Shortlisted for the T.S.Eliot prize, with poems from Poetry Review, Rialto, Ambit, Magma, etc.
The first poem in a book can set the interpretive tone. Here, "In the winter of 1962 my mother" is a run-on title to a poem with no punctuation and all the 8 lines (plus the title) about the same length. The first 4 lines are a set-up for the last 4, which form a rather long punch-line. The lack of punctuation could symbolize haste, confusion (or it could be a diversionary tactic). The redundancy/repetition could mimic the repeated movement (but "travelling" and "into another lane" in this short piece sound surplus all the same). And unfortunately for the symbolism, I reckon changing lane inwards would be as hard as changing lane outwards. I find myself withholding judgement. It uses the "short-text effect" - any short piece is going to be read expansively/symbolically in this context. And it does introduce us to some characters.
Fortunately doubts were dispelled by the next poem, "My mother's bathroom armoury", with 19 rhyming lines. There are several other forms in the book too - "Leavings" is in rhyming couplets; "Kiss/Kiss" is a villanelle; "Spunk" is a sonnet; "Charm for late love" has ababb stanzas.
Scattered amongst the poems (and listed in the contents) are several short pieces in italics laid out as prose. I thought at first that they were like the comments poets make between poems at a reading. They're both factual and literary. Here's an example - "My first stepmother was blonde and clever. She was on my father's arm when he came to collect me for annual holidays. My two fathers did not dislike each other and sat politely conversing on the sofa; one wielded his stethoscope, the other his paintbrush. It was not entirely clear which of them was in charge" (p.26).
The mix of prose and poetry can happen within poems too. Before I continue I'd better say that I don't privilege poetry over prose, nor do I care about categorisations. When I say that a piece presented as a poem reads like prose I'm not devaluing it. But I suspect that if some of these pieces won a poetry competition, losers would be complaining. I think p.27 is prose. p.29 is fun and it's prose - it's paraphraseable, its plot is its main asset and it doesn't have sound or typographic effects. The layouts try to disguise the text, but only at the cost of (at best) redundant white space. In "They paid us in airmail letters, cigarettes and bowls of oranges and gave us our own bomb shelter for a disco. I learned how to smoke, roll a joint and say I want to have sex with you, in nine different languages" (p.33) 6 line-breaks are inserted for reasons that are beyond me. A shame, because I like the content. "Hampstead, 1979" is prose in triplets. "Chicken" is prose with random indents and line-lengths. "Since we last met" has a similar style of layout, but I like the poem. "Soup" is the same style of layout again, but I don't like it. In the end I tried to ignore the layouts. And while I'm nitpicking, on p.16 why "lighter in colour" instead of "paler"?
The book can almost be read as an episodic life-story (or a novel-in-flash). Mothers are seen from several viewpoints - viewed by a daughter; in the first person; alone again, the children gone. They're independent and encourage independence. Some of the mother-characters sound like composites or wished-for mothers. "Mother. Son. Sack of Salt" is unusual in that it's based on a single image - a mother and son carrying a sack together. First the mother bears most of the load, then at the end the son carries it alone. It's been leaking all the time, so at the end "She turns back; follows the trail/ of white. She tries to gather up// everything they've left behind,/ to fill her arms with salt".
My favourites are the title poem, "Mother. Son. Sack of Salt", "What time is it in Nova Scotia?" (poetry laid out like prose) and "The Melting". I like many of the italicised, interludal pieces too.
'Leavings', 'All My Mad Mothers' and 'Virginity' are online.
Other reviews
- Jane Simmons (In section 2, childhood is left behind and the narrator has become a young woman, exploring her sexuality ... In section 3, the now adult narrator has children of her own. These poems are quite different from the poems in the two previous sections . ... In section 4, we appear to be in the present)
- Aoife Lyall (The collection begins with ‘In the winter of 1962 my mother’, a poem that navigates the silence and isolation of a woman who fails to subscribe to contemporary social norms ... The rest of this section explores the significant and potentially lethal difference between the examination of biological sexuality and the expectation of political sexuality. ... The second section develops this idea of multiplicity through the ring-fencing of burgeoning sexual awareness. ... The closing poems are more affirmation than resignation, spoken with the wisdom and self-confidence so lacking on that opening roundabout.)
- Julie Irigaray (One of the highlights of this collection is the incantatory quality of pieces like “My Mother’s Bathroom Armour”.)
- Dave Coates (Saphra has a gift for ushering the reader into a place of hurt with often overwhelming kindness, or a wry recognition of the absurdity that sometimes accompanies suffering. The unintrusive calm of the narrative voice only breaks on a handful of occasions, and these are some of the book’s finest individual lines: ‘not saying you have a broken heart, but if you ever do, that’s a lovely, normal thing’; ‘I miss you. I wish I was a skink’. )
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