Enter the Water tempts you to wade straight in. And it will take only the briefest of dips, a toe in the water, before you find yourself needing to read on. Whether or not this is poetry (and possibly it isn’t) swiftly becomes a non-issue, because Jack Wiltshire, who grew up in Leicester and recently graduated from Cambridge, occupies his own element. He is a Pied Piper of a writer (though I am not sure if the Pied Piper ever swam). His writing is fresh, funny and serious. His verse narrative, set in 2022, describes becoming homeless in Cambridge and journeying to the coast in the company of pigeons, a blackbird and the unruly Storm Eunice. Swimming, he finds, is a form of salvation. The book is an experiment, a work-in-progress, but not in the sense of requiring further effort; more because Wiltshire recognises life as an ongoing, scattered experiment, filled with imperfections, inequality and with endless room for improvement. He opens with an admission about Nature (one of the rare nouns granted a capital letter) as his unreliable yet necessary pal:
he’s not always a nice guy, Nature
but he tells me he’s all i’ve got
and then comes his quirkily ingenue speculation about a flower and sympathetic sideways glance at “unsatisfied tourists / dithering about the wet steps of a fountain”.
Wiltshire is a wayfarer, his spirit – in a saner contemporary version – recalls the nature poet John Clare (1793-1864) who knew what it was to be on the road. His narrator describes what it is to be evicted from an unsavoury flat (“underneath the carpet were the bodies of bugs / this left me feeling restless because: / what’s buried remains”) and ends up in his “big gay coat” dossing on a park bench, trying to outwit the authorities (“trying” is the most important verb in the book. The essential thing is to keep trying).
I am usually allergic to a lower-case i to represent the first person but find I do not mind it here, for Wiltshire (again, like Clare) has an engagingly modest sense of himself. He also has a clear-sighted attitude towards the UK’s shabby political scene but without any hectoring. His line: “there’s never been a them and us / only politics and political parties…” is more collected than irate. When the narrator ends up on a park bench, contemplating recent breakthroughs in astronomy, he observes – but only mildly – that a recent discovery of a potentially habitable zone in space is:
a celebration of possibility
for the scientists
but not for the homeless chap
covering himself in a pile of leaves
Overt complaints make tiresome reading. Wiltshire tends to be more subtle, but has his differences with language, threatens to fall out with it, leans into the possibility of doing without it. He wakes, “thinking about how language had me / in multiple positions from the beginning / more than i’ve liked”. After giving up maths at school, he “picked up the word / learnt it was a way to hide from an entire earth”. He refers, too, to the power of swapping one word for another to tilt the way we think, noting what happens to a re-worded bird: “And instead of being named wild like it always was / we called it FERAL”. He mistrusts the claws (pigeon claws?) that language has in us. Yet the irony is that his own writing persistently tells against this view because of the sheer pleasure of what his words can do. Wiltshire writes on a wonderful wing without any need to compromise himself with a prayer.
Enter the Water by Jack Wiltshire is published by Corsair (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
