"City of Departures" by Helen Tookey (Carcanet, 2019)

Poems from Magma, Manchester Review, Shearsman, and her HappenStance pamphlet In the glasshouse from which "Prairie", "In the rose garden" (which was a Guardian poem of the week.), "At the ponds", "Quend-Plage-les-Pins" and "Mow Cop" came. 2 pages of notes!

The word dream" appears on pages 9, 11, 16, 27, etc, but even when it doesn't explicitly appear, the theme dominates the early sections - memory can't be trusted, things are strangely different, and there's synaesthesia. Halfway through the title poem the persona realises they're barefoot in a cobbled street, then "You were there in the sense of having spoken a vital word to me and then gone away, leaving me wandering the wet quaysides holding the word I couldn't use, a bright coin in the wrong currency". The ambience continues - "She said she didn't know why (p.11) ... Where were you going? You can't remember now (p.14) ... She can't say when she saw it before (p.15) ... So did you maybe dream it (p.16) ... Everything happens at a distance (p.21) ... you woke and knew at once something was different (p.27) ... You don't see any marker posts after no.3/ You begin to be a little afraid of it, this path" (p.30). When on p.50 I read "it has become a habit   not knowing/ not remembering   how to proceed" I knew what she meant.

In "Boat" a "wrecked boat uncovered by storm, by shifted sands" appears for just a day on a walk the persona often took. Someone had left them that day, so they "crept inside and lay for hours". Others later say there had never been a boat. I like the image, though 18 lines seem too many.

Even interiors aren't stable or secure -

• "one room becomes another, a string of rooms like paper dolls" (p.21)
• "At first you're a child, out of scale with the house you find yourself inside" (p.23)
• "suppose the house were only windows" (p.39)
• "doors leading only to more doors, to more rooms - interiors with no exteriors, doors and windows yet no way out" (p.67)

In "Green" the persona goes out, hides until they think they've been seen, then they go home. Dolls houses and Glasshouses aren't safe retreats either.

Nostalgia isn't reliable. In "Front" the persona tells a passing couple how she'd recalled what the sea-front was like. The couple say it was like that only before the persona was born. Nevertheless the persona is sure that s/he's seen it. There's a strange transition from "we" to "I".

I like the start of "Hotel Apostrophe" -

Apostrophe. I. Rhet. A figure of speech, by which a speaker or writer suddenly stops in his discourse, and turns to address pointedly some person or thing, either present or absent; an exclamatory address As though the ordinary business of being a hotel were the discourse, which has suddenly been abandoned, the notional hotel turning instead to address us

On p.44 is an excellent stanza that matches the cover -

As the blue comes on, the canal shivers, and just for a second all the charts go haywire. (Reflections of telegraph pole, of factory chimney.) In the ward of the white house no one will sleep. The single lamp outside will burn all night.

And she can do standard (good) analogies - "the long beach is almost empty/ and the sea is quiet, its attention elsewhere// like a small girl in Sunday school/ who sits on a hard chair, half-attending// pleating and unpleating/ the hem of her skirt" (p.55).

Yet several poems puzzle me - not for their complexity but their simplicity. I don't see anything much in p.29, p.30, p.46, p.47, p.54, etc.

I like "Prairies", "Paper birds" and "Quend-Plage-les-Pins".

The final "Skizzen / Sketches" section is 12 pages of prose - an essay really, about some female artists and poets; about representation of females by themselves and others. I liked it, and I can see how it relates in part to the poems. It's not trying to be poetry. In a book with 13 all but blank pages between the contents page and this final section, there are fewer poems than readers might normally expect.

"In the glasshouse" by Helen Tookey (Happenstance, 2016)

Poems from The Compass, PN Review, Shearsman, etc.

A restless intelligence is at work here. Even when I felt I didn't understand a poem I often liked it. Those that didn't appeal to me still interested me - they seem carefully constructed even if their purpose remains a mystery. I can imagine other people liking them.

Symbols

Water appears in nearly every poem ("Like the Sorrows" has tears and a boat, "Mow Cop" has a watermelon - only the final "Sudley Field (Dusk)" is completely dry). There are specific links between poems (e.g. "Heptonstall" begins with "They are always speaking of beauty in this valley". The next 2 poems are entitled "beautiful error" and "Rheidol Valley"). Most striking however is the pervasive dream/Jungian imagery. I imagine the most common images could be classified as follows -

• paths connecting places
• boundaries between something and something else. These can be crossed - e.g. beaches
• boundaries between something and nothing. These can't be crossed - e.g. cliffs
• places to be - gardens
• places of transformation - ponds

"sea" and "wood" are the wilder, more infinite analogues of "pond" and "garden". "Jitties" are more confusing paths. In "Celandine" there's a path around a wood. Between the path and wood is an impenetrable hedge. Ah, there's a stile to the wood. In the wood is a clearing where there's a pool. In the dark water a naked man keeps swimming down. He's nameless. There are little flowers by the path and round the pool. The ending is "Only the small yellow flowers are named. The flowers are celandine". The impenetrable border and the border of no return around the pool are indicated by nameable beauty in contrast to the nameless body disappearing into the depths. The flowers are all we can know. Celandine is referenced in several pieces of literature, according to Wikipedia.

"Family Affair" also brings together some earlier themes - "This is the garden on the cliff, and this is the path". Later, "In the garden, the ponds are scummed with algae, the glasshouse doors hang askew".

"Speke Hall" is packed with the same family of images - path, woodland, pond - this time being described to accompany the walk of a couple trying to make it up.

Flesh sometimes merges into these symbols from nature - into water or soil ("if you put out your hand and the earth were to take it" (p.17) "Press fingers to dry earth" (p.28)).

I can't draw any conclusions from all this, except perhaps that there's an interest in the moment of transformation when there's no turning back and as yet no consequences; and an interest in the visible entrance to places of invisible change - event horizons.

Fragmentation

In an interview she says "I really enjoy using found text as a source for poems. For me, it’s a way of getting hold of types of language that I wouldn’t be able to generate for myself ... Sometimes I collage things together from different sources ... but probably more often I use some sort of fragmentation ... It’s partly about trying to bypass your own censoring, to allow a certain amount of chance and free association; but of course there’s always a process of selection and arrangement at work as well."

Repetition, fragmentation and discontinuities all help disrupt linear narrative, tempting readers to see through the cracks and connect at a more symbolic level - as it says in "Speke Hall", "none of these things mean much in itself    only that we are seeing them together"

• Repetition - examples include "Like the Sorrows" (33 lines each starting with "Like"), "beautiful error" and "Rheidol Valley" (where the last 2 lines are very nearly repetitions of the first 2), and "At the Ponds" (which begins with "She takes you to the ponds", then we're told about bodies underwater. The final section begins with "Well? she says, and you remember, back, at the castle, over the wooden castle" then repeats much of the earlier material using the same phrases).
• Fragmentation - "Rain Script" is a scattering of words. "Like the Sorrows" would be too, were "Like" removed.
• Discontinuity - "Prairie" flicks between 2 viewpoints. "Speke Hall" flicks between found text and narrative. "Jitties", by lacking punctuation and line-breaks, makes readers repeatedly back-track and re-parse.

Individual poems

I liked the first poem, Glasshouse. It begins/ends with "in the glasshouse we are all listeners/ we all make confessions/ the air alive as rain whispers tell us ... and the glass will hang always in its perfect instant/ complete still but fractured utterly". She wrote elsewhere that "fundamentally it’s about that tension between wanting or needing to change things about yourself or your life, but also the dangers and difficulties associated with that". I liked the second poem "Prairie" too, and "Speke Hall". Not so "Jitties" (no punctuation or line-breaks) or "Happy Valley, Cromer" (don't know what it's meant to do), or "Rain script" (too fragmented for me), or "Poem for Carola" (too plain, too many dreams). "Celandine" is attractive. "Family Affair" is wordy - deliberately, no doubt, though "We feel always the presence of their recent departure - an abdication we cannot account for" could have been shorter, and the concept of a departure having presence makes me think too hard.

Other reviews

• Jessica Traynor (Sometimes the spaces between are the site of loss, as well as becoming.)
• Marion Tracy (There’s a repeated theme of unease often expressed with images of water and people underwater ... ‘Celandine’ – my favourite poem of the collection.)