Being 'elsewhere' may afford a writer an ingress into a more receptive, possibly even perceptive, state of mind. The disjuncture may be temporal (suggestions of the present on a canvas of the past), or it may be geographical (clarity of a vision of home yielded by emotional distance).

Yorkshire-born poets Rennie Parker and Peter Bland share no stylistic or tonal kinship, but they are united in the fact of a willed removal from the circumstances of their respective lives: Parker, by imagining the past as though it were being lived in the present, and Bland, by embracing the sometimes seductive austerities of the postwar urban Britain of his youth, from the perspective of a long exile in New Zealand.

The past, for Rennie Parker, is a place of meaningful, often ancient, ritual whose importance to her wandering rural journeys resides in their power to illuminate the present. Time’s continuum is illustrated in shifting signifiers which move as randomly between the centuries as that other poet of totemic histories, Jeffrey Wainwright. The wind-blown 'overtones' of the poem ‘First and Second Entrance’ skew a sense of fixed historical perspective as they move brushwood about a derelict country chapel, the 'art' of nature exercising its boundlessness suo tempore. Past and present run concurrent here too: the mediaeval rapacity of land-grabbing and summary punishment – the brutal image of a 'Grand Inquisitor / in all his twisted metal' figures for the enforced piety of a bygone era – is ironically reflected in the present church’s gate 'laced with warnings of Rural Theft'

Parker’s touchstone is the backwater of rural Lincolnshire, but she is by no means thematically constrained by the magnetism of ancient provenance. If the discomfiting past disturbs the leaves of the present, then it is also deformed by the shadow of deracination, of ‘Urbs in Rur’ migration, of uncertainty of identity. The location may be small-town, but the themes have limitless gravitas. From the first-person revelations of ‘Wild haired and dumpy...’ and ‘Would you like some biscuits...’, Parker describes a landscape of Heimat-yearning.

‘Bastard England’ is bastardised in both senses, its thin comforts given neat expression in the anachronistic and sinister window of a shop whose survival seems as unlikely as its ancient till, 'a till stuck' – significantly –'on ‘No Sale’ (‘In fear of regional woolshops’). Parker has an acute eye for the 'viscid sickness' of decline: the 'chalk-white' assistant, whose features appear 'stitched on', is as creepily inanimate as the 'lopsided' mannequins which ‘people’ the shop front.

Candleshoe was Parker’s second verse collection and the inclusion, here, of the central cluster of poems of her earlier volume, Borderville, would suggest the self-conscious development of a voice. But there are few fixed markers in evidence within her sustained regional engagement. That her vision refuses, like an eye in REM sleep, to still where it alights, generally adds to the effect of weightlessness. She won’t hold focus and flits over landscape at the speed of her own sonority; her sense of rhythm nourishing the ground she briefly rests on.

But the manifest purpose of, for example, the poem ‘The attractions are closed today’ – its neat circularity secured in well-placed rhyme – belies the nebulous. The eye’s lens roves between an unnamed town where 'houses crowd like unlovely teeth' and an 'acneous hillside'; ironic rain pouring with 'Pluvial generosity' marks time tendentiously, as though it was an agency of 'theatrical disillusion' along with the town’s streetlamps, beneath which 'A thousand hearts are slain'. Parker overlays the poem’s conceit with a foreboding which is both real and theatrically fictive.

The presence of the figure of a ‘Fool’ in several poems is liminal like the personified rain: a figure who at one level directs philosophical traffic like a Deus ex Machina, and at another, is subsumed into the narrator’s landscape. Where rain is given body, the Fool is denied it; re-gendered as Gaia-mother, she is the burden of history whose imprint blunts the soil or who acts as a warning: 'And Fool seen striding across fen dykes / Larger, more dangerous than before' (‘The difficult surface of Lincolnshire’).

We have the distances of geography and time to thank for the clarity of Peter Bland’s collection, Remembering England. Scarborough born but Kiwi by inclination, the fact of Bland’s exile enables a concentrated rear-view - a vision uncontaminated by closeness. Another Yorkshireman and occasional exile, Tony Harrison, wrote simply and movingly of life in post-war Leeds from the culturally remote standpoints of Florida and New York, and it is difficult not to infer a connection between his Sonnets for 1945 sequence, and Bland’s ruminations on the industrial North of that period. Bland’s ‘Lament for a Lost Generation’ describes a threadbare but happy austerity shadowed by a failure of hope:

'Between V-J Day and 1951
we wore our first grey longs.
Drab, insular, short of vitamin C,
Much given to fags and the fumbled grope'.

The consonantally-vital arc of the commemorative impulse is also Harrison’s; the ‘fumbled’ present, a precursor of an uncertain future, 'a lasting doubt / about the next good time'. Bland bangs an elegiac drum to secure memory, and excepting where he lapses into an unexpected surreality, his poetry is direct and object-laden, as if the furniture of the past provided the comfort of identity.

As the Oxford Companion to NZ Literature notes, Bland’s ‘distant view’ works in both directions, but the title of this volume seems valedictory, perhaps a final homage to his origins. And the sketchiness of that past need not interfere with its portrayal: the poem ‘Regression’ knowingly unravels detailed memories, but in a cheerfully surreal form which entertains as it contradicts. The regression is dream-like, bringing forth a kaleidoscope of strange juxtapositions, where drowned sailors occupy workers’ buses and coffins emerge from shift work on factory estates. They all have a place in the narrator’s vision, if not, to shamelessly cannibalise Eric Morecambe, in the order they were experienced.

Bland affords a good, solid introduction to poetry for the newcomer. Mercifully free of arcane abstraction, his balladry for a lost time bears the integrity of honesty. These are poems of great warmth and vigour which open an authentic vista on an England now vanished.

Candleshoe and Remembering England are both published by Shoestring Press.