Before We Go Any Further

From the homing pigeon in the opening poem to the 13th-century cuckoo in the last, Before We Go Any Further by journalist Tristram Fane Saunders circles themes related to his English heritage, reveling in words with a lightness of touch that deepens here and there into strong emotion. Moving from London to southern England, the poems render minor-chord twenty-first century tristesse (“I’ve never slept beside / someone who didn’t need pills to separate the day from night”; “Zoe starts / another chapter of the niche / erotica she ghosts”), fondle registers, and reflexively quip (“a gala fundraiser for – I mean, against – heroin”); some close with a gentle sigh: “A crest that tips to meet the wave you raise: / Ceremonial Hat for Eating Bouillabaisse.”

In five poems, Saunders creates one “AE Pious,” a faux scholar of “literatures of the British Isles” whose “responses” to “neglected late-medieval texts” include:

Row north, my son,
By soft moonglow,
To cold Wych Brook,
By frost, by snow.

 

Go soon, my son,
By strong wood prow.
Don’t stop, nor stoop
To mop my brow.

After dwelling on invented pasts, this debut ends with “2nd Edition,” a poem from a son’s perspective in which candor unseals concealed interiors:

A week before my twenty-first,
it arrived. Your gift for every occasion:

The Oxford Book of English Verse
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch Edition

Wide for First Class, its green weight forced
through the letterbox tore the wrapping open.

I’d half expected it. Of course
the same book. The same dedication.

You gave it to my mother first,
for some anniversary, now forgotten.

I found it after the divorce

Then an echo of the cuckoo’s hollow knock leads the speaker to conclude movingly, “Why / not, for a gift, forgive you?”