Sheenagh Pugh's Blog, page 43

Review of I'll Dress One Night As You, by Chrissie Gittins

I'll Dress One Night As You, by Chrissie Gittins, Salt Publishing 2011



The title comes from a sequence about mourning a mother; in the poem "Out Of Place" the bereaved speaker envisages putting on the dead woman's clothes and habits:

I'll dress one night as you,
wear your weighty beads and bracelet,
I'll stretch my lips across my teeth,

&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp half open my mouth,
apply red lipstick in a compact mirror

It's an appropriate title image, because much of this collection is about putting on the voice and personality of others - a former bodyguard of Hitler, a 17th-century chorister who also acts in Shakespeare, Samuel Pepys's mistress.

Sometimes too the alter egos are from the myth-kitty, as in "Alcyone" and "Triptolemus". I'm not among those who are turned off by the mere mention of Greek myth; it seems a perfectly valid source of material as long as the poet recognises that it has been extensively mined already and needs something new doing with it. In "Triptolemus" we see the man cheated of the gift of immortality as a baby, now on his deathbed and massively grateful for not having had to outlive his own children - a good twist on the myth, I think.

I've always liked voice poems because they give the poet a certain distance from material that might otherwise become sentimental, also because it seems weird to be a writer and not take advantage of the freedom it gives you to get into someone else's skin. In "The Carpet Fitter's Wife", this fondness for shape-shifting combines with an interest in vocabulary: a married couple's relationship becomes defined by their respective idiolects, his as a carpet fitter, hers as a maths teacher:

Our congruent bodies lie parallel,
an owl calls from the coppice,
he holds me firm like gripper rod.

Another sequence, about a woman transported to Australia, works well. Of course the thing about voice poems is that the voice needs to convince throughout; if "Chorister, St Saviour's Church, Southwark, 1607" works less well for me it is because I can't hear a 17th-century voice saying "his lips were mink on mine", given that mink weren't introduced into Britain until about 1920. Granted, their fur could have been imported earlier, but it can't have been widely known, and it just seems unlikely to have been among this speaker's references.

The other main theme of this collection is bereavement, and on the vocabulary and minutiae of loss she is very sharp - "the back of everyone's head is you" ("Around Thaxted"). The poem which sticks with me most, though, is another about the place of fictional vocabularies in life, "She Gave Me Her Childhood Books, in which fiction becomes a talisman for children against reality:

on a cold stone wall in the playground

we're joined by the King of Peru
who falls down a well

and comforts himself with a rhyme.
The bell sounds for lessons, we fetch up in a line.

Beside us loiters a row of ducks,
an old sailor, a knight with quiet armour.

When keys are thrown at chatty Colin
the knight shields the blow

If I were feeling picky, I might object that actually he deflects the blow, or shields Colin from it, but the idea behind the words is one most of us could relate to. Gittins has in fact worked a great deal with children, but this collection shows her as a poet adults can certainly enjoy as well.

Grr

Have just been laboriously restoring my journal style and sidebar quotes, which LJ decided to remove. Luckily managed to get the quotes back by finding a cached version of the sidebar via google. But no matter how often I ask it for serif fonts, it doesn't seem willing to put the main body of text in one, so only the headers now look like something written by and for adults.

A fun way to hear poems

How's this for a good marketing idea? Here is Paul Yandle's poem "Dogs" from the anthology of dog poems I blogged about in my last post, and he's recorded it not only with his rather lovely reading voice but set it to kinetic typography using words from the poem (and playing with said words visually; see what he does with "circling"). Curiously enough, though this uses modern technology, it had a precursor in the artist Paul Peter Piech, who used to make posters using text to create pieces of calligraphy. Mostly he used political texts but he did sometimes set poems too; he did a lovely one for Dannie Abse. This is an ingenious update of the technique; give it a listen!

A doggy pamphlet

Candlestick Press is to publish a pamphlet of 10 poems about dogs by various writers. Arr, says you, why is she blogging about that, for she is a cat person all the way down the line? Well, says I, among names like Billy Collins, Stevie Smith, Siegfried Sassoon, Ogden Nash and Lord Byron is that of my ex-student Paul Yandle, with whom I did a blog interview here. Paul also has a web site, where you can see how unusually upbeat and aware of the possibility of joy his poems are. He won't look at all out of place in that company.

Just thinking...

... people are always saying "oh, but if we didn't have a monarchy we'd have someone like Blair or Berlusconi as head of state!" Well, possibly... or we might have someone like Mandela or Mary Robinson. Why are monarchists such pessimists?

My favourite tall ship

- specially for vjezkova , here's the Statsraad Lehmkuhl, three-master, of Bergen, visiting Lerwick for the first time this year.

A great performance

Some folk on Planet Academia are sniffy about Billy Collins, finding him not complex and multi-layered enough. I think myself that this poem could both start and end a few lines in from where it does. But... it's funny and well-turned, and more to the point, a brilliant performance; his timing and delivery would do credit to a top stand-up. If I ever get the chance to go and hear him read, I certainly shall.

Yes. Oh, yes

From Philip Pullman's Guardian article:

"We need to be on our guard when people say they're offended. No one actually has the right to go through life without being offended. Some people think they can say "such-and-such offends me" and that will stop the "offensive" words or behaviour and force the "offender" to apologise. I'm very much against that tactic. No one should be able to shut down discussion by making their feelings more important than the search for truth. If such people are offended, they should put up with it."

A go-ahead mag.

Just in case anyone'd like to know, the poem I wrote on the day of the Chilean miners' rescue and posted on this blog has now been published by the magazine PN Review (no 198). This is quite enlightened of them, because a lot of print mags won't so much as look at anything blog-published, even if it's the writer's own site. I offered to take it down but they haven't required me to. Good eggs, and sensible. I only wish more mags would figure out that it isn't going to hurt sales if the odd piece is known in blogland.

Review of Michelle McGrane's The Suitable Girl, Pindrop Press 2010

Michelle McGrane's poems, like those of many a poet who grew up in one country and now lives in another, show a keen awareness of location, not just the ones she knows but those into which she can imagine herself. This goes for historical times and personas too; she's as likely to think herself into a female Irish pirate or the last Russian tsarina as to speak in her own person. In short, she sees poetry as a window rather than a mirror, which is in my view the best way to make it entertaining and relevant to others.

Paradoxically, I think this outlook can also be beneficial to more personal poetry, because being in the habit of seeing herself as only part of a wider universe, rather than as the whole concern, enables a writer to universalise her experience, giving her an eye for those details that will resonate immediately with others. The second poem of "January Triptych", on the loss of a father, is a good example:

Grief

It arrives in the mail
with a licence renewal,

wears the thin grey socks
never returned.

It curls up, settles in
where I least expect –

a note slipped between pages,
a bald head in a supermarket queue.

Now the thin grey socks of old men struck an immediate chord with me, because exactly the same detail was true of my father. But so did the bald head in the supermarket, and in this case the detail was different; my father had very white hair and for a long time after his death, I couldn't see a white-haired old man without thinking it was him. This shows, I think, that if the poet gets it right, it isn't necessary for the reader to share every incidental detail of her experience; it is the basic situation, the essential in the experience, that travels.

While I don't object to poems having notes (especially when, as in this case, they are at the back), I think some of these are unnecessary; if your reader has not heard of marchpane or doesn't know the translation of remise, he can soon look them up. Also, though I'm averse to suggesting any subject is off limits, I do think there are territories that have been so thoroughly claimed that one needs to be sure one has a new angle. My first thought on reading the title "Bertha Mason Speaks" was "Wide Sargasso Sea!" and I didn't see anything in the poem that Rhys hadn't already said in the novel. But in a poem like "Princesse de Lamballe" (one of Marie Antoinette's pals who lost her head during the Revolution), the head held aloft on the pike memorably sees a side of Paris its owner never saw when alive:

growling alleys and ravenous back streets
guttered with urine, nightsoil and vermin,
toothless, frayed women queuing for bread

It's this heightened awareness, a window on something one hasn't seen or been conscious of before, that the best of these poems can provide.