The love affair the poet has with words, their worth and wonder, is faithful throughout Alan Humm’s debut collection. Humm’s voice is certain and wields metaphor and verbs in fresh ways, as in “Summer, Newly Over,” with “A dog reads midges/like foreign type.” 

With the first lines of the opening poem “Anchorite,” I am peering into Julian of Norwich’s cell: 

Do not think that I am ignorant of the body
nor that these walls
are an analogy.
[. . .]
They are as obdurate as everybody is,
tricking the flame
into a dance that wavers for its own pleasure; not for mine.
All that I want is light.

This persona poem in the voice of a religious recluse provides a portal to a collection of decidedly secular loves. Dancing light is an image that echoes throughout the collection. The closing sentence “I was bricked in/before I was bricked in,” is a construction Humm uses elsewhere. A bold statement quickly negated. I am, I am not. 

Aside from eight sonnets and a villanelle, Humm has written free verse lyrics of shortish, often uneven lines. The villanelle’s refrains capture the soul of the collection, “Within the part of us that never grows/the future is the past in different clothes.” The free verse demonstrates Humm’s excellent ear with rhythms that underscore imagery and meaning. 

Humm’s affinity for music comes alive in “How to Love Music.” The speaker watches a musician’s fingers “flubber” strings, and wonders, “If rhythm was a liquid/then a voice would be its grain.”

I can go through each poem and pluck out plums, such as “she arrives/poised like a top note/in the air” from “Watching My Daughter Climb.” These lines from “Teaching in Addington” with the contrast of soft h’s and w’s with the harsh k’s and t’s create a soundscape biting image:

Its skies, I swear,
were stark and intimate
as someone’s mouth;
the hill was like a jaw,
the houses worn away like teeth.

The second section, named for its opening poem, “Counter-tenor,” opens with an incomplete sentence, a fragment, describing the speaker’s voice and closes with “This is:” the colon presenting the poems that follow. We are led into the poet’s youth and family life where in his room “It feels like I am lying in an opened fist,” while listening to the house where “Silences are worse;/they all contain my father’s murmur/like a river does a crocodile.” From the dread of the childhood home, Humm takes us out of the house into villages and the pub. Again the keen language that enlivens, not just describes: “I am flat, or sharp,” “light’s slum-coloured,” and “lamplight dribbling down his chin.”

In “Basildon,” the final poem:

I stood and stared at the estate
out of the kitchen window,
merging with it;
its remorseless disregard.
Love’s shards were beckoning
in the distance;
dithering there in space.
Not love. Disgrace.

The speaker’s stare at the “dithering” of love’s beckoning shards beyond the confines of the family home is not an end. I want to grasp these lines to loop back to the opening poem and cast a new light on “these walls” of the anchorite’s cell. That speaker tells us “I am a wall./I am extravagantly pure.” The recognition that the damage the child experienced was “Not love” is devastating,  yet the varied loves and not-loves that populate this striking debut offer pleasure in language and richness of emotional depth. There is a fullness of life here.

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