Whistle

by Martin Figura

Martin Figura's riveting sequence of poems about his childhood, his father killing his mother, and the consequences of that upon the whole family is remarkable for the story he doesn't tell, as much as for the story he does. Exercising a humanising restraint, delicately balanced, these poems are an attempt to excise memory, to fill in some of the missing gaps, but the sense one is left with most of all is absence and loss. Moving, brave, unsentimental, Whistle doesn't blow the whistle on the family. Instead it rather heartbreakingly tries to piece together the fragments of a life, shattered by murder. Sometimes lyrical, rarely angry, often tender, Figura's soul-mate throughout is the understanding and watchful eye of the camera: 'One day I shall hold them with white gloves, / carefully brush away the dust and look / through their shadows and fingerprints' - Jackie Kay.

Genres: Poetry

77 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Martin Figura was born in Liverpool in 1956. He is married to the poet Helen Ivory and works part-time at the Writers’ Centre, Norwich and as a photographer. He is a member of the poetry ensemble The Joy of 6. He is Chair of the Café Writers Live Literature organisation in Norwich.

Whistle is also a stage show produced by Apples and Snakes which has been on tour throughout the UK. Nasty Little Press has published a pamphlet of his amusing poems 'Boring the arse off Young People in November 2010.

Reviews

[Tôpher Mills · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the second book I’ve read by Martin Figura and I’m definitely going to read more. Wonderful poems evoke a life blighted by tragedy and yet surviving with passion and love. A great collection.

[Kathleen Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve often been disappointed by poetry cabaret performances at literature festivals - so often over-acted, precious, amateurish, with a lack of balance between poetry and cyber-technology - it’s rare to see something really good. So I approached ‘Whistle’ with a degree of scepticism. And was unprepared to be blown away by it.

It’s very low-tech - a video projector unobtrusively parked, a stage with low lighting, a screen for the black and white images. Martin Figura came on-stage and stood, equally unobtrusively, behind the microphone in the shadows at the side of the screen, dressed in black and white. He began to speak and the images began to flicker across the screen and I was immediately lost in the story.

My mother and I pose in Sunday best
in front of a cottage with roses
around the door. She dreams .....

The performance is a blend of poems, letters read by a female voice (his wife, the poet Helen Ivory), and his own narrative links. There are no pyrotechnics, no special effects, no emotions except those generated by the words themselves and their relationships with the images. I was moved, delighted, saddened, and moved again by the story that unfolded.

When Martin was 9 his father, a polish refugee who came to Britain during the war, murdered Martin’s mother.

‘Through the wall, it causes no more than a ripple
on the surface of milk....’

His father - diagnosed with mental health problems - was placed in Broadmoor, and Martin and his two sisters were consigned to boarding schools and orphanages after an uncle and aunt decided they couldn’t give them a home. Salvation came in the shape of the Piggotts - a large catholic family who had been neighbours and who rescued Martin from school to bring him up as one of their own brood.

‘Taken prisoner by this bashing, clouting clan. Jammed between
Danny and John, the second and third boys with their shock
white hair and flying fists. Dragged through lanes and hedges
into ponds and up trees for birds’ eggs. ......
Flying over fields on the Honda fifty, being chased
by the mad dog. The mad dog burying bones in your bed;
hurling itself downstairs.......
Family parties at the drop of a hat: party cans and egg-
rolls, trifles and crisps, hokey-cokeys and terrible dancing
to Status Quo.....'

The poems try to claim fragments of memory to bring his mother June to life. There are a few black and white photographs of her as a young woman, a young wife, quotes from her letters, a glimpse of her daily life.

Her own face appears in the furniture.
She shines small brass animals back to life.
A tiny kitchen disappears into the mist

of an afternoon. A sponge cake rises
behind the oven door. He watches
the last slow hour on the factory clock.

... we can nurse baby for half an hour and then you must put him to bed. I insist on this as I want him to know his Daddy as much as me. He must grow up to love us equally. We must give him a good life so he will be proud of us.

Poems reconstruct a family history, trace the rehabilitation of Martin’s father, and the awkward attempts at a relationship after his release.

The girl I’m going to marry
sits with a cup of tea on her lap
while Dad fusses over the gravy,
peels the potatoes under the tap.....

It’s a stunning show because it’s so honest and doesn’t try to push any buttons. There are just the words and the images. Martin is also a photographer, so he knows how to use visual imagery.

I bought the collection, published by Arrowhead Press, so that I could read the poems again. And as I read, I can see the images floating through my head. What it would be like to read the poems without those images, I don’t know, but I have a feeling that they still stand up. Poetry as narrative autobiography is rare - and even rarer when it works as this does. Whistle has won awards, notably at the Edinburgh Festival, and it deserves them.

Martin Figura 'Strange Boy' was my Tuesday Poem this week over at http://www.kathleenjonesauthor.blogsp...

Clips from the show http://www.martinfigura.co.uk/whistle...

Martin’s website http://www.martinfigura.co.uk/

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

If I were to tell you that Martin Figura's father murdered his mother when he was a boy and ended up in Broadmoor and that Martin has written a book of poems about his childhood I can already see you stepping back and turning away. I can imagine you thinking how sad and what a bleak and gloomy book it must be and not the sort of thing you'd want to read but you'd be entirely wrong. This is a book about growing up and as much about ordinary childhood experiences, about being naughty….


I can be trusted on my own for a few minutes.
First off, a big spoon of Andrews in a glass
followed by orange squash and water - instant pop
then the loaf and carving knife


Cutting soft white bread isn't easy when you're seven,
You do your best - two ragged doorstops.
Rewrap the bread and put the knife back
exactly where you found it.
from How to steal

We all know, that a pen should be kept
in a pencil case in your satchel. But


At times for convenience, you will leave it
on a wall, or stuff it in your pocket, so later


It can slip out onto a bus seat, if it hasn't already
fallen into the grass during a handstand.
From Fountain Pen

… about moments that are as sharply focussed as a black and white photo. Last night I went to the Roundhouse, Camden Town to listen to Whistle being read by Martin against a backdrop, a montage of images to go with the poems. He is also a talented photographer and his father was never without a camera. And there was his mother, June Figura, smiling, writing love letters, making perfect lemon meringue pie, Having her hair permed at the same saloon as Cilla Black's mother and making sure her son was well turned out with a quiff looking like Cliff Richard's (as if that was a good thing).

'What if she had lived?' Martin said

Listen the violins are playing
playing your favourite waltz
On the dance floor the accordionist is stamping
his feet in tune to your song

The singer
the singer
the singer
has words for all your lost years.

For an hour or so in Camden last night she did live and his father Frank with his love of Polish sausages and his ambitions for his son to be a doctor or another Chopin, to make something of his life. Yes there were moments of sadness when I wanted to rush up on stage, take this small boy by the hand, give him a hug and tell him it was going to be all right. I didn't move from my seat because there wasn't really a small boy on stage but a grown man and Martin is about my age and much taller than I am and he didn't need me to tell him it was going to work out because that was his gift to us, the story of his life.

Do buy the book http://www.arrowheadpress.co.uk/books...

[Julia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whistle is Martin Figura's second collection and is an interesting read. It is very different in tone from his first book Ahem which falls somewhere on the border between serious poetry and light verse. Whistle however, occupies an entirely different space. Figura's style and subject matter put me in mind of Sharon Olds. Although not so overloaded with painful concrete detail as Old's work, Figura's new collection has all the power of Olds at her most vivid and painful and gains rather than loses from his use of gentle understatement. This is a book in which Figura deals with the difficult and painful subject of his mother's death at the hands of his father when Figura and his sisters were small children, which left them orphaned. Martin deals with this difficult territory delicately and assuredly. This to me feels like a writer who has really found his "voice". All the irony of Ahem is still there lurking in the wings, but this voice doesn't need to overstate the humour or rub our noses in the pathos. The book moves deftly and swiftly through Figura's history: his parents' marriage, his own birth, his relationship with his sister, his father's return to Poland, hearing the dreadful news right through to the birth of Figura's own child. For me the crux of the book being the poems "The News" and "Vanishing Point":

"Uncle Phillip turns onto the busy road.
The boy pedals like mad to stay with us, but we stretch away
and leave him stranded, disappearing..."

Figura handles his subject matter with a delicacy that you can't help wishing that the adults in his life had applied to him. His is a tragedy made worse by indifferent adults. However, this is not a collection asking for sympathy but more a poetic voice coming to terms with loss and piecing together the fragments of a shattered past, all beautifully framed by his uses of photographic reference and his clear love of the camera. In Figura's case less is more and although he is sometimes economical with the details he evokes an incredibly strong sense of time, place and event.