"The Telling" by Julia Webb (Nine Arches Press, 2022)

Poems from Alchemy Spoon, Butcher's Dog, Poetry Wales, Under the Radar, etc. At the launch on 26th May, Jane Commane suggested that some themes were - finding where the damage is; how stories shape us; how trauma is passed down. Julia suggested another theme - that of water, saying that in dream it represents emotion. There's the horror of flooding, of domestic space invaded by water. She started the reading with the book's first poem, "Crash Site", the mother as a crashed plane - "we never did find that black box" - and ended with the book's last poem, a reconstruction of the mother from things around the house, magicked into life by chanting her name (perhaps an analogy to how the words of this book summoned a living mother character).

The book has fewer myth/fairy-tale elements than "Bird Sisters" had, and less about Thetford and growing up than "Threat" had. It's replete with family characters - mother and father get at least half a dozen poems each. Grandparents, sisters, ex and children also feature. They're rarely alone - interaction between "I" and these characters is the norm. Consequently it's rather hard to review the book without indulging in character analysis. I'll assume that all references to "mother" in the book refer to the same person (ditto "father", etc). I'll assume that the "I" person is the same in all the poems, though I won't assume that it's the author. Sometimes the supporting cast interact - mother and sister in the same poem, or mother and father, so it useful to read the poems in context.

When the "I" is the focus in this book, it tends to be transformed (into a picnic rug, mermaid, comet, concrete, bear, lobster, broken-down van) or fragmented (e.g "Selves (non existent)") - not so much to escape, to be someone/something else, but to be able to see others differently, the other often mutating too - e.g. "When she was a field/ I ran through her ... When she was a road/ I parked myself ... When she was a train" (p.16). In other poems mother's a bramble, father is a rhinoceros, a parrot, a budget supermarket, a pine tree. These transformations can backfire though - "I was a bomb and he was a fuse - and she lit it" (p.34).

The symbolism and focus on relationships come at a cost. The characters don't learn about each other by sharing activities. There aren't crowds or landscapes. People don't go for a swim or a ramble. In fact, they barely move, barely have a location. They don't have a sense of belonging to a place. Travel might do them good, a chance to be at one with nature. Having a tea on an old Indian train offers some writers the new perspectives - here the character would become a teapot. When the external world appears, its objects become internalised, become psychological props. "Inside" is a common relation between 2 entities. Conceptually it can mean "absorb" or "conquer", though it can also lead to rather mixed spatial metaphors - e.g. there's " a hurricane inside me" then "I" becomes a storm shelter on p.46.

The text

The current tendency for all stanzas of a poem to have the same number of lines is present, though interestingly many poems are nearly regular - e.g. a few poems mix 4- and 5-line stanzas, or 6- and 7-line stanzas. A few pieces (p.38, p.67) have a prose layout. A few (p.31, p.35, p.68) use "/" instead of line-break. On p.23, p.43, p.57, p.61, p.63, p.69 there's some adumbration. I'm probably alone in thinking that removing all the repetition (especially on p.43 and p.57) would improve the poems. I think "Prayer for the Lack" uses spaces instead of commas, and line-breaks instead of full-stops. "The future died inside me" has no punctuation.

Role-play

I don't know much about transactional analysis. I suspect knowledge of it would help readers of this book. "Prayer for the Lack" mentions "the empty chair" - a standard therapy ploy.

I don't know much about drama/comedy ad-lib exercises either, but I've seen people pair up and perform scenes where they were objects (those objects sometimes unknown to the audience). I know objects are used in therapy. I read that "Rojas-Bermudez’s (1997) specific use of intermediate objects relates to the use of an object to symbolize the therapist when a client cannot tolerate the vulnerability of direct human interaction. Instead of the dialog taking place between therapist–client, it takes place between object–client to reduce intensity and decrease activation or alarm." (Essentials of Psychodrama Practice - Scott Giacomucci). Role reversal is sometimes used so that participants can see situations from both points of view (see "The Hunt"). The biggest pay-offs (key insights) often happen early. In comedy ad-lib the chairperson hits a buzzer for the participants to go on to the next pair of roles once returns diminish. In this book (e.g. p.16) there's a stanza-break instead of a buzzer.

Psychologists suggest using role-play to explore the past, to learn and undergo cathersis, then return and integrate the knowledge into the current self. This final phase - of analysis, change and looking ahead, renewed - is denied us in many of these poems. Such endings would give the poems a more standard shape though - thesis-antithesis-synthesis or anecdote-reflection-conclusion - and perhaps result in a less interesting collection. There are few comforting endings: last lines include -

• to keep the darkness dark
• you can't always find what you need
• you woke up black and blue
• here is the staircase down which she fell
• so that I could be the one to cry; but secretly they hoped I would fall
• and in that moment darkness fell

The hopeful endings are perhaps revealing -

• "and my little fish taught himself to swim" shows that water isn't always bad
• "we threw open the doors and cheered"; "trying to see each other in the dark"; "and is finally flowering"; "and lights up her face"" oppose the prevalent darkness and inwardness

When a son in "Giving Thanks" talks about the future, the persona is happy!

Communication

It's a key theme, emphasised by the poems often involving two entities -

• "the distance between us/ became whole galaxies, oceans even - garbled as if speaking underwater" (p.12)
• "miles between us" (p.13)
• "the distance between us so big" (p.15)
• "I reached for his words but couldn't pin them down" (p.27)
• "the gaps are bigger than the words either side" (p.40)
• "There was nothing left between us to say" (p.41)

Water and especially flooding (i.e. emotion) seems to hamper communication -

• "her lake was so wide/ we couldn't see to the other side of each other/ we broke ourselves on each other's shore" (p.15)
• "the future was a glacier that melted flooding the house" (p.20)
• "we could hear our parents downstairs (neither of them swimmers) struggling to keep their heads above water" (p.32)
• "no one could stop my river bursting its banks ... when the flood warnings sounds I didn't hear them" (p.46)
• "the river running between us/ was getting wider, overrunning its banks" (p.54)

Miscellaneous

• "The Telling" - Throughout the book, physical proximity doesn't guarantee empathy or communcation. Instead it may provoke silence or diversionary role-play. In this poem emotions are shared. Significantly, it's done distantly, by phone. A "telling" is where a fortune teller reveals the future. I'm a bit confused by the details - the mother is on the phone, the narrator is on the phone, the father (behind the narrator?) is urging "you tell her", then the narrator picks up the phone. The last line's good though.
• "Daddish" - the middle section is entitled "I want my father to be an owl". In her previous book "Bird Sister" I think mother and sisters became owls.
• I don't get "Rules of the Liar Family"
• I like the simple ending of "When I was made of concrete"
• I don't know why "Duplex" has that title. Is the first stanza needed?
• "remaking mother" - it's interesting that the materials seem to have no sentimental value. The previous poem mentioned decluttering, which is what this poem might be describing. It sounds most like a school project. "I sing her name out" here contrasts with "she made a prayer of my name" in "Prayer for the Lack"

Quite often when I've read a poetry book I feel it should have been a pamphlet. This book however earns its pages - it doesn't sag in the 3rd quarter like many books do. My favourites are "Crash Site", "girl was born", "That year there was a hurricane inside me", "we had nothing but love for the bird he had become", "That day I was a picnic rug". I wasn't so keen on "The Telling", "Comet and Moon", "I don't believe in death", "The hunt".

Other reviews

• Emma Lee
• Stella Backhouse
• Mark Connors
• Alan Parry (Wide readers of contemporary poetry who are tired of immaculate veneers will find in Webb’s book a necessary, gutsy companion—flawed, furious, and all the more vital for it.)

"Threat" by Julia Webb (Nine Arches Press, 2019)

Her first collection appeared only 3 years ago, but thanks to a full-time involvement with literary life she's managed to garner accolades since - highly commended in the Forward, a poem in a Bloodaxe anthology, etc. She has gathered contacts too - Pascale Petit and Heidi Williamson read the manuscript. She hasn't rested on her laurels, as the dozens of publications in the Acknowledgements show - Ambit, Fenland Reed, Oxford Poetry, Under the Radar, etc.

Her first book title, "Bird Sisters", brought together a now derogatory 60s term for women with a more recent term signifying female solidarity. Some of that sixties sexism (along with the owls) persists in "Threat", which sounds more ominous than the first title (though crossworders might see "Treat" and "heart" lurking in the title).

On the back cover it says that "Threat" tells "how it feels to be a girl living in small town ... A girl whose body grows into a woman’s shape and becomes instant prey to the lurkers in bars. ... the dark and sometimes brutal undertow of small-town life seeps to the surface". This could also describe several stories in "Fen", a short story collection by Daisy Johnson (Vintage, 2017). In an interview Johnson said "That’s what I wanted to explore, I think, being a young woman in the middle of nowhere. And the Fens was the perfect place for that. It’s so flat you can see everything coming. It’s a land that dreams of water." In "Fen" (as in "Bird Sisters" and to a lesser extent "Threat") the borders between Nature, animals and humans are porous. There are village pubs where there's always a chance of an easy lay, and animals with supernatural powers.

In contrast to the Fens (though still in East Anglia), The Brecks is one of the driest parts of Britain ('Brecks' were fields cultivated for a few years and then allowed to revert to heath once the soil became exhausted). Thetford, the setting for several of these poems, is in this area. I liked Thetford on a first visit. The Priory Grounds are impressive, and there's a pleasant river walk. The Norman motte is substantial, and the Three Nuns Bridges interesting. There's a life-size bronze of non-threatening Captain Mainwaring to sit beside.

That's not the Thetford of these poems, which is stuck in the 70s-80s and has more in common with Johnson's Fens, the pre-gastro pubs especially - Fen's "Fox and Hounds" is Threat's "King's Head". When it got dark early and there were no late buses where else was there to go? "Roly is on the floor gyrating, his ageing mum in her leather jacket is leaning against the wall" (p.67). It has a forest whose trees are straight, tall and in lines - not the ancient woodland of fairy tales. "The language of home hurts my mouth" mentions"the shush of pines; shoulder to shoulder silence, shoulder to shoulder dark".

Then, as now, society's expectations affected the behaviour of males and females. Norms were enforced. If boys didn't treat girls the way they're supposed to, they'd be bullied. Boys were boys, and girls' roles had to reflect that. There were allowable ways to be different - the Arts for example - but in those days, especially in a small town, such opportunities were few. Whatever their reasons for rebelling, pre-social-media rebels ended up bundled together - in the pub or public toilets.

This threat to self-actualisation, coupled with family issues and the bodily changes of adolescence and middle age (when "the body does not consider your feelings" - p.11) all provide challenges, most evident in the "Tell me more lies about love" section where men are on the look out for vulnerable women young and old. In "Good Friday" the (female) narrator's submissive, to her partner's delight. "The Moth" and "Public Bar, Central Hotel" show men's views/behaviour regarding women most starkly. Sexes are differentiated and there's no in between. "Girl's School" - "We are cows" (p.32) - opposes "Grammar School Boys" - "They ... make legends of each other" (p.39).

How does the Self react to these pressures?

• By re-assessing relationships that once defined it - Mother is viewed as father's doll (p.57), an owl (p.61), a nuisance phone call (p.62), an unbaked loaf (p.63), a public bar/barmaid (p.66).
• By inviting others on its own terms, even if that leads to rejection and disappointment - in "carport" "my mouth is a carport with a broken light ... you prefer to hang around/ in the street revving your engine ... there is a chest freezer by the back door./ It is full of something dead".
• By re-assessing current relationships - "Consultation" ends with "you're better off without him ... She wipes the crumbs off the counter, offers you another slice of cake". In the next poem, "Love is mostly about validation ... perhaps, I can believe in myself ... you must first start believing in the solidarity of the self". Following that the narrator has a motel party with the moon and passes out - time for a change?
• By absorbing, changing from within - "something inside me broke" (p.18). In "Moon Party" "you are full of the moon/ it is bursting out from inside you" whereas in "you are on fire" "you have accidentally swallowed the sun". In the final poem, "all the women, all the women are inside me now ... I speak acorns and buttresses/ I speak water lilies and doves ... I open my book beak and inadvertently sing". It sounds like progress.

The book's organised into 4 broadly thematic sections within which there are mini-sequences and one-offs - a pleasing mix of predictability and surprise. The earlier poems in the first section, "Body of Evidence", begin none too merrily. Chaining together titles or first lines gives "the body does not consider your feelings ... Step outside of yourself he said, and I did ... the way as he looked into your eyes you closed them ... you have made my house a circus ... If I hadn't swallowed the kettle ... She was a biscuit barrel ... Good Friday was the day I chopped off my own head". The self tends not to recover by the poem's end. The next section, "Tell Me More Lies About Love" sees things for what they are. "Family and Other Distractions" reviews the family and familiar haunts - the "Resurrect" poem is a false dawn. The final "Evidence of Body" section begins with an optimistic quote - 'The light has bored out of the body's long house' - and reaches a hard-won, contented conclusion.

Much as some people use role-play to explore aspects of self, the narrator employs extended analogy as illustrated in "Kettle", which isn't just a list of Martian metaphors - there's a story-arc. The narrator begins by comparing herself to a kettle - "If I hadn't swallowed the kettle/ maybe I wouldn't have boiled myself dry". Perhaps "swallowed the kettle" means "done the domestic chores". Later "My wire is dangling over the toaster again ... those tiny bits of limescale/ like flecks of dandruff" then "your razor plugged into the kettle socket" and "My gauge is so scaled up/ there's no telling what my capacity is" - domesticity thwarting development.

Several of the more experimental pieces are near the start. Some pieces are formatted as prose. "Resurrect" is a loose sonnet. A few poems (p.75, p.77) use "/" instead of line-breaks. If you want to read poems from this book go to Atrium where you'll find "The language of home hurts my mouth", "The Doll", "Your mother is landlady of the dead house", and "All the Women". Or watch a video of Lightening Up. In a Nine Arches Press interview she talks about "Bus Station Toilets" - "Most adults who grew up in the seventies or eighties will be able to recount some kind of happening – good or bad – that occurred in school or public toilets. Toilets were a place to share secrets and gossip, a place to smoke out of sight of adults, a place to put on make-up, to write graffiti, to cry over a break-up, to try out drugs, to hide when skiving off school, a place to hide from bullies – or to be found by them."

Favourites? "Kettle", "The Doll", "All Shades of Empty", "expansion of", "All the Women". Gripes? Well, being a person who writes little, and only when I feel like it, I'm suspicious of practises that help poets squeeze out more words. Several poems are "after" someone or something. Several poems use anaphora ("spilling", "Elegy", "Bus Station Toilets", "Public Bar, Central Hotel", "Love Poem to Loneliness"). "Sleight of Hand" is too slight. And I wonder how much more there is to extract from the memory mines of Thetford.

Other reviews

• Nicola Heaney (In the first section, ‘Body of evidence’ the poems have a sinister tinge ... The last two sections are more abstract in description as Webb moves from the immediacy of these events and begins to look backwards. This gives these poems a lighter feel and the collection ends on a much more positive note )
• Atrium featured publication
• Mark Connors
• Stella Blackhouse

"Bird Sisters" by Julia Webb (Nine Arches Press, 2016)

Poems from "And Other Poems", Magma, The Rialto, etc, by a poet who's twice been short-listed in the Bridport. There's a chronological sweep to the poems overlaid by recurrent themes. Subjects are often described by recording people's reactions to them. This also applies when the subject is a person - we learn about them by observing their interactions with others. Several of the pieces centre around a family where the Father is strict and religious, the mother negotiating between him and the two daughters - the narrator and an older Alice. There's sibling rivalry and cooperation between the girls. This core family concept is explored using anecdote, mythology, etc. The book begins with "Sisters (part i)" which has 5 sections (some more Realistic than others), each describing a persona/trait. The first begins "This sister is the bones of the outfit", the replacement of "brains" in the usual phrase by "bones" being a hint of things to come. On p.23 there's "Sisters (part ii)" with 6 more sections, an example being "This sister has neat borders,/ she is carefully cultivated,/ an exercise in quiet self-control".

The book's final sequence uses circus personae (freaks and performers) to explore sister-hood (or maybe aspects of self-hood). Father is explored in "Family Values" as "Sun daddy" and is imagined as a horse in "Night Sickness" etc. The mythologising persists at the father's death, the mother's death a cause for more sibling rivalry.

Birds (owls in particular) feature. Owls are creatures of the night. Seemingly quiet and wise, they eat creatures whole, leaving bones. The narrator and other people transform - the sister is viewed as a sparrow and owl (one poem's entitled "My owl sister mistakes me for a mouse")", and "my owl mother" appears. Night/dream imagery is prevalent.

Bees (a popular theme in recent UK poetry) appear first on p.11 and finally on p.66, popping up throughout. On p.13 they are "The bees that sleep inside me". By the end of the poem "I might take flight". That outward movement is replicated in "A Bird Inside" where the initial "I wear a bird inside me" develops into "Today I am blackbird,/ tomorrow I will be all owl"

The most common thematic movement is Confinement/Release - physically in "Thetford Forest", but also breaking free of strict upbringing, situations and definitions by subversion or flight rather than confrontation. Poems end with waking, singing, or (in "Gin Fox", "Bee Mornings", and "A Bird Inside") releasing. More things unravel than ravel.

2 sub-categories of poem emerge from the mix -

• Prose - The Piano Lesson, The Trap, Lent, Rain, The Callers, Visiting Time, The Miracle. These are family-based, usually involving religion, and use CAPS to emphasise words. I wouldn't call them prose-poems - they're Flash. "Rain" ends with "I WOULD like a doll who can REALLY CRY!" which is a good way to end any text.
• Lists of definitions - of sisters, water, etc.

Other reviews

• Gram Joel Davies (The fairy tale quality which many of Julia Webb’s poems possess provides a way into a child’s understanding which could otherwise not be articulated)
• londongrip (More than anything else in this collection, however, I am impressed by the seven prose poems)