In this semi-surreal journey through the present and past, Henry’s narrator walks us through the seasons and along a section of canal in Powys, shedding a momentary light on some former inhabitants of an old workhouse.

The poem opens in the modern day with an engineer working up a telegraph pole, fixing a line that runs across the canal to the workhouse. As he toils, the engineer hears the faint sound of voices: ‘Abraham Bishop, Pauper, Gloucester / Charlot [sic] Phillips, Wife, Camarthen.’ This crackling transmission of the names, occupations and abodes of the inmates is a motif that runs through the piece, acting as a kind of sombre background static. 

As the poem progresses, we encounter other workhouse labourers such as Mary Thomas, abused by a member of staff as a punishment for her child having cried in chapel. There is also John Moonlight, an angler from Crickhowell, who we feel is more poacher than legitimate fisher, ‘Children camp in the field / where you hid your night lines.’ When the canal freezes over in winter, it becomes the glass aisle of the poem’s title. John Moonlight walks along it, eventually falling through the ice into the freezing water below.

For me, the power of this poem is in what is not said. From their apparitions and utterances, we get a sense of the traces that these souls have left behind, with the physical and emotional strains of their lives being inferred rather than made explicit.

A government document dated 1852 held at the British Library lists the kinds of hard labour the workhouse poor had to undertake. Amongst these were ‘breaking stones’ and ‘picking oakum’; the latter involved unravelling rope that had been treated with tar (often used in shipbuilding). Henry references these two tasks in his poem. The workhouse really was the last resort for many who, through illness, disability, unemployment or homelessness, could no longer support themselves. This poem makes us consider these people, who in sheer desperation referred themselves to such institutions and, in so doing, surrendered much of their self-worth and dignity.

The poem closes with the narrator standing on the canal towpath, contemplating the whole bandwidth of other worldly communications he has encountered, ‘I cannot tell an owl from a name on the wind, / the voices in the wire / from the voices in the leaves.’ 

This is a memorable work which, for me at least, has something of the darker moments of Dylan Thomas’ ‘Under Milkwood’ about it. In the spaces between the poem’s ghostly broadcasts, I think Paul Henry succeeds in confronting us with the grim reality that faced the Victorian destitute and gives these inmates the chance to breathe again. 

But whilst the title poem is the centrepiece of this collection, it is flanked by a number of other interesting poems:

‘Craiglais’ asks whether a tunnel connecting two coves might just be a wormhole bringing two separate worlds together; one at low tide, the other at high tide. I like the sense of space-time evoked in this poem, that this bridge between two dimensions could well disappear in an instant, leaving a traveller stranded on one side or the other.

In ‘The Seamstress’, the narrator’s wife is trying to hold back autumn by fixing the leaves back onto the trees. It is as though the oak and the aspen do not understand the force of their actions. Here thorns are pins, leaves are fabric, and the endeavour, an echo of the garments the seamstress used to fashion. ‘And for every hour returned / another falls to the ground, / to the colours of heartbreak, / of the clothes she used to make.’

I was transported back, in ‘Shelves’, to Henry’s previous collection, Boy Running (Seren, 2015). The sentiments of this poem feel deeply personal; as though they are a real, lived experience. It speaks about packing up old books – from either side of the fireplace – into plastic bags. ‘Bookmarks: letters, photographs / of the boys… slip free / like split playing cards, like knives.’ The more I re-read ‘Shelves’, the more I felt this piece belonged to the opening poems of Boy Running: with ‘Usk’ and ‘Moving In’ and ‘Studio Flat’ and ‘Ring' – incredibly raw works that speak of marital breakdown. But it was, nevertheless, good to revisit these emotions in this poem and in this collection.

The Glass Aisle is a body of work that walks us through different ages and locations, as well as through lives lived and lost. The title poem is a poignant reflection on the past and the severe hand dealt to those deemed least in society. ‘The Glass Aisle’ has that potential to endure.

It was only halfway through The Glass Aisle that its melodic lilt jolted my memory to recall that I once spent a halcyon half-hour relaxing to the tune of its author, Paul Henry, playing guitar in Ty Newydd’s sunlit library. I was 13, and he was our school group’s poetry tutor for the week. I wonder whether my 13-year-old self would be surprised that, more than a decade on, I’m relaxing on a bright Sunday morning in the company of the poet’s lyrics (on paper, this time) once more.

This is Paul Henry’s tenth book. Divided into three parts, the titular poem consumes much of the second section – an elegy to displaced workhouse residents observed in the Brecon Beacons, which threads through centuries of Welsh history. Ghosts of yesteryears haunt 21st-century passersby, and in fact a performance version of the poem is bringing these ghosts to life on a tour with Stornoway’s Brian Briggs to coincide with the book’s publication.

But let’s start at the very beginning. Music is omnipresent across the collection, as is the rhythmic sea for the earliest section. This first chapter is named ‘The Hesitant Song’, after one of the poems that features. In the opening poem, ‘Cliff Terrace Clouds’, clouds cross the Sugarloaf “full of my mother’s songs.” Mothers lead the way into the second, sentimental poem, too (‘Last of the Sixties Mothers’): “the jetsam of her decade | beached on suburban drives”. Born in 1959, this was the decade of Henry’s childhood.

Then, a mother’s song is more overtly in danger of loss. The poem from which the first chapter takes its name, ‘The Hesitant Song’, refers to a mother’s songs flickering in brightness – as if in danger of extinguishing altogether. Many lines form a quasi-refrain, altering only slightly each time: “Inside the sun’s amber arcade, | a beat before the singer sings | the sea’s soft pedal…”. The amber arcade and soft pedal reappear again and again. Yet, there is an overwhelming sense of demise: “To orchestrate silence”, Henry writes in one sobering line. A little later, more contradiction: “the sea’s absence | flooded the room each day.”

A great majority of Henry’s verses make reference to either the sea, or music, or both: “A fanfare of gulls … A crab makes a violin of itself” is a spectacular example of their merging in ‘The Sea in Pieces’. Henry is a skilful personifier of the elements; “the wind’s stammer | snagged on a gate” (‘Brown Helen Reclining’). As he has done in previous poems, Henry frequently directs his words to Catrin Sands, often also referring to Geta. His poem ‘Put on the Sun’ asks Catrin Sands to wear her yellow dress, and adds: “let’s walk behind our shadows | on the promenade of sighs.” The poetry feels melancholy; there’s often a sense of love misplaced: “I miss her too easily, the hook in her smile … And where she swims | in what she dreams | is further out to sea | than any line I cast.”

Loneliness creeps into several of the poems early on – and perhaps explains why the poet so often calls after Catrin and Geta. Others, too. Henry opens ‘The Fireplace’ with the line: “No one’s in except the sea.” His poetry has a habit of colloquially addressing people, without the need to explain their identity – often even just listing names italicised. Whether this serves to augment realism, or is simply irksome, is up to the reader.

Onto ‘The Glass Aisle’: Henry drew the names for his long, centre-stage elegy from an 1840s census, and the harrowing story of Mary Thomas came from a pamphlet from a certain Rev. Margaret Williams (according to the Acknowledgements). Mary’s narrated experience is acutely moving – and topical; she is a woman who is sexually abused, because her son cried in chapel. “He put one hand on my neck, | the other under my clothes. | When I told him No, he kicked me”, her ghost tells the observer. #MeToo, from beyond the grave. The elegy flickers back into Wales’ past: “Mary’s here, on a white horse | drenched in medieval leaflight.” There are other ‘ghosts’, but for me none so poignant as Mary’s tale. The closing effect is magical, surreal: “Clouds clear, stars spill, | cows amble over the moon.”

The third and final section remains nameless. I was wary, half-wondering whether Henry had somewhat run out of steam by this point. The poems themselves, though, are lovely – if not cogently forming a cohesive chapter. The close is composed largely of love poems and elegies, with a continuation of the melancholy that hangs over most of this book.

I felt that the ending of the poem ‘The Nettle Race’, “Slowly the sun leans | towards its finishing line”, would have been a perfect closure to the book. Henry does not give us this neatness, of course; instead we have a figure waiting at a train station, hoping his daughter would return the wave that he gives as her train speeds past. He ends the poem with the lines:

and that love
however distant along its track,
however brief its glance, can forgive,
wave back.

A heartrending point to close on, the poem is called ‘Not Stopping’. I hope – as I’m sure so do many – that there will be no stopping for Paul Henry. This is a poet still at the height of his powers, ten books in. Let the music play on.