My in-depth review of Alison Brackenbury's fine new collection, Thorpeness, is now up at Wild Court, and here's a quick quote as a taster...
"Thorpeness finds Brackenbury stripping away artifice to face the ageing process and the only possible end of age, setting her narrative thrust in the context of the world around us."When we approach Helena Nelson’s new
book, Pearls (HappenStance Press, 2022), certain potential
misnomers and misconceptions are worth addressing and dismissing.
First off, it isn’t really a
collection as such. Instead, it’s subtitled ‘The Complete Mr and Mrs Philpott Poems’, and includes several poems
that were previously published in earlier collections, now reprinted alongside
a whole host of uncollected pieces. And secondly, Pearls isn’t thematic if
we take that term as it’s understood by most people in the poetry world, i.e.
preconceived, planned and executed as a whole. There are no fillers here, nor
are there poems whose role is to link themes or join up a narrative. These are individual,
connected poems that accumulated over decades.
And the above points lead us to a
third clarification: Pearls is not a novel in verse. This is
demonstrated by the fact that every single poem retains its value
as a stand-alone piece while also adding to the sum. Nelson employs a collage
effect throughout the book, implicitly building her characters and their
stories via juxtaposition, each scene, each
moment, each episode enriching the reader's experience, page on page, pearl
after pearl. As a consequence, it’s useful to quote Nelson’s own explanation,
which reaches beyond the structure of the manuscript, taking her title as a point
of departure to understanding life itself:
...But now I feel there’s a sense in which all the
moments of our existence are suspended timelessly, pearls on a string. Each
moment contains the whole story: beginning, middle and end...
And then there’s a fourth issue to clear up. Poetry readers don’t often encounter the explicit, sustained deployment
of three-dimensional characters, so it’s important to underline that these poems are far from being confessional in tone and content.
This statement would be superfluous if we were discussing a novel, but even
experienced heads often seem prone to seeking out pointless biographical
parallels when it comes to considering poetry. Of course, any character
contains a proportion of the writer that created them, but that’s the case in
any novel too.
Moving on to the poems themselves, one of Helena
Nelson’s greatest attributes is her knack for observation. Not just watching
people and then portraying them, but the capacity to pick up on the nuances and
undercurrents that play crucial roles in social and human relations. One such
example is the closing couplet to ‘Back’:
…She is back. He is glad. And the bed is glad
and a pot of coffee is almost ready.
The ‘he’ and ‘she’ of this extract are
the Philpotts, of course, the protagonists of this book. Their relationship, a
second marriage in middle age, is evoked via snapshots such as these lines in
which emotion is conveyed indirectly through the active role of objects such as the
bed and the pot.
In technical terms, meanwhile, this couplet is
fascinating. For instance, the penultimate line features three anapests before
a iamb kicks in, drawing the elements together and offering a musical
reassurance that’s mirrored by semantic warmth.
And what about the punctuation? At first glance, it
might seem artificial or unusual. Two three-word sentences without conjunctions
are then followed by a longer, unexpected sentence that goes against
convention, not just by starting with a conjunction but also by refusing to
place a comma midway through (at the end of that penultimate line). However,
this punctuation is actually riffing on our expectations, surprising us and
then turning inevitable, guiding us through the couplet’s delicate cadences.
As the clichéd rhetorical question
goes, which came first, the chicken and the egg? In this case, however, we’re
referring to the poet and the editor. Is Helena Nelson such a scrupulous editor
because of her highly tuned understanding of the importance of the tension
between sentence and line or has her poetic skill-set been further developed by
her work as an editor?
Deep down, of course, the important
thing remains that her awareness of syntactic and semantic cause and effect,
already keenly felt in her first full collection, Starlight on Water (The
Rialto, 2003), has only increased over the years. In fact, one of the aesthetic
pleasures in reading this book is derived through observing an expert at work,
admiring her control of sentence and line, learning from it.
In other words, Pearls
possesses numerous attractions both for previous readers of the Philpott poems
and for newcomers. Perhaps the most moving facet of this book can be found in
the previously uncollected pieces that portray the couple’s ageing process and
their slow-looming awareness of impending death. In this context, the books
closing lines from ‘Peril’ pack a huge punch:
...of course they are not all right
but she takes him in her arms
and she tells him that they are.
The mirrored, satisfying rhythms of this final couplet strengthen its comforting effect. And once
again, there’s that slipping-away and stripping-back of punctuation, leaving
behind only the words and their latent power.
It’s not beyond the realms of
possibility that critics’ and judges’ prejudices might well kick in and
indicate to them that Pearls will only be of interest to women of a
certain age and certain social origin. They couldn’t be more wrong. Pearls
matters to us all. Like any great story, its specificality is what makes it
universal. And then, moreover, for poets themselves, it provides an implicit
lesson in the roadcraft of writing poetry, far more useful than any handbook or
workshop. With such wide appeal, here’s hoping Pearls reaches the
swathes of readers that its poems so richly deserve.
Everybody loves a winner, that’s for
sure, and the poetry world’s no different, though winners create losers too.
Certain losers could complain bitterly,
seething with resentment, that they’re being ignored by major awards, and they
could set up an important poetry prize for poems that are unsuitable for competitions.
Or they could launch a subtle coup and take over an existing award. Of course, they’d
also have to name judges who have been ignored up till now.
But then, once the winning poems had
been chosen, others would inevitably kick back against the decision and generate
an alternative award for the poems that hadn’t been selected. Or launch yet another
coup. With a new batch of judges. Starting all over again. And
again. And again. Just as generation follows generation, establishment follows
establishment.
Or we could read, write and explore
beyond prizes and awards, relying on our own tastes and judgements instead of invoking
the Emperor’s New Clothes on a regular basis…
Whether we like it or not, absolutely
everything we write has its origins in our identity. Even when we use a
persona, a context that’s far from our own lives, a filter of fireworks or
devices, we are always writing out of who we are. That process might be more or
less overt, and we might well be reluctant at times to recognise it (even to
ourselves) but our identity runs through our poetry as if through rock.
Of course, over the last few years,
many poets have emerged who’ve wielded their identity to terrific explicit
effect – be that with an aesthetic, emotional, social or political aim.
However, I also enjoy poetry that assumes, assimilates and textures its identity,
using it more to enrich the genre’s capacity to create a whole new emotional
world that casts fresh light on previous ones.
As a consequence, I’m especially drawn
to Tamiko Dooley’s new poems on Wild Court (see here). They’re so similar yet
so different, so strange yet so familiar. This is very much the effect that I
seek in my own poems about life in Spain.
In the context of events elsewhere, my
thoughts turn to Auden’s statement, made in 1939, that ‘Poetry makes nothing happen’. Leaving aside the potential layers of nuance that
we could read into his statement (e.g. whether he’s implying that it shouldn’t
have to do so), it’s an important point of departure for any discussion of the
relationship of poetry to war.
Like any theme, poets (and by
extension, readers) can meet it head-on, in political and moral terms, or they
can come at it aslant. Both approaches are valid, of course, but I personally
prefer to find emotional refuge in poems that at first glace seem to have
nothing to do with war.
At first, in the opening days of the
war, I felt guilty and self-indulgent for admitting this to myself, for sharing poems on Twitter
that appeared far removed from the context of Ukraine. However, as these poems lent
me their support, I realised that reading them wasn’t an act of cowardice, nor was
it turning the other cheek.
Instead, by treasuring the human
significance and ramifications of simple, everyday acts, we implicitly
celebrate love, which is the counterpoint to war. And therein lies one of the
key roles that poetry can play in our lives, reminding us of what makes us who
we are, of the values that keep us sane and might just lead us out of this mess.
If poetry helps us keep our humanity
in the face of evil, its importance is beyond doubt.
