"Stranger, baby" by Emily Berry (Faber, 2017)

Poems from Granta, LRB, Poetry, Poetry London, Poetry Review, etc.

Imagery

There's much about ghosts and water, bodies and deserts. If you've an aversion to poetry about dreams, or about therapy, you may need to skip some pages.

"Summer" has enough repetition of images to make one think that there's a conceptual structure. It begins with "In a kitchen, on an island, stirring tomato sauce, I am far from home". Already there are complications - kitchens can have islands. Then the sauce is thickening. The kitchen is hot and deadly. The sauce is deadly. It "cracks my ice caps ... they let out a scream ... Someone is holding me and crying". Perhaps doing something that mothers traditionally do has provoked a breakdown of sorts. In future the persona won't prepare food, s/he'll have food that "cannot break into me: white cheese, white bread". The poem ends with "Colour all over my hands, I get down on the floor of a tiled, white room" - which could be a ward. The sauce could be blood. White (purity? processed?) is contrasted with red (raw life).

In the middle of this poem is the line I'm most envious of - "I am thirteen years away from home. Later, twenty, and so on."

There's a temptation to transfer imagery between poems (justifiably perhaps - interviewed, the poet stated that the book "was written mostly written in fairly intense bursts over a couple of years. Most of the poems address the same subject matter"). In any case you'll need to do some calculating. After reading "my self is a river, yours is a sea ... A river cannot survive in the sea ... I cried the way the sea cries when it has swallowed a river" (p.55) it's worth exploring the implications of "sea"="Mother". The earlier "Picnic" poem involves rain and the sea too. And eyes

If you are not happy, the sea is not happy ... Watching the sea is like watching something in pieces continually striving to be whole ... The mood of the sea is catching Your eyes wear out ... Its colour became the colour of my eyes and the salt made me cry oceans ... I started to be able to see in the dark It hurt my eyes           My, yes, salty, wet, ocean-coloured eyes ... When the rain came after the drought they said it was not good enough It would not change things It was the wrong rain The rain came out of my eyes

The first line associates "sea" with "you" (meaning "one"?) the "you" affecting the sea, preparing for the 2nd line in this extract. Lines 3-5 of this extract suggest that the sea affects the self. Rain and tears are conflated. Towards the end there's a suggestion that some cathartic release was merely physical - "the wrong rain" - but who are "They"?

In the extract below, towards the end of the poem, self and sea, tears, rain, language and other people come together. Language is a mirror aiding self-reflection, but can a moving self ever be captured in words?

Who are you. Who are you. Who are you Stop, language is crawling all over me Sometimes if you stay still long enough you can make it go. ... If a person standing still watched another person minutely moving           would it seem after a while as if they were watching the sea? I remember just one thing my mother said to me: Never look at yourself in the mirror when you're crying

In a world of water, "spillage" (which appears explictly a few times) becomes significant.

Voice-centred poetry

Bakhtin's definition of hybridization is "the mixture of two social languages within the confines of one utterance", which is evident in this book. There are rapid changes of register - switches between intimacy, intensity and evaluation - flattened into monologue. Here's a passage from "Picnic", where switches come thick and fast.

I like curved things      Apples, peaches, the crest of a wave We once agreed the apple was the only iconic fruit I like it when I am writing a poem and I know that I am feeling something To be poised and to invite contact Or to appear to invite contact

Once the "voice" is presumed to require a persona to produce it, the reader might go a step further, reacting as if in the presence of the person in a social situation (on a bus maybe)

• Line 1: The speaker is telling us about their likes, communicating well, though it's a rather odd predilection
• Line 2: Perhaps realising that the first line might not be helpful, more details are provided; again, a good sign. However, the list of 2 similar objects then a very different one is rather odd
• Line 3: Using the apple as a link, another person is introduced. After having previously drawn us in, an intellectual albeit interesting conclusion is reported. The speaker's straying off the topic
• Line 4: The speaker's telling us about another of their likes, in another line that ends in "thing[s]", (as if a self-revelation needs to be balanced by an abstract concept). How does this interest relate to the previous one, which it's connected to by anaphora? Should we take the second phrase of this line to mean that the persona needs to write poetry so that they know that they're feeling something?
• Line 5: "Poised" = balanced. "invite contact" = ready to engage with others. These are socially desirable goals.
• Line 6: The difference between appearance and reality is again emphasized - others don't know the real feelings of the persona, who may only be pretending to be sociable. Again, having approached the reader, the persona withdraws, without asking for comments.

Poems like these exploit readers' conversational skills, using their reactions to the persona as the pivots that articulate the movement within a poem in preference to using their ear for music. Because discourse-based poems emulate speech, they tend not to use sound effects (regular ones, at least), using register changes instead.

Bryan Walpert points out in "Resistance to science in contemporary American poetry" that in Language poetry "The 'meaning' ... lies not in an expression of the individual author or speaker but in the collision of languages or discourses" (p.128). This isn't language poetry, but the collisions are in these poems. He points out that "it is in language that we construct what appear to us to be unified central selves and so it is language that poetry must scrutinize" (p.182). In these poems conflicting emotions are held together, just, by a single voice or the sea.

Therapy

There are poems with "Freud" in the title - his "War", "Beautiful Things", "Horses" and "Loss". There are allusions to therapy - e.g. "Imagine trying to pick up a piece of the sea and show it to a person / I tried to do that / All that year I visited a man in a room / I polished my feelings." (p.4) - polished in the way that a poem's polished, or in the way that a pebble is polished by the sea.

Some phrases have a therapy feel -

• "I want to be loved for the wrong reasons. I mean I want to be hated for the right reasons" (p.38)
• "Every time I say the word 'I' I am ashamed. When I say 'I want' I am triply ashamed." (p.38)
• "My thoughts are wrong. My thoughts are wrong/ The thought that my thoughts are wrong is wrong" (p.5)
• "If it was up to me, I would not have her back// It is not up to me, and she is not coming back." (p.37)

Therapy's a useful ploy in poetry - poets can explain and "tell" in the guise of "show".

Dreams

On p.56 there's "Over a period of weeks I had a series of dreams" followed by some prose which is dream-like. So is "Several people point to gaps in my face where the little girl has been cut out" (p.30). Strongest though is p.45, where after "Numerous dreams about rain, flooding, and bathing", we get another water image - words responded to with a smile.

Doubts

• "Tragedy for One Voice" is formatted like a play script
• "So" is 20 one-word lines
• "The whole Show" is all in upper case
• The poem on p.43 is 7 words long with an 18 word title (the poem's a quote from the writing of the poet's mother — she was an academic but also wrote novels)
• "Aura" is right and left aligned, a gap displayed towards the middle of the lines that don't have enough letters to fill the line

Such poems will confirm the doubts some people have about modern poetry's gimmicks, not least because these particular tricks are so easy to do, and the content of these poems tends to be weaker than that of the other poems. Of course, apparent ease of production shouldn't influence assessment of effectiveness. The trouble with the "one-word-per-line" trick however is that many 20 word sentences are going to seem more interesting in that format if readers are so inclined. And experiments have risks that extend beyond the piece itself - in some books, poems provide mutually support but for me these poems raise doubts about some of the others.

Similarly, the sections in prose cast doubt on the value of the line-breaks elsewhere.

Misc

I noted some other lines -

• "she obsessed me, in spite of the fact that she died when I was thirteen, until I was forty-four" (p.50) (Emily Berry was born in 1981)
• "People can be removed from the world/ They don't tell you that, but it's true/ I mean, they do tell you, but they don't tell you/ People you love can be removed from the world/ (They can remove themselves) They will be removed from the world" (p.56)
• "Be my mother, I said to the trees, in the language of trees ... they looked into my eyes as only trees can look into the eyes of a person, they touched me with the rain on their fingers till I was all droplets, till I was a mist, and they said they would" (p.57)

Conclusion

Interconnections add value to the individual pieces. For example, on p.53 there's "BAMBI'S MOTHER WAS SHOT AND KILLED DURING BAMBI'S FIRST WINTER. THESE ARE THE DANGERS OF LIFE AS A FOREST CREATURE", which benefits from being read in association with "Canopy" and "Winter".

"Ghost Dance" is long and sprawly. I prefer "Summer", "Picnic" and many fragments.

Other reviews

• Ralf Webb
• Annie Muir (This poem sets up a book in which its author comes out from behind the costumes and props and takes control of her own story. This is not an easy thing to do well. It is the kind of writing which acts as if it is giving everything away, even though it is the most embarrassing and painful thing in the world to do. It is the kind of writing ‘biographer[s]’ live for. Berry does it very well.
• Sarah Crown (Where those in her first collection were sprawling, arch and metaphorically lush, these are honed down and pared back ... There’s water everywhere in these poems)
• Dave poems (One thing Stranger, Baby does better than almost any book I’ve read is in its intensity of care for the reader, its careful management of the poems’ often brutal subject matter. The book doesn’t aim primarily to shock or appal the reader with its ideas, but it doesn’t shy away from them either ... They operate in full awareness of their artifice, remaining sensitive to the unspoken contract between reader and grieving poet: this is a book about mourning, and to some extent, the reader will anticipate some performance of sadness.)
• Charanpreet Khaira (Berry’s speaker conveys the gulf between poetic intention and creation. Poetry is stripped of its mystery as the process of creation is described with almost staged self-awareness)
• Todd Swift (This new book of Berry's, frankly, is stamped, on every page, with Riley's ideas and advice, regarding language, identity, the body, and the strange. ... Berry's contribution to this field is to accept both the constraints of Rileyian ironies, and the unlimited expressionism of Plathian self-revelation.)
• Lucy Mercer
• Kim Moore

"Dear Boy" by Emily Berry (Faber and Faber, 2013)

This book (which won the £5,000 Felix Dennis prize for Best First Collection) is interesting in the way that debut collections should more often be. It probably helped that the poems were written over the course of 7 years. "Our Love Could Spoil Dinner" has multiple twists. Rather than conventional closure, some poems end with a burst of disjunctive phrases. E.g. -

• "I ♥ NY" - "You can buy non-sequiturs in bundles now/ from international supermarkets. And guilt,/ where is that sold? How much for eating cupcakes/ on my birthday from the famous bakery/ and admiring San Franciscan boys in aviators? Oh -/ and when we went for mani-pedis, we sat in a row/ and Korean ladies kneeled at our feet"
• "The Old Fuel" - "John Humphreys is still shouting at someone between seven-thirty and nine; your shoes line up in the hall; and I'm cranking out oodles of love the way an old spaghetti machine cranks out spaghetti".

I like "A Short Guide to Corseting". Two Budgies is written as 5 couplets (though the layout in the book is different to that of the version originally in "nthposition" magazine - fewer semi-colons and the line-lengths more regular). Conceptually it's in sections that barely coincide with the stanzas - 2 lines; 4.5 lines;2 lines;1.5 lines. So why have stanzas? Mere disruption? It's good though. The first stanza's packed -

‘The mango’s bone is like a cuttlefish’ I said proudly, domestic. You looked on holding the pulp.

I liked "The Incredible History of Patient M.". "The International Year of the Poem" is clearly prose - it's imaginative enough, albeit a list.

Then things start to sag, or perhaps the novelty wears off. "Nothing Sets My Hearts Aflame" is another list. It doesn't work for me. "Preparations for the Journey" is the weakest in the book so far. I've sent something much like "Props" out as micro-fiction. "Some fears" is a semi-coloned list - "fear of one's reflection in spoons" but also "fear of fear; fear of help; fear of asking for, receiving, refusing, giving, or being denied help". "Well bébé" doesn't quite outstay its welcome. "The Way You Do at the End of Plays" is weak. I didn't get "The Tea-party Cats" or several others.

2 poems are in landscape mode - don't know why, because the line-breaks look pretty arbitrary. The first line of the landscaped "Zanzibar" has 4 gaps - "Dear island:     I blame you entirely     Your shoreline     so suspiciously     wantable". "The Old Fuel" is fully justified with a gap or two in each line. Here's the end of "Love Bird" - I think the underlying content's good enough not to need gimmicks.

Love was not one thing it took many shapes                          I mistook its presence     I worshipped it sometimes      other times I ran I called it names I starved it till my ribs were a grand birdcage           Lover,             Love was no bird

There's one comma in the poem. Elsewhere gaps might be replacing them, though there are non-punctuation gaps too. Most of the lines are justified. All in all, it looks quirky, perverse and reader-unfriendly. In an interview she says that "I think some people call it ‘tabulation ... These spaces appeared initially as a way of indicating a kind of stutter or inability to speak/write except in a fragmented way (which is probably a textual representation of how I feel when trying to talk about emotions!). They started appearing in other poems I wrote, mainly the ones about dealing with absence and I guess you could also see them as symbolising the way in which someone’s absence can seem so physical. I don’t seem to be using them so much any more. I like the way they give you a bit more freedom in terms of line breaks, but they’re also quite annoying to work with, you end up spending ages deciding how many spaces a particular gap should be, which is not the greatest use of one’s time".

"The Number Game" has "When a person we love is taken off it is - 1. Better and worse than we might have imagined. Better, because mostly, we do not fail to go on living. Which is, after all, the main agenda ... We are trained to revere life/ To look back on it at the end of a person's life and count what we have found of value/ This is a kind of comfort/ On the whole I conform to this theory/ After all, what else can we do?" which is hard to disagree with.

Other reviews

• Ben Wilkinson (Guardian) (The book's title poem, a playful missive that showcases a good deal of Berry's tonal repertoire, achieves a strangely convincing balance between intimacy and solipsistic extravagance ... a crucial aspect of Dear Boy's knowing aesthetic is the precise and telling detail. ... For all the archness and cleverness, however, such images betray a serious and incessantly inquiring mind that seeks out epiphanies almost anywhere)
• Dave (Dear Boy falls victim to one of the most obvious flaws of un-composed poetry: it all sounds the same, a conversational drone. ...a book that does everything in its power to distract you from the fact that there’s not much below the surface )
• Rebecca Tamás (Literateur)(Berry deftly reveals the divisions created in the narrator’s self by her contradictory, complicated desires ... Within the poem’s fluctuating, contradictory language Berry can communicate the jarring, yet hugely significant, realisation that the self is not a fixed, linear entity, but one capable of painful, unpredictable shifts.)
• Judi Sutherland (a tabulated format that spaces the words across the page, giving the poems an anxious hesitancy. ... Berry’s is not like any other contemporary poetic voice)
• Željka Marošević (A large jagged space is carved out of the first stanza, which has the visual effect of making the poem like a game of Tetris which cannot be finished. The central tetrimino piece, of course her lover, is missing ... Berry inserts gaps between the beginning and ending of the opening lines to introduce cognitive dissonance in the poem ... In ‘Zanzibar’, the gaps between words are smaller but more frequent, mimicking the two second delay that occurs over a long-distance call)
• Andrew McMillan (Eyewear) (The beloved is the anchor around which everything else in the collection oscillates. Emily Berry’s other talent is that she is genuinely witty and often very very funny; not funny in a ‘that was a quite amusing line’ sort of way, but genuinely, laugh out loud funny. ... ‘Nothing Sets My Heart Aflame’ captures the contemporary zeitgeist for vintage and transient connections perfectly without ever feeling like it’s trying too hard. It’s the sort of poem which feels like it will be anthologised in decades to come and used as a document to teach about the decade we’re living through. ... Berry has the ability to go on to be one of the most respected and accomplished poets of her generation ... Constant consideration of the reader, of an audience, is the mark of a great poet. In Berry, that is exactly what we have)
• Todd Swift (Poetry)