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A vanishing of self, souls rent and torn and a builder’s divine instructions Kathryn Maris muses on three remarkable, dissimilar new collections |
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| COLETTE BRYCE SELIMA HILL MARTYN CRUCEFIX
The rhymes seem less stiff in this collection, often tending towards the slant, and her rhythms similarly seem less manufactured than those in her first collection. In most of these poems, such as the electrifying ‘1981’ and ‘Pillar Talk,’ there lurks an infallible ear that seems increasingly to rely upon itself, and on raw nerve. There is nerve in her themes too: Catholicism, love, and the curious lines of stratification that create sectarianism, socio-economic divides, and racial disharmony. But the real nerve is in poems like the title poem, which won the National Poetry Competition in 2003, and also in ‘Present Perfect’ and even ‘The Negatives’ — for therein lies the haunting theme that defines this book — the vanishing of the self. In ‘The Negatives’ the vanishing is a heart-wrenching one as an old woman searches among photos for some evidence that she was present at a day by the lake she remembers well. But she can’t find a single print to validate the memory, so she begins to question her presence there. She resolves to check the negatives, knowing that she must find proof, for ‘whoever listens to an old woman / with the world still spinning so fast?’ The poem is dark, but the darkness is winsome; it is part and parcel of Bryce’s wit. But mostly the disappearances in this volume are hopeful ones. They promise return, just as the original Indian rope tricks performed by Fakirs did. In the title poem, the speaker chronicles her metaphorical climb and disappearance at the age of 18: Guildhall Square, noon Goodbye, goodbye. There is something thrilling in these lines, something of Plath or Hopkins, maybe. At the end she writes, poignantly, that the trick took years and that: ‘I’m my own witness / guardian of the fact / that I’m still here.’ This idea of absence followed by a transformation has mythical undertones, harkening back to the Fisher King story, or even to Eliot’s The Wasteland. It’s an idea that is again well-realized in the final poem of the collection, ‘Present Perfect’,which describes an airline flight: Through the cabin window’s haze and we, who haven’t taken off The poem suggests a divide between the people who are launched by the flight, and those who (metaphorically) remain on the ground. One has the sense from this collection that Bryce herself has been launched into some cloudy stratosphere from which she will one day re-emerge — in what form, no one knows. We shall have to wait for her third collection to find out. And I, for one, await it eagerly.
Hill’s ninth collection seems filled with souls that are rent and
torn, but beautiful, too, with a beauty that rises from grotesqueness,
as she chronicles her experiences at a psychiatric hospital in the 1960’s.
Each poem is written as a hasty journal entry, and accordingly assigned
a date. The poems appear in chronological succession, beginning on June
2nd and ending on September 26th, when the speaker is discharged. Each
poem/journal entry is also identified with a hospital room — Night-room,
Day-room, Corridor, Office, Toilet, Sister’s Kitchen — and
these rooms come to serve as the poems’ titles. The atmosphere tends
to be particularly sinister in the many night-room poems. For example,
here’s the poem entitled ‘Night-room July 22nd’ (a poem
of only four lines — not an unusual length in this collection):
‘She There are 46 night-room poems, punctuated by poems that occur in other locations. Upon reading them in succession, the reader starts to get a sense of the rhythms of Hill’s mental hospital, a rhythm of rooms and thoughts and things incessantly being done to both body and soul. Nothing active seems to happen here; the patients are animals, variously and viciously handled, hauled, branded, nuzzled; or they passively squat like frogs or grunt like pigs. (In fact pigs adorn the cover of this book.) Only occasionally are we privy to a glimmer of dignity, as in ‘Corridor: July 27th’: Nurses lead us I wished for more such glimmers, and better-developed ones, too. Most
of these poems, harpingly repetitive, cover too-similar ground, and echo
some of the problems of Hill’s
These highly narrative poems often take on personas, and in ‘Scoop’ a man whose savings have deflated as currency goes ‘real’ (i.e. becomes directly proportionate to an ounce of gold) entertains lascivious thoughts about his daughter. And in ‘An English Nazareth’ a builder from the year 1061 reflects on his work for Lady Richeldis of Walsingham, a woman who claimed to receive instructions, via divine vision, for the building of a replica of Christ’s original home. Other poems present characters from a third person perspective — ‘The Author of Kosmos’ gives us Alexander von Humboldt, and ‘You know Alan Mills’ investigates the Wimbledon referee. The staggering diversity of subjects makes it hard for one to find a common theme linking the collection’s poems. Children appear in these poems as often as not, as do references to prodigality on the one hand, or want on the other. ‘Dolmen at Skybar Hen’ tells of an abundant Christmas feast with: Turkish Delight, liqueur trifles, the cream and purple of ham on the bone, In the presence of this excess, family members sit down to ‘celebrate the new religion / grown old in just two thousand years.’ So old, in fact, that the children falter when asked to name the parents of Jesus, for in our world the material has replaced the spiritual. This idea comes up more subtly in the title poem, in which the speaker, who is the builder, opines on the difficulty of transferring Nazareth to England. In speaking of his employer, Lady Richeldis, he says: ‘And no matter how vivid her dream, / local men build as we have always built: / English wood upon English earth.’ The socio-economic disconnection between the builder and his employer is alluded to more than once, with the line, ‘We — who have only our strength to sell’ that opens and closes the poem. Crucefix has, as always, an exceptional ear. He doesn’t take a lot of chances, but when he does, the result is exhilarating, as in ‘On Bunhill Fields’, a sonnet that feels like a cross between hip-hop and Shakespeare. The collection really comes together with the last poem, ‘On night’s estate’ which echoes, strangely, an earlier and very different poem ‘17 Brittania Square’ in that the speakers in both poems are poignantly anchored in omniscience. ‘On night’s estate’ is global in its vantage point, describing, in quick succession, night time around the world: from city to city, river to river, continent to continent. It’s a dark poem, portending monsters and catastrophe in a way that reminds one of Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’ and makes us read the title of Crucefix’s book in a different way. It’s a superbly intelligent ending to a very strong collection.
Kathryn Maris, Listings Editor of Poetry London, has published poems and essays in journals such as Poetry, American Poet, Ploughshares and Poetry London, and in an anthology commissioned by the Academy of American Poets. Her first collection is forthcoming from Four Way Books, a publisher based in New York City. Born in New York and educated in the Northeast of the US, Kathryn has lived in London for six years.
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Please send books for review in Poetry London to: Scott Verner You can contact Poetry London on editors@poetrylondon.co.uk
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