with me:

• “Everyone wants to go to heaven/ But no one wants to die.” ('Life - An Anomaly')
• '1973' in which the author remembers being told by adults to “Slow down you have all the time in the world”; the final line is the devastating: “They lied.”
• “The male is an uncomplicated beast, a walk, a stroke, a sniff and the next feast ... less a hierarchy of needs - more a canine shopping list.” ('The Dog Watch')

There are some funny verses such as 'Define Silly' in which the narrator is told by his wife not to do anything “silly” while she is out and considers some very silly possibilities, before realising that the word is a euphemism. In 'Dress Code', the author imagines dressing for a Buckingham Palace Garden party and the rivalries this will inspire among the clothes: 
“Boxers were throwing their weight around, trunks looked confident and briefs had little to say.”

Some of the poems are poignant, such as 'To Catch a Thief' in which an old lady wants her son to protect her against imaginary fears but he realises the true thief is the one who is stealing her memory.

'The Secret' appears to be about depression, perhaps caused by the dark days of winter. I enjoyed the images elicited by these lines:
“Unmuzzled, unbridled a constant threat
they plotted and planned for a legacy of regret.
He employed tactics, ruses to deflect their blows,
deployed novels, pictures and poems like
coastal defences, determined to hold back the flows,
desperate not to be swept away on a tide of
despair.
He cultivated ear worms of fragile hope to
muffle the noises, perfidious voices, sinister
whispers of frayed rope, flickering wicks, broken
reeds, hopeless needs.”

'Kite Flying with Auntie' has a great start:
“For one summer you were my locum mum and I
your ersatz son.”

'My twin' considers the poet's id: "the shadow side we let no one see ... The one who looks at another’s sin and says ‘I’d like to give that a try'.” That's brilliant!

My favourite poems were at the start and the end: 'Same Old Same Old' compared  the New Year with a new car: “Haven't had a test drive yet but, sitting here all shiny in the showroom it does look remarkably like the old one.” 'Only Recently' was quite spooky: the poet, realising that "you are ahead of me", also realises that he is afraid to follow: were we talking about someone such as a parent who had recently died or - given the Christian subtext of so many of the poems - Jesus?

An interesting collection.

Paul Canon Harris has also authored a novel reviewed in this blog called Called into Question.

This book was independently published in October 2025

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God