Poems from Confingo, Stand, Rialto, and her Paper Swans pamphlet, "Glass". In an Interview with Paul Stephenson she says that "My full collection is my MMU portfolio. It won the Michael Schmidt Prize and a poem from the collection was highly commended in the Forward Prize and appears in the Forward Book of Poetry 2018." So it's no surprise that this book has many worthwhile poems.
Context
The fens feature heavily. If you read this book along with Daisy Johnson's story collection Fen you'll
get a fair idea of what growing up in the area's like, especially for girls. This book is more rural than
Johnson's, and is more aware of geological history. And it sounds more autobiographical. At least 10 poems are about a mother, and there's a father figure too - "Forgive me, my stepfather/ wasn't always a brute" (p.16). In the interview she says
- "As a child, I didn’t want to be female because I’d been conditioned into thinking girls and women were weak/lesser beings by my stepfather (who beat and humiliated my mother)"
- "My mother and I have an open dialogue. She has been very supportive. My stepfather passed away a long time ago and has no living relations. Even so, there were times when I felt uncomfortable, that what I was writing was wrong, but I resisted the urge to silence myself, having often been too scared to speak during my childhood."
This contrasts rather with the approach taken by Ros Barber in "Material" where the Acknowledgements page ends with "Finally, apologies are due to all those individuals who find themselves incorporated as 'material' when they would have chosen otherwise". All the same, knowing that the contents are sensitive affects interpretation. A painting of a tragedy may have more impact than one of a tree, but does that make it a better painting? Should the poet's daring influence a reader's judgement? I have trouble enough assessing my own poems in these circumstances, let alone others'.
Poetry/Prose
There's much poetic description - e.g. "My mother is in the kitchen/ well before dawn, her backbone already sunk/ over the sink, elbows pistoning.// I watch her baptise a creature in the gleam/ of its own inner sleeve: easing pelt from membrane/ and loosening the densest caul to a bruise." ("Divining her firstborn"). That's balanced by pieces that aren't poemed-up, except for the line-breaks - e.g. "You don't move fast like that now/ you're in your eighth decade// with no calves to feed, steers to inject: I wonder if you remember// that winter of pneumonia" ("When my mother fell"). Or "Boy".
Who knows? Who says?
The past slowly emerges, one poem informing another - the mother's first child; the dark loam ("The Ouse was a tributary of the Rhine"). "Rebirth" and "The time has come to talk of many things" are just two of the poems where evidence of the past is hidden, neighbours sometimes knowing more about events in the house than the narrator knows. "Mother's Day Portrait" is partly about how people judge representations, how other factors colour the interpretation. "Unmade" (meaning "un-maid", as well as alluding to Emin's unmade bed) has Emin (or someone like her) as the PoV - "I don't/ coax gold into sunrises ... the man// who opened me when I was thirteen - // taught me/ not to let the wound heal,/ but to pick the scab until it bleeds". As in some other poems, italics are used to show the interjection of another voice - "Emin puts her pain on/ to attain fame and notoriety".
Forms
Forms don't figure much. "At the kitchen sink" is a 14-liner sort-of sonnet. All but one of the 17 lines of "Fidget" end with a variant of the verb "fidget". "Military Road" ends with repetition. Most stanzas are regularly rectangular. "Anguilla Anguilla" bends the rules with 4 4-lined rectangular stanzas that use "/" as a comma or line-break. Here's the first stanza -
The water delivered bold / lifeless things
into my gran's nets / a smell / sap
of Ouse / earth to air / peat to clay / seepage
through willow baskets / woven the old way.
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She uses the same device in "Fallen".
Writers' tips
As I writer I picked up 2 tips -
- There's a page listing the prizes and commendations that 14 of the poems won. I don't record my short-listings and commendations. I guess I should. I'd enter more competitions if I valued commendations more highly.
- "A smallholding in the fens" is a list of sections, each pregnant with meaning - "Our home was full of hooks:/ for fish and for game ... My mother hung birds in the kitchen,/ sometimes their heads brushed hers/ as she walked underneath ...", "Once my stepfather caught a linnet:/ as his hand tightened around it,// it pecked at him,/ but it was the small heartbeat// he felt through the gourd of his palm,/ that made him set it free". These are the kind of symbolically significant, related details that I embed in prose. People more often notice them in Flash than short stories. In poems they're harder to miss.
Unknowns
I don't get "The bantam". One poem's entitled "Explanatory style analysis". I had to look up "Explanatory style" - it's "a psychological attribute that indicates how people explain to themselves why they experience a particular event, either positive or negative".
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