"Dressing for the Afterlife" by Maria Taylor (Nine Arches Press, 2020)

Poems from Agenda, Ambit, Magma, Stand, The Compass, Manchester review, North, Rialto, etc.

"dressing for the afterlife" - i.e. preparing a role for a new phase of life. And what better place to look for tips than Hollywood - its techniques and case studies. The past is a useful place to look as well. It's a strong yet not limiting theme. Here are the titles and a few extracts from the first few poems -

She Ran I took up running when I turned forty ... I ran past every town in which I'd ever lived. I ran past all my exes ... I couldn't get as far as I wanted I begin the twenty-twenties as a silent film goddess I became Clara. I became Louise ... At last I had a voice but no-one wanted to hear and there she was in the shrunken apartment like Joan Crawford, toy dog on her lap but there's armour in glamour the floating woman I am absent in our family portraits but I am here sand memoir generations have shifted ... my daughters demand pizza order in perfect English then I reconsidered prayer In summer I went back to the chapel in my father's austere village ... When the young priest entered he was so kind that I almost thought it was OK to be me.

I like "Awake in his castle" - very little padding compared to others' poems on that theme. After that there are a few (only a few) more average pieces, reminders that the title could also be using "dressing" as in "salad dressing" to make things more palatable. Then there's "Poem in which I lick motherhood". What does "lick motherhood" mean? Succeed at it? Knock it into shape? Try it, like a lollipop? Here are the first/last 3 lines -

• "I have several children, all perfect, with tongues made of soap and PVA glue running through their veins" - Of course, a mother would say that her children are perfect. Soap is used to wash mouths of children who swear. Doing crafts with children is a parent's duty.
• "My boys and girls benefit from eating the rainbow" - Whereas the first line's metaphors can be normalised, this second line is more stubbornly surreal. If you want, recall the nutritionists' suggestion that eating food with a range of colours increases the chance of eating a range of vitamins and minerals.
• "I iron children twice daily. Creases are the devil's hoof print" - Perhaps the children have iron supplements twice a day. More likely there's always ironing to do. There's a hint that the children may also need disciplining, that imperfection is sinful, reflecting on the parents
• ...
• "Underneath my ribs is a complex weather system of sunshine and showers" - What is under a mother's ribs? A heart, or (when standing) a womb? Do sunshine and showers create rainbows?
• "Heat rises from me and blows across the gulf stream of my carefully controlled temper" - The gulf stream is a path through the pathless ocean, a way to navigate through life
• "Sometimes I am mist" - A pun on "missed". The first 3 lines all mentioned children. These last 3 don't mention them at all. The persona has become less central, more vague - an environment rather than a person.

The poem comes from her thematically-related Happenstance pamphlet, Instructions for making me. About half of that 2016 pamphlet is here including "The Horse" another of my favourites.

There's transitioning between 1st and 3rd person - the "I" of the present looking at the "she" of the past, etc. In "What it was like" "The stranger I used to be lives in the present now". What responsibility do we have to our past? Should we bother attempting to preserve continuity? In "My stranger" the (let's say female) persona has hung a painting in the entrance hall. She tries to convince visitors that it's her father by providing anecdotes, going so far as to claim it's a self-portrait. Finally we read that "Dad never lived to paint us all. What a terrible loss, visitors sigh. I lead them into a living room and whisper, Yes." So perhaps there's regret that reality didn't match the story, but because it's the past, reality's more easily changed. She uses the new, improved father to cover cracks in her current life - changing one's past is a way of recreating oneself. If you can't go back, you can afford to be selective -

• In "Learning the steps" "We dance to learn about a part of ourselves books can't teach ... We're learning the steps of old island lives ... We leap like salmon, trying to catch scent of home"
• "Songbird" has "she didn't keep any letters to remind herself who she really was" and ends with "You can't release that bird anywhere - there's no country on any map for her to return".
• Mr Alessi is "trying to make a garden out of his life"

And the purpose of it all? We know little of the personae's challenges ahead - no mid-life crisis looms - though "Role Model" ends with "I'd like to be the woman next door with a walk that says I know where I'm going".

Other reviews

• Carol Rumens (My Stranger, Guardian poem of the week)
• Matthew Stewart (a huge step forward from her already impressive first book)
• Juliano Zaffino
• Atrium
• the poet's comments on 'My stranger'
• Sarah James (Another reading of the collection ... is the sense of everything in continuous flow. Water is a recurring image. )
• Neil Fulwood

"Instructions for making me" by Maria Taylor (Happenstance, 2016)

The Acknowledgments mention "The North", "New Walk", "The Interpreter's House", "Poems in Which", "The Manchester Review", "Ambit", "The Compass", "And Other Poems", "Magma", and a Penguin anthology - an impressive haul for 17 poems. Most of the poems contrast the real world with an imagined or dreamt alternative, the subject of interpretation usually being people.

When reading fiction we construct the imaginary characters from their behaviour. We use the same mechanism in real life when we meet people, deducing from external details an internal person (or soul). The opposite happens when we express ourselves - our pre-existing personality tries to express itself using details.

But of course it's not that simple. We role-play ("I'd like to be the woman next door/ with a walk that says I know where I'm going", p.7), dress up, use image consultants and CBT therapists. We might even help people to understand us better, show them how to read our moods, etc. And anyway, what is this "real self" beyond its expression? Is there more to it than meets the eye? Don't assume however that what you see is true. As the poet said of this pamphlet in her poetryspotlight interview, "Some of it’s still biographical, some of it’s surreal. Often it’s a mixture of both"

It's said that being slightly optimistic is more healthy and common than being realistic. I suspect that when poets are not being merely realistic, their way of being healthy is to err towards fancy rather than hope. In this collection, the poet shows several ways to resolve the resulting inaccuracies, thus showing us how to use our imagination to create her poetic persona -

• An imaginative projection could be preparing the ground for a change. In "Jenny", various Jennys are listed. The 4th didn't exist. Then we read that "A boy called me Jenny ... I nodded and rode home with a different name", reality changing to match imagination.
• In "My stranger" the (let's say female) persona has hung a painting in the entrance hall. She tries to convince visitors that it's her father by providing anecdotes, going so far as to claim it's a self-portrait. Finally we read that "Dad never lived to paint us all. What a terrible loss, visitors sigh. I lead them into a living room and whisper, Yes.". So perhaps there's regret that reality didn't match the story, but because it's the past, reality's more easily changed. She uses the new, improved father to cover cracks in her current life - changing one's past is a way of recreating oneself.
• In "The Invisible Man" the persona's daughter is pushing an invisible man on a swing. The persona knows the man - she was stood up by him. She joins in with her daughter's make-believe - a shared, inherited hallucination is hardly a hallucination at all.
• In "Hypothetical" the persona with surprising suddenness imagines being in bed with Daniel Craig, and her marriage falling apart. The poem ends with "I don't even like Daniel Craig, I tell the ceiling.", rejecting the what-if and returning to reality (while continuing the fantasy).

Suppose someone turns the tables, comparing you with an imagined/dreamt character? At the end of "Also-ran" we read "You can’t compete with the ones they dream about". But it's not the end of the world. In "The Horse" (one of several poems that mention horses) there's an over-riding theme of recovery, beginning with "Everyone says I should get back on the horse" and concluding with "Let me stay on".

"The Landfills of Heaven", "The Invisible Man", "Hypothetical", "Also-ran" and "Poem in which I lick motherhood" are online. I'll end by looking at that latter poem. What does "lick motherhood" mean? Succeed at it? Knock it into shape? Try it, like a lollipop? Or is it like a guitar lick? Here are the first 3 and last 3 lines, with notes -

• "I have several children, all perfect, with tongues made of soap and PVA glue running through their veins" - Of course, a mother would say that her children are perfect. Soap is used to wash mouths of children who swear. Doing crafts with children is a parent's duty.
• "My boys and girls benefit from eating the rainbow" - Whereas the first line's metaphors can be normalised, this second line is more stubbornly surreal. If you want, recall the nutritionists' suggestion that eating food with a range of colours increases the chance of eating a range of vitamins and minerals.
• "I iron children twice daily. Creases are the devil's hoof print" - Perhaps the children have iron supplements twice a day. More likely there's always ironing to do. There's a hint that the children may also need disciplining, that imperfection is sinful, reflecting on the parents
• ...
• "Underneath my ribs is a complex weather system of sunshine and showers" - What is under a mother's ribs? A womb? Do sunshine and showers create rainbows?
• "Heat rises from me and blows across the gulf stream of my carefully controlled temper" - The gulf stream is a path through the pathless ocean, a way to navigate through life
• "Sometimes I am mist" - A pun on "missed". The first 3 lines all mentioned children. These last 3 don't mention them at all. The persona has become less central, more vague - an environment rather than a person.

Other reviews

• Matthew Stewart (Taylor’s primary underlying technique and concern is the nature of self, the blending of identities, the interweaving of voices, the merging of fact and fiction through ever-shifting perspectives, never allowing the reader to rest on solid ground)
• Charlotte Gann, Imogen Davies, Ruby Evans
• Karen Powell

"Melanchrini" by Maria Taylor (Nine Arches Press, 2012)

Highlights

I like "Larkin", "Little Acheron" and quite a lot of "I woke into birth".

"Leaving" keeps to its theme and is more imagistic than many of the other pieces. It has "Thrilled by sepia brilliance, children kick/ chestnuts over brittle leaves and listen;/ every memory ends in autumn" and "Sensing impermanence,/ I felt the heaviness of falling leaves,/ that is to say, their lightness".

"Kiss" ends with "Today you will write a sonnet/ about a man who you only know in a poem./ It could be him blowing you a kiss/ as you walk through Leicester market,/ and this time he isn't being clever or ironic."

Formats

I think she writes in sentences, not lines. Some poems look like notes for a short story, including observations, twists and epiphanies. For example, "Auntie" ends "After the wake we start bagging and binning./ It's slow work, like clearing a museum/ forced to shut, the main exhibit gone". "Mr Hill" with fewer line-breaks and a few more words could be a worthwhile piece of Flash. "Here's to you" could be the start of a Flash, or a story. I'd call "The Cleaning Lady of Elsinore" a 2-paragraph vignette, though C.A. Duffy (and many others) call such pieces poems too.

Notes

Were there notes, I think they could mention that -

• In "Half term", "I was Pebble-Milled" is an allusion to a daytime TV program that I recall seeing - Pebble Mill.
• "The year we don't talk about" ends with "the alternative soundtrack for seventy-four" - presumably an allusion to the problems in Cyprus, 1974, though the poem's details are cryptic.
• There's a lot going on in "The carnival of souls" - ah, her blog says it's "based on the early sixties horror film of the same name. The film itself is something of a cult amongst film fans; a low budget horror which had lain virtually ignored until it was revived in the late 80s. I watched it years ago as a teenager, one unfestive Christmas Eve, a late night BBC 2 thing, and it stuck in my memory".

Endings

Some poems rather than concluding with a moral suddenly becomes difficult at the end -

• "A slam - something of them returns/ their children's way of saying enough,/ all that's left of echoes of echoes." (p.52)
• "a palm pressed against a palm/ but this is no holy kiss,/ they are leading each other to the exit" (p.55)
• "stadiums are empty, no honesty to speak of" (p.56)

Other reviews

• Anthony Alder (a collection with a cohesive lyric voice that suggests decorously that it might be a poetic memoir. ... The second section opens with ‘A History of Screaming’, and Taylor collapses her emotional reticence like a Potemkin village ... in the final section, Taylor returns once again to her themes of age, experience, and exile in a clutch of poems that seem to be an attempt at synthesis after her extremes of wide-eyed distance and emotive near focus. These are poems less rooted in articulated experience or subjective feeling than in a self-awareness and rejection of comfortable certainty that borders on wisdom. Again, I do not always find them successful or convincing, but they’re certainly more hit than miss)
• Matthew Stewart (she's only too aware of the shifting, ambiguous nature of identity, and her verse does an excellent job of exploring its vagaries)
• Roy Marshall (The poem encapsulates a key aspect of this collection, namely Maria Taylor’s ability to inhabit and carry the voices of her ancestry whilst maintaining a detachment which enables her to have a conversation with the past.)