Poetry is a mirror for the poet’s mind; a window from which his soul leans out for us to see and appreciate. Reading someone’s poetry is like trying to find a key, a password that enables us to enter the poet’s mind and contemplate some of his thoughts flashing across his horizon like shooting stars. Any writer can hide behind the characters he creates except the poet for what he writes is the ashes of his burning soul. Martin Alexander emphasizes that by quoting one of his friends:

Reading the poems of someone you know

is like suddenly seeing them naked.

Before reading ‘Clearing Ground’, the first thing to stop at is the title. In his preface, Alexander explains the title by saying: ‘it attempts to make the underlying shape of my things clear: not to excuse or erase, but to lay bare and to try to understand, and perhaps to smile a little -ruefully- at myself.’ The poet, like us, is trying to understand his own self. No elusive images, no surrealist symbols, no hiding behind unfathomable words.

To emphasize his point, Alexander starts the book with that particularly fine poem which carries the book title - a poem full of action, sweat, fire, smoke. It vividly shows how the poet works hard in his entangled jungle, his confused life: pulling up weeds, chopping out undergrowth, digging up roots, slicing the deeper ones through, with the bright spade’s thrust; he cuts and burns but in the end, the job is done and a new life emerges from the chaos that was once there.

But all around

This new-cleared ground

The living jungle looms.

He cleared the mess in his own life. Now things seem more in focus. But that is not the end of it for the bigger jungle is at a greater mess and is waiting for him to come over with his tools. How can he manage that?

After reading this poem, I wondered how the poet got these images unless he lived in a similar environment. Maybe living in an island can explain that. But if I don’t know that the poet is a teacher, I would have thought he was a gardener. In another poem the poet answers my doubts by saying:

I’m not a gardener

but my father is.

Martin Alexander is not only keen on understanding his inner self but also on noticing and observing things around him. In his preface he considers any book of poems a collection of pictures. He proves that by writing ‘Photographs not taken’ on his trip by train from Guangzhou to Beijing. His draws what he passes by: a woman squats in the sun outside her house; a man stands and swills an arc of silver water from a black-burnt wok; bullocks graze; squalls of dirty white ducks scud across flat ponds; and many other snap shots of the Chinese countryside deftly taken by the poet’s pen.

Our poet is obsessed with how a poem is written, how language is formed into a new poem. He records the process of writing a poem, from the moment it starts to take shape until it is finally born.

The invisible egg of a poem

hard and white and round, slipped beneath my skin

while I was unaware.

He toys with words. Sometimes the poem slips away, sometimes it is hunted down only to exhaust and consume him.

But the ones that I like best of all

are those that seem compliant:

they let me toy with them like mice

then eat me like a giant.

In “White” he says:

And a blank white page

is what a poem is for.

These poems show how Martin Alexander is attached to his poetry and his language to the extent that he impersonates his poem, gives it flesh and blood, toys with it, and let himself be eaten by it.

It is not only his poems that he likes to observe being born but poems written by his students as well. In ‘Class 9T: writing poems’ he observes his students while writing their new poems. His vocation as a teacher is evident throughout his poetry. He appreciates language and its tools:

Somewhere in the dark

beneath my bed

I’ve got a box of words:

old ones, worn or broken

letters missing –

or wanting repair.

The sea leaves its impact on Alexander’s poetry. He lives in Lantau, an island surrounded by the ocean. The echo of the waves resonates in his ears as though he is asleep in the presence of tides as he says in his poem. In another poem, he can feel the waves licking his feet.

Pale crabs chase the flat, white-lipped slide of waves

Blind, like warm dogs’ tongue against my feet

Apart from writing about nature and the birth of poems, Alexander writes about death and life and love. Death is mentioned in his book several times, in “To Sirdar Khan”, “The Colour of mourning”, “A dying man”, “To Mary Agnes O’Hare”, “Hit and run”, “Lobsters”. Life and revival are found in “Life after birth” and “Beautiful toad”.

Alexander’s love poems are sensual, erotic. He sees woman as sweet as a glass of wine, or maybe it is the other way around! He is down to earth in love and relationship. He is not a spiritual lover who can be content with just some innocent feelings of love.

I'm hungry for the flavour of your thighs and of your lips

I’d like to take a tender steak from both your slender hips

His love poetry, in some of its aspects, reminds me of Arabic poetry in the pre-Islamic era when poets used to describe their lovers physically and to narrate their love adventures with them. Our poet is treading in their footsteps. He describes his lover’s face in details in ‘Not thinking of you’. In ‘Safe sex’, he and his lover cannot get together, so he says:

                             The naked flesh of words is all the love

                             I make with you: and you, quite properly

                             make none with me.

His poems on wine remind me of those by Abu Nawwas and Ibn Al-Mu’taz in the Abbasid period. His ‘Albardanera morning’ and ‘Fingertips and lips’ in which he recalls his kiss to his lover, are similar to the poetry of Nizar Qabbany in our modern time.

He is enchanted by his lover’s eyes and their colour in his poems ‘On the colour of your eyes’, ‘Witchcraft’, ‘Misread’, and ‘In the Spanish dark’. Not many western poets gave that attention to their lovers’ eyes. I believe he is influenced here by classical Arabic poetry, not necessarily through Arab poets but maybe through western poets who were under the same influence like Lord Byron and Shakespeare himself.

‘Clearing Ground’ has seventy nine poems with at least thirty sonnets. That makes Martin Alexander conveniently Hong Kong King of Sonnets. He even writes a sonnet wondering how not to write a sonnet. His river of rhymes is never dry; it flows naturally and with no rocks to block the stream. Even in his other poems , rhymes and rhythm are clearly there like sea waves cascading towards the shore and they end their journey with a slap on the rocks -and that is the rhyme- only to start over again.