Mark Mansfield consulted and questioned Angela Topping during the writing of this essay.

While it is not necessary for thoroughly enjoying the poems in Angela Topping’s eighth collection, The Five Petals of Elderflower, being tuned in to her ingenious use of the title poem as a structural opener provides the reader with a dimensionality and vista that could otherwise be missed. Topping clues us in about the meta-nature of the title poem from its open lines:

Enter through its centre of five petals
past the crown of stamens . . .

Here then is the door by which you enter the rest of the collection. The title poem is divided into five sections as is the elderflower with its five petals. But as you start reading each section you come to realize that something else is going on, much akin to Jacques’ ‘Seven Stages of Man’ speech in As You Like It.

Section one announces infancy, with its oneness with nature, which babies have naturally and that anyone can return to, especially on the borders of sleep, illness, or being greatly upset, the times when we’d crawl back into the womb if we could. “Sleep now, as in fresh sheets, soothed/by the sun, head in blossom, a perfumed lullaby,” and “Your cheek is on your mother’s breast,/the flowers are sweet milk. Rock-a-bye.”

Section two ushers in childhood, and beginning to understand the world, and what’s safe and what isn’t, often through the eyes of an adult. The adult narrator instruct the child accompanying him (the narrator shifts in this poem from section to section) about which flowers not to pick (“If it smells like cat’s pee, so will your champagne./So we don’t pick those.”), to not overpick (“But we mustn’t/take all the blooms from one tree or there’ll be/no berries, neither for us nor birds.”), and about the lore of the flower (“There’s lots of stories about this tree. Some say/it’s Faerie, but your mum knows more about that.”)

Section three vibrates upon the cusp of adolescent sexual awakening. The narrator is now a young girl alone, perhaps for the first time, with a young boy, as he takes her hand in the dark outside of a pub, the intoxicating smell of the elderflower “buzzing” in her head.

I’m giddy, stumbling; now there is no-one to see
you take my hand. We cannot even see each other.
The flowers smell of sex, of lust, foreign tongues to us.

Section four moves into adulthood, to the heady involvement and demands and excitement of fully living life. Topping astutely selects the metaphor of music to convey the rich energy that comes with being grown up and out upon one’s own to face the world. The “Elderflowers sing jazz” and “Notes dance round our feet:/we wade in sound. It’s a five bar blues, /scrolls of baroque, rising like smoke, tasting champagne.”

Section five tolls the inevitability of death, with its implicit advent of old age and perhaps the specter of loneliness, but the narrator does so through the summing beauty of an elegiacally and deeply sworn vow to one departed (or might this “you” be more than one?) that the elderflower will forever serve to remember by.

By its green taste, its umbrella canopy,
by the cushion of blooms each with five petals.
By these things, I swear to remember you.

Reading The Five Petals of Elderflower, you realize that while the ordering of the poems follows the sections in the title poem, the collection’s organization is never sensed as heavy handed or obvious, but frequently blurs much the way living does. Certain poems, such as “The Visited” serve as hinges, this poem being a story from childhood, but also looks forward to the poems about old age—as the daughter who narrates the poem accompanies her mother to visit two shut-in spinsters suddenly comes to fear that she might also end up old and alone.

Angela Topping is a poet whom nature has transfixed, and consequently, her poetry transfixes nature for her fortunate readers, so that when you experience the elderflower through her, you “Soak up the hum—you are one with lace.” She possesses as abundant a gift for synesthesia as I have ever encountered, and the reader encounters this from the title poem onward. The elderflower produces “a perfumed lullaby”; its petioles become a place where “Your cheek is on your mother’s breast/the flowers are sweet milk. Rock-a-bye.” The elderflower “sing[s] jazz,” and willingly leads us to “a five bar blues, /scrolls of baroque, rising like smoke.” Her poetry is equally redolent with assonance: “The flowers smell of sex, of lust, foreign tongues to us.”

It seems perfectly fitting that Angela Topping edited a Focus guide and critical companion to Everyman’s Selected Poems by John Clare (Greenwich Exchange, 2015). Two poets could not be more aligned in spirit, outlook, and in subject matter. Like Clare, Topping deeply perceives the dents left by time at every twist and turn, and that “There will be no going back.” Clare’s especial use of irony is not often commented upon, but clearly Topping has noted it when she suggests a sparrow’s “voice was nothing special:” then follows this coy disclaimer by capturing the very essence of the sparrow’s voice — “a chirrup like a giggle fastened/in its throat like a comedy brooch.” Topping seems intrinsically attuned to nature and man’s primordially uneasy coexistence: “two worlds, the door between/still ajar,” and to nature’s ever immanent power to overwhelm and efface humankind, as in “Three Voices of Ty Newydd” when her narrator says, “These strange margins and borderlands/ are of themselves, not humankind. /The sleeping sea could with one push/rub out these scattered farms.”

At times, Topping’s delicious sense of humor exposes itself, as in “Studying the Travel Question,” which begins, “Travel can be dangerous and adventurous/ declares the question we discuss/in A level classes. You’re not kidding.” The poem goes on to recount the narrator, risking life, “driving through/February snow” because she is taken up with “Fields and trees of enticing loveliness,” tempting her to stop and hike about “in work suit and unsuitable shoes,” all of which brings to her mind Frost’s poem “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowing Evening.”

But Frost’s woods now suddenly become Frost himself speaking “dark and deep” to the narrator, suggesting “One day there will be no promises to keep,” which of course precisely leans away from what impels Frost’s poem, and how the poem ends, its irony drawn full circle. Thus, Topping’s poem about travel in a short span itself travels from an almost off-handed, glib dismissiveness — “You’re not kidding” — about the danger and adventure inherent in travel, to a day in the narrator’s future when travel will not be hemmed in by any promises or responsibilities, or any other constraints. Moving away from constraints is a recurrent motif in The Five Petals of Elderflower, such as moving away from the parochialism of being raised in a small town, or moving away from the appurtenances of Catholicism, their “pull” toward finding and embracing her “own ways of knowing.”

While Topping does not typically employ end rhyme in The Five Petals of Elderflower, when she does the effect is subtly nuanced, as in “Coniston Water from Brantwood”, a poem constructed of couplets in which end rhyme and slant rhyme almost randomly linger like someone whispering just out of earshot but all the more haunting as a result– (see/Vs/trees and out/trousers/proud/shroud). The poem is also peppered with words ending in “er” which very much turns the mind’s ear to the poem’s overall somberness (venture, over-trousers, walkers, gather, tethered, hunker, blurred, Water, covers – and we could add, mere and blurred).

The Proustian past in its various guises plays a crucial role in The Five Petals of Elderflower, whether the pull of Catholicism, “But this was my mother’s God” or acknowledging by detailing irreversible changes wrought over time, which appear, for example, in the final stanza of Topping’s poem, “Welcome to Royston Vasey,” inspired by the fictionalized town where League of Gentlemen was set. “More strangers will come./ New Road. The Local Shop will soon be an Asda, /the Palace a bingo hall. There will be no going back.” But Topping never looks back for long, as her focus is fiercely upon widening her horizon, exquisitely underscored in her lyric Bildungsroman, “When Widnes was in Lancashire and I was in Widnes” which recounts a childhood where:

My fingers stretched to scrape the sky,
head buoyed up with words I’d claimed
understood but couldn’t say
from all the books I’d hefted home.

The small town couldn’t hold me. I
was Alice in Wonderland, stuck
in the White Rabbit’s house, drunk
on grow-me potion, glugging it down.

I was waiting for the wind to change,
to tread the yellow brick road
journeying beyond myself, beyond the town
beyond the people I had known.

While deeply attuned to the past, the narrator’s course is to “journey beyond” the bounds of the past in order to understand not just those words claimed to be understood, but whatever else awaited beyond the horizon, where “mermaids called,” moving past “a gull-haunted strait with looming ships/to New Brighton, Éire, The Caribbean.” The strait may be “gull-haunted,” but the focus is upon those “looming ships.” While at times an illusion of nostalgia may seem to haunt The Five Petals of Elderflower, ultimately it is the poet’s desire to “glug” down “grow-me potion” which drives and impels the collection forward, to break free from the bonds of parochialism and of any hint of nostalgia, which is to adults what homesickness can be to children.

There is one poem among the childhood poems which bears special scrutiny, and that is “Topical Iodine.” On its surface, this poem is about a young girl who takes to skinning her legs by deliberately falling on the playground in order to be sent to the “crisp nurses” for a few “sapphire drops” of iodine. And while the nurses’ clinic is clearly a sanctuary, a safe harbor, or haven from “dull assembly,” “bullies” and “screaming teachers,” a careful reading of the poem shows these trips to be much more, the nascent solitude with the mystery of language alone, necessary to writing poetry.

How many times I fell in the yard
to exchange dull assembly for a walk alone
through streets silent of school clatter, fizzing rhymes
forming themselves in my mouth,

. . . . .

I tried words for size, like tincture and chemical,
words I was too young to spell, though their rhythms
chimed in my ear, saved up like cajoled coins.

This is how poets are made, and this Joycean spell that words, especially their sounds, cast, and which shows up again and again in The Five Petals of Elderflower, as when the narrator’s head in “When Widnes was in Lancashire and I was in Widnes” is “buoyed up with words I’d claimed/understood but couldn’t say.” As Auden wrote, “A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.” Passion, first cast by the musical spell of words – understanding and even proper spelling! will follow in due course.

There is a certain tension evident in The Five Petals of Elderflower between the desire to push beyond the confines of a small town upbringing, which cannot “hold” the quest for change, to “tread the yellow brick road” and an, at times, benignly sinister but acute awareness of a future that might otherwise await if those confines are not pushed past. “The Visited” focuses upon several spinster shut-ins whom the narrator’s mother and she as a young girl take food parcels to. These women, who devoted their lives to serving others, including their parents, are now time-locked, shut in “Behind yellow lace,” leading a petrified existence in “rooms stuffed with knick-knacks:/wax blooms and dead birds under a dusty dome;/bronze stags; crinoline girls, and cranberry glass.” They bring to mind poorer simulacra of Miss Havisham minus the grandeur of Satis House, but sharing the brooding seclusion and forlornness beneath its stifling decrepitude. The young narrator is clearly affected by these visits to these women – “Everything about them scared me,” but most of all disturbed by the realization that she could end up “one day being them.” “The Visited” serves as a cautionary tale, illuminating what impels the untrammeled desire throughout The Five Petals of Elderflower to break loose evinced in “When Widnes was in Lancashire and I was in Widnes” – to not only wait for “the wind to change,” but to stretch towards it.

The tension between the Proustian past and setting her own course surfaces brilliantly throughout The Five Petals of Elderflower. In “Are You Sitting Comfortably?” the narrator recounts her memories of listening to the “BBC Voice, immaculate, the speech I was made for” on the radio as a child, and her mother’s desire that her daughter assimilate the accent’s “correctness, buffed and polished as our table.” A startlingly apt yet almost casual simile. Her mother’s “aspiration” that she “learn to speak properly.”

However, one the narrator is off “to school in Liverpool” and catches “a twang of Scouse,” she begins to more fully discover her own identity – much like the narrator in the poem, “Cradle Catholic,” finds her “own ways of knowing” faith, forever haunted by the bittersweet spell cast by highly descriptive memories she associates with her “mother’s God,” – forever haunted by, but no longer confined.

Speech manifests as the narrator’s “own way” in “Are You Sitting Comfortably.” She rejects the “BBC Voice’s immaculate correctness, falling “into belonging like a warm bath” with “the speakers who’d flowed in on Mersey tides,” a wonderfully poignant line that leads to the narrator to embrace her own individuality, by ironically circling back to the play on the poem’s title, the phrase “Are you sitting comfortably?” spoken by the BBC’s announcer at the opening of his show, which is also the poem’s opening line -- by closing out the poem, acknowledging her self-identity with: “And now at last am sitting comfortably with myself.”

This palpable tension, this freeing up from either the bittersweet pull of childhood or the humdrum of the here and now, asserts itself again and again in the poems in The Five Petals of Elderflower. In the gorgeously lyrical ekaphrastic poem, “Noost,” inspired by its narrator imagining giving a tin with a miniature landscape in it to a dear friend, the process is pared down to an imaginary invitation to voyage – to allow this friend, who seems “long in city pent” (to steal a phrase from Keats) a chance to escape “that narrow place, where you are/pinned like a bug in a specimen drawer,” by opening the “rusty tin” where “a small boat/sheltered in a Shetland bay” – impeccably gentle alliteration there! the friend’s name “painted starboard” – ready for him any time to “Row where your will takes you/into the green/towards distant mountains you long to climb.” This pocket miniature works as a symbol and a microcosm of what infuses and animates Topping’s heart and her core as a poet – Clare’s pure communion and untrammeled being with nature:

Carry my gift in your pocket.
When you open this rusty tin:
the gulls’ shriek is deafening,
water moves and tumbles,
your feet are bare on ribbed sand,
your hands calloused; the sun
is on your back, soothing, soothing.

Not just a microcosm, but a refuge to escape what most often one is dealt versus what one’s self desires. “This is the life you were born for.” More than a refuge – a world.

When you close the lid again
that world winks out, is gone

but stays within; sea, mountains, sky,
that place of quiet I bring you.

Along with being one of the most lyrically wrought poems in the collection, “Noost” seems to occupy a pivotal station, announcing a number of poems which deal with relationships of varying degrees of intimacy between adults, whether spending time with a friend strolling (“June Day in Colyton”) , or a particular activity (“Bookbinding at The Whitworth”, “Fish and Chips”). Other poems recount a closer, abiding bond and describe encounters between a man and woman (“Formby Sands,” “Wenlock Edge Walk,” and “New Year”). Even the surreal, “Ichthyolatry” in which a man, apparently an academic, becomes obsessed with and enamored of a koi, very much focuses upon a one-on-one relationship.

In this section, there are three poems, “Company on the Road,” “Invitation to Tomorrow,” and the meta-poetic “Nothing but Rain” which engage on level where mortality claims the reader’s attention in the context of the relationship, but more than this, the relationship each of these poems turns upon is that between two artists. And it should be said that while the collection contains poems which overtly reference the supernatural (“Coffin Texts,” “On Ghosts”), the power of these poems—and I count them along with “Noost” among the strongest in the collection—emanates from addressing mortality without pulling any punches and waxing ethereal.

“Company on the Road” stands out formally from other poems in the collection by virtue of its structure. The poem is entirely in short lines, some as short as one word or two, and the language of the poem is matter-of-fact without seeming intended so, immediately bringing to mind the work of William Carlos Williams and Cid Corman, but most of all, reminiscent of Robert Creeley’s love lyrics. The narrator of the poem tells of being delayed on the road after a poetry reading, and so we can assume that the narrator is the poet. The first lines of the poem pass so quick that at first you don’t consider the ironic weight that the word, “diversion” carries:

I was lost
after a diversion
and in the dark
driving home
from a poetry reading;
you came
as though
death were
no bar

Is it a detour which provides this moment of visitation? And yet, the language of the poem is so gracefully offhand, the reader at first does not even notice this, but in reading on is overwhelmed by the disarming honesty in how what has happened is described, and by the narrator’s complete fidelity to that moment.

to keep
me company
not by speech—
beyond you now—
but by your scent,
that musk
of clean sweat
I’d known you by
alive
and a sudden warmth
ran through me
like a flame.

Invitation to Tomorrow” while also confronting mortality head-on, is a very different sort of poem from “Company on the Road.” A sumptuously described abode is laid out in the poem, along with repeated cajolings by the narrator to the other person, clearly another poet (“we will talk poetry, and memories, submit/to each other new poems for the winkling of commas.”), to join her. It is only in the last two lines of the poem that the reader learns that the “tomorrow” referred to in the poem’s title will never come:

                                                            We can say
all the things we could not when we were both alive.

While the strategy differs, like “Company on the Road,” the language with which the punch line, so to speak, is delivered is again matter-of-fact and offhand, which underscores that mortality, being inevitable, is as certain as the sun rising, or setting. But couched within the knowledge that the person who is invited is no longer alive, is something more: The bittersweet disclosure that while the person was living, there was much—the little word “all” speaks volumes— they wanted to share with each other, but could not.

“Nothing But Rain” is a meta-poem, referencing and responding to Edward Thomas’s “Rain.” But to simply brand it as a meta-poem would do Topping’s poem a grave disservice for it is much more.

The poem’s narrator begins by describing the rain she’s watching outside, paying particular attention to the birds: “The beech hedge offers little comfort to birds.” And “The bird feeder bobs on the almond branches,” but due to the rain is not being visited by any birds. She then compares the rain with the rain Thomas and his comrades faced “drenched and seeped through fustian uniform,” observing that while he experienced rain back home, he was always “able to assuage by tramping/fields and woods where he lived in England.“ No more.

At which point, the narrator catalogues the horrors of World War I:

                   a war that wasted
poets and painters and musicians,
labourers and farm hands, thinkers and doers
as trenches filled with mud and blood.
Even the weather was against them.

Embedded within Thomas’s poem there are lines, maybe the most well-known of this deservedly famous poem, which amount to, which indeed are a prayer:

Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:
But here I pray that none whom once I loved
Is dying to-night or lying still awake
Solitary, listening to the rain,
Either in pain or thus in sympathy
Helpless among the living and the dead, (Edward Thomas)

What makes this poem of Topping’s rise above other extremely accomplished poems in The Five Petals of Elderflower is how she in the last two stanzas of “Nothing But Rain,” answers Thomas’s prayer with one of her own, through anguished “as ifs”, the pleading for shelter and safety which never came for Thomas and his comrades, a prayer for “warmth and life” back in England, and for more of his incomparable poetry, of which there would be no more. The poem fittingly ends by praying Thomas “could once more sing of birds.”

Rain is still as wet, and drips into poems
like this one, but each one after his
calls out in fellow feeling, as if his Rain
and ours is the same, as if shelter would come

and safety, and warmth and life, like mine
by this coal fire, time for his English words,
to flock into his mind with feathery lines,
so he could once more sing of birds.

“Nothing But Rain,” addressing mortality in the context of the horrifically staggering loss of lives wrought by World War I, signals the final section of The Five Petals of Elderflower, which focuses upon old age, often the likelihood of constant loneliness, and death’s finality. “Agnes,” the poem following “Nothing But Rain” is an unrelentingly somber portrait of a woman’s hollow life, eked out and sacrificed in “servitude” to her parents, doomed to becoming house-bound, linking back to“The Visited.” Like the spinsters in “The Visited,” Agnes inhabited a world, locked in time: “Layers of dust stifle outdated ornaments. /Each sloughed-off cell deepens the pall./Gas lamps are chandeliered with webs.”

Topping’s metaphors in describing Agnes are drawn from the natural world wherein the elderflower blossoms -- when that world is deprived of sustenance. Agnes’s voice is “a husk, a wisp of dried grass.” Not allowed boyfriends, “Each ovum/ shrivelled inside, like dried walnuts,” – sacrificed in caring for her parents, Agnes’s existence is summed as “this drought her whole life has brought her.” Her life stands in stark contrast to the Elderflower’s call, a woman’s body reduced to “a bent stick,” never to grow from the life force provided by sexual awakening. One cannot help but think of the lyrics to the Beatles’ song, “Eleanor Rigby” when reading “Agnes” – the overwhelming presence of the sort of loneliness, which, as age advances, leads only in one direction -- to more loneliness.

The poem following “Agnes” – “Late Roses” addresses another ominous potentiality of old age – loss of memory and the possibility of dementia waiting in the wings (which the poem, “Last Remnants of the Mother Tongue” poignantly focuses upon, in the context of “the last/few scrapings of Welsh words” that “come gentle” to the narrator’s husband’s mother in her 94th year “before all language is go go gone.”). “Late Roses” recounts a day during which the narrator and her husband work, “side by side” in the husband’s “childhood garden.” It quickly becomes apparent that what is being described, the work the couple are doing in the garden, is to be seen in the context of their care for the husband’s parents, whose “tangled minds/are clogged with memories, resurfacing/as they approach their nineties.” Wife and husband are “lopping shrubs, eradicating brambles/snipping dead heads, yanking weeds,” suggesting the daily care both provide the husband’s elderly parents.

This care is not without its precious reward, for “October roses emerge in vibrant hues:/oranges, golds and crimsons, with thorns/ which rip our clothes and flesh./ Their scent is a reward for labour.” Despite the constant difficulty, the thornlike challenges of looking after the elderly, there is the light of recognition, that of the elderly couple being “thankful” for being cared for shines through -- like the roses “late flowering against the dark of winter.”

The familial warmth of “Late Roses” provides a counterweight in this final section of The Five Petals of Elderflower to the bleak solitude of “Agnes.” It should also be commented that small-town routine, which leaves the young narrator in “When Widnes was in Lancashire and I was in Widnes” “waiting for the wind to change,” becomes a solace here for the husband’s aging parents to “cling to.” As we age, what once seemed tedium personified can become much like an old friend who we don’t mind at all running into.

Other poems in this final section approach mortality from various vantage points: Topping’s beautifully wrought elegy to her mother (“Red Squirrel”); an exquisitely Clare-esque poem, “Coffin Texts” which gives instructions for burial, presented in nature’s own tongue: “This magic is true. A spell/to perfect the body and return it/to the cradle of earth.”; and “On Ghosts,” a light-hearted, wonderfully imaginative disquisition on the mischievous habits and behavior of ghosts (which serves nicely to leaven the import of this final section).

The last two poems of The Five Petals of Elderflower work as companion pieces. “The Glass Swan” is a devoutly honest poem of self-recognition, which is to say mortal recognition – that which exceeds confession to any other than oneself. In its first quatrain, the first-person narrator sets the poem’s time and place – midnight in January, in a silent house, “except for the hum/of the coal fire, the blue song of the fridge.” One cannot help but be reminded of a similar quietude described by another narrator awake by himself in a cottage on a winter night:

                           the thin blue flame
Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not;
Only that film, which fluttered on the grate,

Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.
                (Coleridge, “Frost at Midnight”)

Topping is clearly steeped in poetry, having been a lover of the genre from a very young age. These references to earlier poets are at times conscious and overt, and at others, responding to poems deeply embedded in her consciousness.

The scene set, the narrator speaks of the winter weather’s “hard lessons,” but immediately hones -- from that generalized adversity -- in on the hardest lesson of all, that:

those who lived so intensely are gone.
I shall not see them again, though I speak with them

in the aching chambers of the mind.

This is staring down mortality straight in the face without flinching, which makes that “aching” all the more unavoidable. And so, what is there to lessen what will never be undone? The narrator returns to the presence of the coal fire in the first quatrain – to feel its vital warmth. Not only to feel it, but to protect the emotionally nurturing vitality of the corporeal.

Bank it up against the night. It is all we have, these
corporeal things: these candlesticks, this glass swan.

The corporal, what remains near to us physically, and not forever gone, provides. It is a profoundly astute touch on Topping’s part not to anchor the corporeal references in “The Glass Swan” beyond concluding the poem with them. The pure mentioning alone is what brings such lyrical force to these images – weighting either down with specific or confessional froufrou would intrude sentiment where mortality’s bottom line is what the poet demands, and achieves.

“Against the Dark,” the final poem of The Five Petals of Elderflower, serves as a prayer to the collection itself, and a response to the call inherent in “The Glass Swan” for not only holding the corporeal dear, but holding deeply whatever may infuse and animate the corporeal.

Topping’s strategy to compose “Against the Dark” in interlocking tetrameter tercets reinforces the interlocking nature of light or life in the poem with darkness, which Topping associates with life-giving water. The second stanza of the poem deploys the language of prayer, invoking what transcends the corporeal to “Come” -- “saving grace,” “holy bough,” “paraclete of flame” while the final quatrain asks that somehow what is “snuffed and gone” may “shine on.” “Against the Dark” and “The Glass Swan” complement each other – to suggest that either excludes the other would be to miss the point of both poems.

The Five Petals of Elderflower is a deeply engaging while astutely nuanced and subtle collection that will appeal to the lay reader and Topping’s fellow poets alike—rich with poems that invite rereading and savoring again and again. The collection sustains its momentum throughout and is highly recommended.

The Power of Prose