Lynda Plater lives in Lincolnshire. She has been writing poetry for 40 years and has had work published in Stand, Verse and Rialto among others. Her first collection, Three Seasons for Burning, was published by Wayleave Press in 2015.  Last year she was the recipient of the coveted Frogmore Poetry Prize for her poem ‘The Revd. Michael Woolf on his way to a parishioner in need’.

Saving Fruit, her second Wayleave pamphlet, moves along familial lines by focusing on various members of her family who worked as cockle collectors and market gardeners on the Lincolnshire coast and marshland during the first half of the twentieth century.

The collection opens with a portrait of her great grandmother washing sheets in a lean-to with white-washed walls. Washing sheets in 1908 was hard work compared to today. One of the many strengths of this collection is Plater’s depictions of just how hard work was in those days:

Wringing out water
made the skin
of her hands flayed.
Muscles ached
with mangle turn.
The clothes line drawn down
sagged with the weight
of sodden linen
which dripped down
the nape of her neck.

In the next poem we are introduced to her great grandfather who is raking cockles at a sand shelf. Reading this poem we get a real sense of a man battling against the elements, pitching himself against the vast horizons of the North Sea while his horse ‘sleep-filled, / sandfly tired, utters snorts’ waiting for his master to load the cart with cockles.

‘Midsummer harvest, 1911’ describes a photograph which is itself a snapshot in time. Several of the poems in this collection have dates in their titles which helps us to set them in context. They are also printed in chronological order running from 1908 through to 2018. There are, of course, many gaps in between. Most of the poems at the start of the collection cover the period from 1908 to 1921.

Many of the poems are centred on domesticated rural life: fruit preserving, a great grandmother gathering samphire near the shoreline, cockle selling, ploughing, bread-making, lessons in sailing.

Several poems depict the changing seasons. In ‘Turning’, we are reminded that not only the soil but also the planet is turning and that autumn is sliding into winter. The vast open spaces of the county are summoned up in the final stanza:

The tractor turned
in a long landscape
and flakes of gulls
turned with it.
The old man watched,
felt its coming,
knife-edged furrows
meeting in the gather
of earth for fallow.
And on its passing
he was with gulls
between their flight;
saw the ploughshare
steeling straight.

In this collection, the natural world is all around us. In ‘Sailing lesson’, a heron, startled by a sudden close encounter rises out of the reed beds; in ‘Jar of clay’, curlews ‘break soft molluscs / in rising light’ out on the mudflats and in ‘The ring ouzel, November 2018’, the small bird ‘slow-grey eyed’ with ‘a white collar like a pastor’ catches the poet’s attention as the season rolls on and the theme of migration takes hold.

Whether she is writing about rooks in winter, a murmuration of starlings, outdoor labour in frosted fields or time spent in the service of the Lincolnshire Yeomanry in Egypt and Palestine during the First World War, Plater’s vivid descriptions pay tribute to her family by taking us back into the past and giving us a glimpse of how life was lived a century ago.

The cover image, ‘Apple’, a watercolour by Lynda Plater, is the perfect fit for this collection.