I’ve just reviewed this new poetry collection for London Grip. ‘Circus’ has been published posthumously for friend and fellow Border Poet member, Colin Sutherill, who died suddenly in 2020. ‘Circus’ is available from Border Poets Press for £10 plus p&p. Please contact: theborderpoets@gmail.com

Colin Sutherill was for 11 years a much valued member of Border Poets, a long-established group meeting on the Welsh borders. During his long writing career he was published by Red Squirrel Press and Blackwater Press, and shortlisted in the National Poetry Competition.

Sutherill was an extraordinary poet, his writing skilled, exuberant and crafted. He described himself as a ‘bible-loving atheist’, and as this collection bears out, he was an acute observer, who mingled humour with compassion, and a strong sense of the numinous.

‘Circus’ is arranged in sections, allowing loose groupings of connected poems. The first, eponymously named section introduces the reader to Sutherill’s trademark energy: ‘Shocking pink pinched pantaloons/ & kazoo tunes’
There is in these poems a vital joy in rhyme and rhythm that is perfectly suited to the subject matter. In ‘Blondin over Niagara’ the poem begins:
‘The rainbow road is one toe wide a half mile
side to side striding it above creation’s
monstrous weir: the once/forever
circus chevalier’

There’s a frequent wry humour too, as in ‘Snake Eyes’, a poem about ‘Florence Campbell nee Shufflebottom 1931-2014’ –
‘Flo rides shotgun for her granddad
(Fargo stagecoach man
but with a Yorkshire twang)’

In ‘The Thing Itself, the Loss of it’ the reader is introduced to Sutherill’s responses to nature and his alertness to the impacts of art on our minds. A walk through fields uncovers:
‘Rosa canina
petals lightly breeze-tossed
and the sky
is fluffed that same way
and I’m mesmerised by straggling scoops
of light unblossoming
a thing seen for the first time’
Sutherill’s originality as a poet is there in the ‘scoops’ of ‘light unblossoming’, and in his alertness to ‘a thing seen for the first time’, in the sense of a new awareness. A vein of loss threads through this poem, and others. He reminds us how ‘the R word’ has been reduced by common usage, by cliched application (‘the advertising art’). The poem ends:
‘So imperceptibly it
frays and fades
becomes its name and
so it goes: today is yesterday
and things are wept for time
and time again’

Sutherill’s origins were in Lincolnshire, although he spent his later life in Herefordshire. In his poem ‘At Frampton Marsh’, his deft rhyming and whipping rhythms become lyrical:
‘Hoof prints and a lark a plover and
an avocet or three
the ground a broth of turf a brack arc
round to Fosdyke Wash and
not dry land and not the rising sea’

I admire his word-patterning: ‘Hoof prints and a lark’ / ‘brack arc’ – but also his skilled evocation of a liminal place, both in the sense of a marsh, neither land nor sea, but also in the sense of openness to the presence of divinity.

In his working life, Sutherill was a journalist, so ‘Local Paper Obit Man’ must draw straight on experience.
‘His shorthand kicks like blanket stitch
all tics and misses fingers jittery
as kisses he nods asks
all the questions takes in greasy Creda
little pies flicks flies
sips tea ignoring pearly bits’
and there’s compassion here, as well as a job to be done, with the gapping in the poem (a common Sutherill motif) creating pauses for both poet and reader, in which conversations and stories are absorbed and understood.

Repeatedly in these poems there’s an observant sense of the local, in poems like ‘Violets – Bettws-y-crwyn’.

‘Old Eli hangs his hat and falls to prayer
already muttering aloud so gone in fear
is he and rapture
specs lids snap as
Pulpit Dai unpins his notes’

and even the sheep play their part:
‘Outdoors the mountains crowd a dying fall
where sheep bleat psalmfully they nudge
the old stone wall of chapel acre
dirt hearts trenched around in certain hope’

I had never thought about it, but of course Welsh sheep bleat psalmfully. Now we know. And it is quite possible to hear those specs lids snap, too.

Sutherill’s ability to catch a place, an event, and human actions in such economical and simultaneously lyrical verse is encapsulated in ‘Tundra’ 1 Volcano.
‘We ride the glacier in jeeps at night
to Eyja’s crown
where cinders
sting our eyes
and lightning
rakes aurora
upside down’

For much of the time Sutherill makes white space do the work of punctuation, (this became a running joke at Border Poets meetings – we still shed commas in his memory) and many of the poems in ‘Circus’ take an exploratory route to layout. Exploratory it may be, but never careless. The returns and gapping in the last four lines above fully enable the reader to marvel at what’s being described, its outlandishness, and the time it takes the onlooker to grasp the vastness of what they see.

Sutherill’s final poems were based on the Psalms, and here we catch the voice of a poet still entranced by the world despite the nearing end of life. The collection’s final poem is ‘Psalm 121’, which I quote in full.

‘I will let down my eyes onto the fen
from whence cometh my hope
my helpless hope
my hope cometh from the law
which made heaven and dirt
creeks and genes and tractor fields
twists of DNA and is
the Milky Way / Sluice Farm / Bicker Eau
pale flare in a glair sky
and the fen is plainsong ploughed ground
with one descending crow
is mind and
keck and sweetheart weed
and all I need to know

Here was a poet who believed in paying sharp attention to the world, and all the world’s inhabitants. He heard the world in a vigour of rhyme and rhythm. He is much missed, for his intellect, the warmth of his humour, and for his distinctive voice – but he leaves us ‘Circus’ – a book that many will enjoy, and that deserves a readership.

Colin Sutherill really had something to tell us, and he tells it with vim and playfulness, with delicacy and love.