This book won the Poetry Business Book and Pamphlet Competition 2006, and she won the National Poetry Competition in 2011. Poems come from The North, Rialto, Envoi, Interpreter's House, etc. Several of the poems are sonnet-shaped, rhymeless.
There are phrases I like - e.g.
- From "Swimming Lessons" - "how to keep going, to endure the cold,/ to enjoy the loneliness, to think of other things besides the swim"
- From "Tasting the drink" - "You have lived your years on a life-raft, knowing not to drink, but craving something all the same"
More often I'm puzzled by simple-sounding poems.
"Pediscript" and "Needle work" face each other. In "Pediscript" , "Paving stones were vellum to her shoes, the soles marked out with chalk which he'd put there to keep her home ... the street lamps unmasked her text, and traced the tracks of secret, calligraphic trips". In what sense did he think they'd keep her home? In "Needle work" he's unconscious across the doorway, drunk. She goes out "to see the woman who unpicks problems. // Back again she checks his pockets for the inch of chalk he used to spy, ... re-marks the soles of her shoes, resumes her knitting". Who's the woman? In what sense spy? Why the willing subservience?
I don't get "His theory of string".
I'm puzzled by this, the middle stanza of "Interiors" -
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All these interiors mingle in gutters, buffeted by a now-quiet wind, more drift than back-draught so that high-rise shuffles with bungalow, Cheadle Hulme with Hale Barnes. In the ticker-tape a crystal vase re-shatters on grid, steals the sun. |
I don't get "Under trees". The "I", sitting on the bed, notices the beads of "you" (is "you" a daughter dressing up at a mirror? An old mother in bed?). The "I" imagines the beads as planets (why?), imagines being on one of them, walking under trees, dancing at the Ritz. Then "If I snapped the string, let loose the planets, I'd scoop up a different life, exchange the sphere under your fingers for the one in my hand". Is the "I" imagining being on the planet when the string is snapped? And were there an exchange, so what?
The ending of "Women at their gates" is rather flat and wordy - "We think we shaped ourselves but it was this mix of women padlocked to their kitchen lives who taught us how to wait and what it means to go".
The first and the last poems from the book are online -
- Portrait (with a write-up by Frieda Hughes)
- Still Life
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