Wood Bee Poet

Queen of Hearts by Hannah Hodgson 

The Poetry Business 2023 New Poet’s Prize was declared opened a couple of weeks ago; it is open to 17–24-year-olds and will be judged by Kim Moore. This declaration has nudged me finally to review a pamphlet from the 2021 competition, also judged by Moore, which I read earlier this year and has been sitting on my bedside table for six months waiting for me to find time to write about it. 

The pamphlet in question is Queen of Hearts by Hannah Hodgson, which seems to me as good as – and better than – work by much more established poets that gets far more social media publicity and acclaim. I don’t know why this is (well, I do: poetry readers, including reviewers, tend to wait until any given writer has hit a certain critical mass of praise before they join in) but it should be rectified because Hodgson’s work – and that of 2021’s other winners Safia Khan, Karl Knights, and Charlotte Shevchenko Knight – deserves a wide readership (I’m very pleased to find that Hodgson had a full collection, 163 Days, out this year from Seren, which I will be sure finds a place on my necessarily curtal Austerity Christmas list). 

Hodgson’s collection particularly startled (and then sank into) me, not because she is a palliative care patient who brings an unusual, difficult and inspiring perspective to the big subjects like life, death, love, and dildos, but because her imagery, pacing and sheer clarity of thought are just so arresting (“We specialise in living when we shouldn’t. / Death between our teeth, a cold black flag.” she says in ‘Colonel Mustard is Waiting in the Dining Room’). Somehow, Hodgson manages to create a surreal world from hospital and house interiors, where the psychological turmoil of her family comes through as clearly and movingly as her own – perhaps more so.  

While the physical pain of her condition is not ignored (‘Last Night, I Finally Remembered the Screaming’ is a shocking journey into the agony behind the anaesthetised mind) neither is it highlighted or played for pity. And as for fear – surely there must be fear if you live in such a position – but if that is part of Hodgson’s experience, when we look for it (and this is one of the marvels of the pamphlet) we find in its place fury and humour, the former sharpening the latter, and the latter leavening the former. 

There is the fury at her betrayal by contemporaries (“Eight months // of his pretending to be dying, whilst I actually was” – ‘Year 11’), fury at the church (“Our vicar left the Church of England upon legislation / of gay marriage, and when I saw him in ASDA / he walked right through me, a miracle of mine, I guess.” – ‘Jesus Loved Men Too’) and fury at the lack of Covid provision for the disabled (a poem that is difficult to quote from, entitled ‘Do you ever think about all of the photos in which you’re accidentally in the background?’). 

The humour is, perhaps inevitably, dark and generally understated, but there is a wry surreal smile sitting behind many poems here, and which (like Lewis Carrol’s Cheshire Cat) fades in and out leaving only its general sensation until it finally takes on its full form in the Caroline Bird inspired hallucinatory madness of ‘A Family Christmas’ towards the end of the collection. Before that, Hodgson’s humour serves many purposes; for example, to take the edge off the potentially over-depressive ‘Beauty’ where she brackets the central five couplets (which begin “Summer is heavy in painful bones” and end “My mother couldn’t look at me without grimacing”) with two grimly amusing comments (1) “Emptying a stoma bag is a transferrable skill – // an icing bag of shit piped down the toilet” and (2) “Tesco had given me priority delivery – / until I spent two weeks in hospital, // where I was briefly pronounced dead,  / cancelling my slot automatically.” The effect of this is interesting, the archly raised eyebrow almost heightens the power of the poem’s central theme, which is the poet’s own body image, by sucking out of it any trace of self-pity. It is, I think, a deft and mature move. 

The surrealism evokes something, perhaps, of the in-and-out-of-consciousness daily experience of those living with constant serious illness, where the reality of an ‘anarchist’ body and the ‘void’ of being either passed out or sedated appear – through Hodgson’s sharp use of metaphor – to blend with each other into a heightened rather than a diminished level of awareness. In ‘Clairvoyant for the Unconscious’ she describes her bedroom as “the space used to come back / from transparency, reclaiming autonomy / from the void” as she and her parents wait “for the breeze of oxygen to leak / through the window seal of my brain”. This room-within-a-room (both within the stanzaic room of the poem itself) create an almost claustrophobic sensation which heighten the relief of the ‘breeze of oxygen’ for the reader and turn this short poem into an HD evocation of the movement from ‘transparency’ back to consciousness. 

One of my favourite poems here is the wonderful ‘translation & interpretation’ of Jules Laforgue’s ‘Complainte d’une convalescence en mai’ (‘Convalescence in May’), where the poet’s body is “an anchor on a seabed” and her brain “sits pickling in a jar” but both she and her tragic ward mate are “so sick (they are) disembodied”. Hodgson takes Laforgue’s images and reimagines them to her own symbolic purpose, weaving a world between her parents’ “unmedicated” pain and her own dreams, where she wanders “along the coastlines of (her) imagination”.  

Something else I like about this collection is the way the imagery leaps from the expected to the leftfield and back again with ease and grace. Many poems use metaphors and similes that emphasise the body as part of the natural world and the natural world as part of the body as she considers both her internal and the external physical worlds (“my body retreats and advances, tidal”, “organs like obstructing hawthorn”, “I waited there / for someone to pluck me / like a fresh egg from the coop”, “Doctors, wasps.”), which both serves to increase the sense that the poet is inhabiting a hinterland between life and death, and also gives priority to life over death – not a position that can always come easily to someone on palliative care. Hodgson only occasionally allows herself to play on the old ‘vegetable’ insults thrown at the mentally unwell (“We wait to soften as vegetables must / in boiling water” she says in ‘The Mark Holland Trust’, one of the few poems where bitterness seems close to despair).  

But in between such images we hear of her relationships with her family: “The three of us are like fine bone china”, “We operate as a carriage clock, our minds / equal, opposite, unable to touch”, and the unbearably moving (for me as a father) “Once this is over / I’ll surrender every candle he hates; embrace the familial equivalent / of a fireman’s lift – saved from this awful void of space.” From the organic natural images she keeps for her own body, to the small, intricate, utilitarian objects that symbolise her family, the reader gets a sense of a small, precious human world at the mercy of a capricious universe – particularly during the Pandemic, to which a lot of these poems relate. 

The loss of autonomy that comes with serious illness is another central theme, and some poems feel like attempts to wrest back some self-determination from her situation. In ‘Exhibitionist’ she refers to herself as an “exhibit” in “this museum / of self”, and during what is presumably an operation she is almost sinisterly objectified as she says “Somewhere, a doctor / is live streaming this / to his students.” And in ‘Missing Posters’, she finishes “I’m a blow-up version of myself; my valve belongs to someone else.” but even here it feels as though the very writing of the poem, the expressing of this humiliation, is an act of defiance. 

The body, the poet’s body, the disabled body, is inevitably at the centre of the collection, and the variety of ways that Hodgson describes the body is like an artist trying various angles to find the right way of expressing what they need to express – perhaps even like Picasso where all the perspectives are integrated and merged. From “the entrapment” of the body, to the body as “a car aflame”; and, wonderfully, from the body as an “anarchist” to the body as an “anchor”.  I wrote out all the direct refences to ‘body’ to look for themes, and as I saw them written in the order in which they appear in the collection, it occurred to me that they are a poem in themselves, which I include here (let’s call it a found poem) as a final way of recommending this excellent pamphlet:  

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You can buy Queen of Hearts by Hannah Hodgson from The Poetry Business New Poets List, here. 

Any reviewer of Denise Riley who has read her 2000 book The Words of Selves, proceeds if not with caution, then with a definite sense of unease. There are two principal reasons for this. One is that Riley’s work is difficult; she is known as a poets’ poet for good reason – her poems contain a lot for those knowledgeable about poetry to get their teeth into, but on a first reading many can appear a little like crossword puzzles to be solved, codes to be broken. And this is intimidating – to review and misread her work would be to expose oneself as an inadequate reviewer. She knows this, and comments in The Words of Selves, specifically on the interpretation of literary references: “When reviewers interpret a poem, they may confidently misconstrue an allusion. Often they’ll think up the most ingeniously elaborate sources for something in the text that had a plainer association, a far less baroque connection, behind it.” (p.74) So there is the concern of making a fool of yourself by over-reading (something I’m sure I’ve been guilty of in this blog more than once); that’s the first reason. The second is that much space is given in The Words of Selves to questioning and problematising the lyric I, and Riley is skeptical, even scathing, of biographical ‘selves’ in contemporary poetry: “Poetry can be heard to stagger under a weight of self-portrayal…Today’s lyric form (is) frequently a vehicle for innocuous display and confessionals” (p.94) And yet, for Riley’s reviewer, the fact of her son’s tragic death and the fact that she has written in prose and poetry about this, leaves the poet’s biographical self very close to the surface, and (the reviewer might feel) liable to breach at any time. How then to know at what point the real Denise Riley steps back and an imagined subject takes over? As one of Riley’s great philosophical concerns is the means by which language creates the Self, the uncertainty that Lurex (Picador) creates in the reader around what is being said and by whom, is unlikely to be coincidental.  

And this sense of unease is not entirely out of place. Riley herself writes of the “linguistic unease” of the writer, and so there is some solidarity perhaps between these two unequal partners in the generation of a text’s meaning, the writer-poet and the reader-reviewer. If we can proceed together with a joint feeling of guilt and inadequacy, the job of searching for meaning might not seem so lonely. 

So, to the review.  

Riley’s discomfiture at the intense focus on her personal grief is one of the central themes in Lurex I would, tentatively and with all due caveats, suggest. Part of this seems down to the inadequacy of the word itself (“’Grief’ is too bland a word, and I’ve always found it irritating, all the more so since he died” she says in ‘Beggars of Life’); and part of it could be due to a physical reluctance to be looked at – to be ‘seen’ in even the smallest way (“Hopeless to caution the scanning eye ‘keep off me’ – an unfocused look just is promiscuous” she says in ‘And as I sit and I feel the gaze’, riffing on WS Graham). But mostly there is a sense that Riley does not see her grief as anything special – that singling out an individual’s misfortune in a world of pain is not entirely, for want of a better word, appropriate:

What authority could my old pain, broadcast, allow me to claim?  

– None, I’d say.  

The humans sound their billions-fold democracy of distress – a dying spillage.  

How clear and plain its songs, how hummable. 

from ‘Were I September’ 

These beautiful words, evoking another of Riley’s central philosophical concerns, solidarity (worked in with the gorgeous irony implicit in ‘the humans’ – and we’ll come to irony in a moment), are the final ones of the collection; and they carry all the weight that this privileged position affords them. 

This unease with a focus on herself in Lurex chimes with comments Riley has made in interviews, and I can think of very few other poets who appear to feel this way about the limelight (and those I can think of are all women I should note) – it is enormously refreshing in a culture/industry that overwhelmingly encourages inflated egos, over-confidence, and self-aggrandisement. 

But we can assume too much about a writer, even if our assumptions appear borne out by public appearances and other sources, and I realise that my inferences above risk falling into the “all too common” reviewers’ trap of imagining “character profiles or amateur psychoanalyses of the author” (Words of Selves, p.74) but the sadness of the lines quoted above, modulated between the personal and the political, the past and the present, the internal and the external, show how meaning in Riley’s poems is no simple thing, and the character/psychology of the poet could only ever be a speculative point of departure; a springboard perhaps, but too flimsy a one to use with any confidence.  

And anyway, as with much modernist writing, the question is not always ‘what do these words mean?’ but more ‘where do they take me?’. In the case of Lurex, they may lead you to continue the journey of personal and political speculation about the generalities of loss, grief, loneliness, and old age, or the specificities of post-war adoption policy, personal experience of abuse, and the act of writing; Lurex is about all these things. But lots of poetry collections are about these things, or things much like them; what is special about Riley is that her writing is about them while simultaneously asking questions (of us? of itself?) about how language creates us, what we are within language, and what language is, materially. These are not just a wordsmith’s musings or a smart-arse poet’s cryptography; they are questions fundamental to the human experience of Being. It always sounds a bit self-satisfied and pompous for a reviewer to declare a poet ‘important’ (it’s up there with ‘one of our finest living poets’ as an unforgivable reviewers’ cliché) but in spite of myself I can’t help agreeing with what seems to be commonly accepted, that Riley is, especially in these times when self-identification seems so central to cultural discourse… pretty important. 

Yet, where I say Riley says this or Riley says that in this review, I can imagine her wincing should she ever read it, because it is clear that she doesn’t really believe that she writes the poetry at all, and that it would be much closer to the truth to say that the words write her. She refers to this obliquely and directly in Lurex, and in The Words of Selves she states it plainly as the paradox at the heart of her ‘linguistic unease’; it’s a lovely passage:

Words are brought forward as things, even if their semantic element is not completely overthrown. Stuff predominates, but sense insistently wells up through it later. This generates awkwardness at being called a writer, because really I am largely written. Writing, my writing, has got to know far more than I know for it to be of any interest whatsoever. It knows superficially – at its surface laid bare to scrutiny. I wrote it, but more interestingly I didn’t; yet I am not its agent or vice versa. As writer, I must be the ostensible source of my own work, yet I know that I’ve only been the conduit for the onrush, or for the rusty trickle, of language.

from The Words of Selves, p. 90

This understanding of language as worker and language-user as work-in-progress (that which is ‘worked on’ to quote ‘What are you working on’ from Lurex) follows the Continental strand of philosophy much beloved of Riley and which is central to many of the Culture War (sic) squabbles that have been flustering people for the past five or six years. Riley is concerned with how we are created by our shared understanding of words, and as such she is as worth reading as Judith Butler on gender and identity. Lurex introduces complexity to the question of gender pronouns without claxon-signalling a position in any spurious ‘debate’, by highlighting them as a feature of language. The importance of pronouns has been part of Riley’s work since her first collection, Marxism for Infants (1977), where she says in ‘A note on sex and the ‘reclaiming of language’’, “The work is / e.g. to write ‘she’ and for that to be a statement / of fact only, and not a strong image / of everything which is not-you, which sees you”. But where in that early work the pronoun reference seems most likely aimed at steeling feminism to wrest language from the patriarchy, in Lurex they take on a more paradoxical, less easily defined importance (although her pokes at the patriarchy remain gloriously intact): 

To write the word she does less than you might think. Or it does more. 

To write the word she does more than you might think. Or it does less. 

What about he? – Well, what about he. 

Typing a solitary word, indifferent, doesn’t do much one way or another. 

from ‘Colour words, person words’

The pronoun minefield is stepped into with almost comic glibness in ‘Prize Cultures’, during a wittily sardonic comment on the contemporary poetry scene, where we read: 

‘They’ is storming the Recommendeds for International Pronouns of Boldness (mine was always an ‘it’). 

from ‘Prize Cultures’

This poem was published in the TLS as a stand-alone, and I can’t help feeling that if it had been written by a less well-known, and less incontrovertibly good, poet, it might have received words of criticism from some areas (perhaps it did and I missed them). But, like colours, our perception of poems changes depending on those that surround them, and the sequence that follows ‘Prize Cultures’ in Lurex, ‘1948’ – fifteen shocking and powerful poems about the abuse of a child who I take to be Riley herself (my doubts about autobiography in Lurex notwithstanding) – shows that the poem’s ‘it’ is far from mocking other people’s pronoun choices, it is in fact a sign of the dehumanisation visited on an adopted child by violent adoptive parents, and as such it is a comment on the profound importance of what we call each other and what we call ourselves (if there is an archness to the line quoted above it is aimed at the current fuss made around pronouns rather than the pronoun choices themselves):  

I tell my past it’s passed, though it can’t tell. 

More training, to teach obedience: the toddler 

who’d wet herself gripped by the scruff of the neck 

and her nose rubbed in it, in freshly damp white cotton. 

Their real beloved dog I envied, while I stayed an ‘it’  

burrowing through straw quills in the kennel 

to study the grace of the dog, to poach the secret of being liked. 

Yet gradually, my life as an ‘it’ has grown muscular. 

Almost, I am that dog. 

‘from 1948’

This “muscular” life as an ‘it’ is key here I think, because it represents the strength of a learned empowerment and self-actualisation, the arrival at a point of that, albeit ironic, dog-like grace. 

Riley is an advocate for and analyst of irony, as mentioned above, and she deploys it throughout Lurex to great and subtle effect, often burying it just below the surface, and as an addendum to allusions. One example of this is her apparent allusion to Lucretius in the prose poem ‘All, as a rule, fall towards their wound’, which while it is a reference to Lucretius, it is also pointing us back to Riley herself, the prose writer rather than the poet, as it is a quote which forms the title and part of the structure of a chapter in The Words of Selves (‘The wounded fall in the direction of their wound’, Ch 4). Is this irony? Well, I think so, but irony is, as any reader of Riley’s work knows, more complicated than Alanis Morissette’s critics would have us believe. Here is an allusion which simultaneously directs the reader away from and towards the poet (perhaps what allusion always does – a multi-layering of irony?), and which echoes in poetic form her own line of thought from more than twenty years ago; it calls out and back to itself, it distances and modifies – all features of irony mentioned by Riley. The poem gives symbolic resonance to the notion that we do ourselves a psychological disservice, having been as Riley says, “wounded by an aggressive description”, even a self-description, if we dwell too immovably on ourselves as wounded. 

The wounded fall in the direction of their wound in the sense that the injury, if narrated enough and without transformation, has the terrible capacity to embrace and infiltrate the whole person…I can easily become not just ‘the walking wounded’, but in myself a walking wound. Walking, and talking too; and once I am a talking wound, I am at grave risk of being heard only as a scar on legs.

From The Words of Selves p. 125

This brings us back to both the wound of a child physically and verbally abused by those charged with her protection, and perhaps to the different and differently difficult wound of being labelled a grieving mother.  

Here is the poem in full: 

The sentence at the centre of the poem, is also at the heart of its meaning, relating it back to the chapter quoted above, as I think the title encourages us to do: “Here the raised axe is no more than its action” – its meaning is removed in the same way as it is from words which have no receiving ear (“should a human receiver / fail to bear that light / clatter where no ear is.” – ‘What are you working on?’). I feel that in both the case of language and the violent action we are in Kantian – or more likely Hegelian – territory here, with a stripping down to the noumenon.  Poetry, like religion perhaps, edging towards the unknowable. This death-bringing gesture is a monument to the dead, and its meaning ends there. It is not the ‘old violence’ itself. What is to be gained, the wondering voice wonders, from sharpening those painful, even self-shattering, events from the past and making them real again by considering oneself a ‘survivor’? Would the recipient of this old violence attain some form of “purely secular grace”, or just become a “walking wound”? But the poem ends with a caution which may be aimed at the speaker herself or outwards at those who are tempted to define themselves through their victimhood: Agnes of Rome is patron saint of among other things, girls – and more particularly virgins and victims of sexual abuse – here I take her to be symbolising women as victims, which would of course include Riley herself if she in her autobiographical self is an intended presence – and the double meaning of Agnes’s emblematic lamb “bleating” feels pointed, but I’m not sure what to make of it. Perhaps this is the bleating of a lost or scared lamb – or a bleat of pain – rather than one of complaint. 

In common with a number of the poems in the collection, colour words abound, and they are given such physicality (“cloaks drip carmine and rose velvets glow”) that they seem to exemplify and elucidate what Riley calls “the flesh of words” (The Words of Selves, p.111), the materiality of language that creates us even as we feel we create it. This is why I think that separating Riley’s prose from her poetry is a mistake – they are both part of the same project of working with this raw material of language that is a physical reality in the world – her prose is expository, while her poetry is exemplifying and experimental. 

What lays across Riley’s work, for all its complexity, its sadness and its nuanced anger, is a deeply intelligent and knowing humour; the eagle-eyed reader will have noticed numerous instances of this above. Her humour is inseparable from her irony and comes across with varying degrees of centrality to the poems but is always present even if on the periphery (central to ‘Prize Cultures’ and ‘To a Lady, viewed by a Head-Louse’, on the periphery of ‘Another Agony in the Garden’, ‘Lone Star clattering’, ‘Person on train in August’ and others); and it is as much part of her language’s meaning-making as the grief, loneliness and “vast motherliness”. There is, we might say, a twinkle in her ‘I’. “Dark yet sparkly – / the seriousness of it!” she says in the titular ‘Lurex’. This describes a quality of Lurex the material but could also stand in for the paradoxical language of the Self itself…profound yet silly, heavy yet light, depressing yet amusing etc. 

‘Lone Star clattering’ is a nice example of peripheral humour. It picks up on the “light / clatter where no ear is” from ‘What are you working on?’ and blends the Texan imagery with the idea of someone happy in their own company (being alone she is in fact in a ‘lone star state’) to create a brief inner monologue that again expresses doubt that dwelling on the wound of past pain is helpful: “to canter around its crimson / rosette would tart up a harm”. The poem has begun in high seriousness with “What got done to me stains / through my hopes of passing // as fully human” but here in the third couplet ‘canter’ raises a small smile as it blends the horsiness of the Lone Star State with a very British sense of brisk and easy human movement, which is then consolidated with the “crimson / rosette” which ironically turns a traumatic wound image into a child-like sporting award, and takes it further with “tart up”, jarring with both the seriousness of the poem’s opening and the Americana of “yellow rose” and “Amarillo” that come a few couplets later. Having been shot down like an enemy fighter jet in the first line of the final couplet, the speaker then declares “Yet do I rise, a tad orange”, turning into both morning star and phoenix, picking up perhaps the rousing declamatory mode of Shelley’s “rise like lions”, only to puncture it with the archaic Britishism “tad” in the final clause, the lovely intentional bathos echoing the “orangey grey” of the morning light in ‘Plaguey winter’, and maybe even the “strayed montbretia’s orange flecks” in ‘Is there nobody in here?’. I wonder whether this kind of inter-poem repetition of particular words and intra-poem deflation of the move towards bombast, is a poetic experiment in irony’s potential for protecting the identifying Self against what Riley refers to in The Words of Selves as “cadences for antagonism…(which)…rise as syntactical forms”. Noting that “there may be a syntax of both remembered and anticipatory hostility”, she goes on to ask, “Is there some way in which irony itself can modify this grammar in its latent capacity for damage?” (p.171-2). 

So, I may be guilty of “confidently misconstru(ing)” Lurex, and “think(ing) up…ingeniously elaborate sources” for its associations (as I say above, it wouldn’t be the first time); but I choose to read this brilliant collection as an experiment in psycholinguistics and the sheer materiality of language, and as an expression of the ways in which people (particularly women of course but I don’t see why men need be entirely excluded) hurt by past violence might work towards new strength and grace; and more, through the “clear and plain…songs” of our “billions-fold democracy of distress “, which are “hummable” like plainchant, and hymns, and the buzzing of bees, we might do it in solidarity with each other. 

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You can buy Lurex from Picador, here. 

You can buy The Words of Selves from Stanford University Press, here. 

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Some online material relating to Denise Riley: 

Riley in conversation with Professor Lisa Baraitser from Studies in the Maternal, specifically on the interruption of the sense of temporality described in Time Lived, Without It’s Flow, here. 

Conversation between Riley, Emily Berry and Max Porter concerning their experiences of loss, in which Riley explains among other things her dislike of the word ‘grief’ and her reasons for writing about her son’s death and the language she used to do it, here. 

Riley and Berry discuss a couple of poems which were later published in Lurex, here. 

John Self’s Guardian review of Time Lived, Without It’s Flow and Selected Poems, here. 

Ange Mlinko’s 2016 review of Say Something Back, here. 

Interview in PN Review with Romana Huk from 1995, in which Riley gives in-depth analysis of her work. Behind a paywall – but if you don’t subscribe to PN Review, you should consider it, here.  

An interesting essay by Marxist-feminist Helen Charman, who was inspired by Riley’s early collections but is suspicious of the bourgeois attention given to her later work, here.  

κόσμον τόνδε, τὸν αὐτὸν ἁπάντων, οὔτε τις θεῶν οὐτε ἀνθρώπων ἐποίησεν, ἀλλ’ ἦν ἀεὶ καὶ ἔστιν καὶ ἔσται πῦρ ἀείζωον, ἁπτόμενον μέτρα καὶ ἀποσβεννύμενον μέτρα

Stewart Lee

I can write jokes, I just choose not to

Heraclitus

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You don’t get a blaze of laughter but you should
Laughter is like fire
it crackles and splutters
it purifies
Wild like laughter like fire

It dances, it dances
as though mocking time itself
with its not-existing-existence,
and gone
As your brain ticks beneath the heat of the lighting

The machine of your mouth
The subtler machine within
your sandpaper brain
The scratch of your delivery
What you have done is create

substantial nothing
It purifies
Your lips on the mic in caesura – flow
you create
sound after silence

brute noise after a system of manipulations
joy as a by-product
of a political point
The stomach of an auditorium
eructing

like in the cartoon
where the human-like non-human animal
burps so fiercely it sets ablaze
chars to a carbon squiggle
anyone close

It crackles and splutters
and your brain ticks beneath the heat of the lighting
Did you get that
Joy as a by-product of the political point
it purifies

The comedic ouroboros
If there is an escape from ideology
it lies somewhere within the circle
of the seriously silly

Although they are two very different debut collections, Inhale/Exile by Abeer Ameer and Mother, Nature by Aoife Lyall share a number of similarities when considered together, the most obvious being that they are both concerned with notions of Home. In Inhale/Exile, Home is Iraq, or perhaps the more ancient Mesopotamian homeland, ‘the land of two rivers’, from which her own family and many of the characters in her poems fled during the days of Saddam Hussain’s totalitarian Baathist regime. But Home is also the UK for a poet who was born in Sunderland and raised in Wales; and so, much of the work is suffused with both a refugee’s paradoxical longing to return to what is now an ‘alien land / called home’ (The Fugitive’s Wife (vi) return) – Ameer uses the evocative Welsh word hiraeth in her acknowledgement of gratitude to the Iraqi diaspora community – and an understanding of non-belonging in a land which remains foreign: language errors, for example causing a recent exile, who I take to be the poet’s father, ‘an awkwardness he’ll know well’ (The Waiting Groom). The awkwardness is not Ameer’s as a second generation Iraqi immigrant to the UK, but that of her parents’ and her grandparents’ generations, for whom Inhale/Exhale stands as an impressive tribute. For Lyall, simultaneously celebrating the birth of one child and mourning the loss by miscarriage of another, the speaker/poet herself is Home to her surviving baby: ‘I am your home / Hold me close and you can hear the ocean’ (‘Hermit Crab’). The ‘I’ and the ‘you’ of these poems exist in a state of symbiosis, their mutual dependencies are the fabric that binds them and protects them from the outside world. They are the universe drawn inwards, and for a time (painfully short for the mother) they are hermetically sealed and yet all-containing. But this is no smugly beatific Earth Mother; the Mother-as-Home in Mother, Nature bears all the pain and responsibilty of nature’s personification: ‘…I tried not to cry. I felt your stomach fill / with the violant sting of golden milk. / My body bled for you.’ (‘3oz’); ‘There is no room for error / (…) / …If I open / my eyes to the chance of falling / I will fall. And down will come baby, / cradle and all.’ (‘Trapeze’). And the grief of a mother’s loss, Lyall shows us, is an emptiness which is far from metaphorical; it is of course the all-too-physical reality of an unoccupied womb, ‘this house your home in me a hollow place’ (‘Ithaca’). This is a truth we may have already known, but Lyall’s language begins to make us feel it. Body-liness and the material mechanics of life pervade Mother, Nature, from the contractions of childbirth (astonishingly rendered in the typography of ‘Labour’) to the ‘unfolded’ family resemblances of ‘“Origami…”’, a well-crafted concrete poem in the shape of an ear (knowing where to place words on the page is a particular strength of Lyall’s), to ‘each starry breath’ of the sleeping child in ‘Caledonian Sleeper’. And breathing, of course, is also central to  Inhale/Exile, as the title suggests: the held breath of ‘The Diver’ who dredges the Tigris of dead bodies ‘holding his breath hoping for peace’; the ‘shallow breaths’ of the boy hiding from Saddam’s soldiers in a watertank in Sulaymaniyah (‘Kurdish’); and the breath that brings music from a reed flute, whose ‘inhale / is your exhale’, and whose ‘larynx speaks your exile’ in one of the collection’s several stand-out poems, ‘The Reed Flute and I’. And just as Lyall considers the unspoken name of her lost child to be a ‘folded treasure map / I hold in my throat’ which when she is lost will ‘lead me back to you’ (‘Your name’), Ameer also makes a connection between words and motherhood as her speaker struggles to find a word for a sensation of survivor’s guilt that she cannot quite express, searching ‘for a link between / the tip of the tongue / and the body of the larynx / vocal cords stretched / to umbilical chords’, going on to ask what the word is that could describe the feeling ‘when the words / form a tumour in your throat / but do not make a sound?’ (‘A Word I&II’). The relationship between the mother, the word, and the body is implicit in a number of Ameer’s poems, but made extraordinarily explicit in the third poem of the four-poem sequence ‘The Interpreter (Alif to Thaa)’ where she notes the inadequacy of English to capture Arabic’s intense employment of body metaphors, as a son recalls the last time he heard his mother’s voice: ‘she calls him the light of her eyes, / her heart, / her after-liver,  / says she’ll put him on her head, / go to sacrifice for him, / that his leaving burst her gall-bladder / and dragged her soul from her body.’ English translation from Arabic, Ameer tells us, ‘is too dry to taste the spoken blood / which flows through gutteral throats. ’ (‘Taaت ’) and we can well believe her. While Ameer’s poems are social, political and outward-looking, Lyall’s are ostensibly almost the opposite – their power coming from the unwavering gaze of a mother on her child – but the final poem of Lyall’s collection, ‘Acrania’, changes gear, turns around and faces politics head on with a powerful attack on Ireland’s Eighth Amendment (‘By law she carries you. / She will know the sound of your first breath. / The rest is silence.’) Such a stark final move should not work, especially post-repeal, but it emphatically does, bringing all the tenderness and strength built up over the preceding poems to bear in this now-historical context and serving, as Lyall notes in her preface, to ‘give voice to the present before it becomes an inevitable, and untouchable, past.’ – something which is achieved in both of these startlingly successful debuts.   

Inhale/Exile by Abeer Ameer (Seren) £9.99 

Mother, Nature by Aoife Lyall (Bloodaxe) £9.95 

In a week in which, inexplicably, a kerfuffle was kicked up over Ange Mlinko’s not-extravagantly-unreasonable comments about Adrienne Rich in the London Review of Books, the poetry contribution to the same edition of the LRB, Emily Berry’s Paris, seems to have passed more or less without comment. I’m surprised only because Paris is a prose poem and prose poems always seem capable of getting someone’s goat; I would at least have expected someone to take to Twitter with a complaint about how this sort of thing ‘isn’t poetry’. I’m posting about it now not to bemoan the form of Berry’s offering (if interested, see more on the subject in relation to Jeremy Noel-Tod’s prose poetry anthology, here) but to celebrate it as a complexification of literary power dynamics, an exposé of authorial paranoia, and a parody of Proustian psychological observations.

This week is also of course Proust’s one hundred and fiftieth anniversaire, and so it is appropriate that the LRB should mark the occasion, even if it is tucked away in the sub-text of a prose poem. Berry is very witty in shrinking the vastness of Á la recherche du temps perdu to what is (prose/poetry debates notwithstanding) basically a single paragraph. And it is a paragraph repleat with ironic thoughts on that most thoughtless of modern mechanisms for capturing lost time, the selfie. What took Proust thirteen years to write, and most readers months if not years to read, is whittled down to a minute or two for readers of the LRB and a single moment of posing for the protagonist of the poem. Not that we ever find out if the speaker actually takes the selfie, comically wracked with doubts and insecurities as she is (I say ‘she’ but the speaker is not gendered, we know only that the admired poet who Berry’s ‘I’ is visiting is male and famous and therefore in some position of implied authority – which is part of what Berry is dissecting). The sentences have a rather Proustian feel to them too; the first is short and clear, but from the second sentence onwards they are curiously difficult to parse, as the protagonist’s thoughts layer and divide and digress, so the clauses build within lengthening sentences, punctuation causes the reader to double-take slightly, and sense also seems to leap across full-stops sometimes, which sounds perfectly normal when read aloud but requires a little more from the working memory than would usually be asked. The opening of the poem begins to give a flavour of this:

“I went to Paris to visit a writer I admired. Because I was not confident he really wanted me to be there, he promised me that he did and we hugged for a long time but he let go first and I was not completely reassured. In his apartment he had taken my photograph when I had just finished showering and was looking rather dishevelled because I had dressed hurriedly and I asked if he would take another one later, or if maybe we could take a selfie together.”

With seven ‘I’s, six ‘he’s, two ‘me’s, two ‘we’s, a ‘my’ and a ‘his’, the proliferation of personal pronouns in these opening sentences suggests another reason that the reader needs to slow down a little: the things being done in the poem are swamped by the two people doing them; the verbs feel crowded, harried almost, by their subjects. As with selfies themselves, the people involved are paradoxically both foregrounded and stripped of any real identity, while blocking out anything of real interest that might be going on.

We are offered the suggestion (one we can accept or not) that the ‘admiring’ writer is in Paris having an affair with the ‘admired’ writer – it is after all the city where clichés tell us such things are commonplace, and anyway why is the protagonist showering in the other writer’s apartment? And why does the admired writer photograph his admirer in a state of post-shower dishevelment? There is an unexplained level of intimacy here, and we do not have enough information about the couple to disentangle the innocent from the creepy, or the romantic from the manipulative. Is the male writer a symbol of the power an aging literary patriarchy wields over rising millennials?

And if there is no affair going on here, why is the speaker in Paris at all, other than out of this professed admiration? What is in this visit for either of them? Is it simply the professional kudos of proximity to a ‘famous’ and ‘interesting’ writer? To gather that all-important photographic evidence that one literary celebrity has been close to another – with all the intimations of heavy-weight intellectual conversation that brings with it? Are they each other’s trophies? Paris, city of literary as well as romantic clichés, is the right place for such trophy gathering.

This brings us back to the poem’s central theme, the overwhelming and crippling sense of paranoia and insecurity (a word used multiple times, building almost feverishly and comically towards the end of the poem) which the speaker feels both in relation to the other writer and their respective social media ‘audiences’. It is the level of over-thinking that the speaker brings to the more-or-less thoughtless, impulsive activity of selfie-taking, and, for example, the solemn use of the word “collaborate” to describe the two writers posing together for a selfie, that seems to me both amusing and profound in equal measure. We know what research has to say about the effect of selfies and social media on emotional health, and by juxtaposing this with the supposedly High Intellectual world of literary relationships, Berry both pokes fun at such relationships and exposes the dissonance between what we show of ourselves to the world and the turbulent individual emotions laying just below the digitally connected surface.

“I wanted to appear secure and aloof but it seemed to me that what such pictures conveyed was quite the opposite, even though that wasn’t their intention.”

The speaker gets tied up not because she is paranoid that she is not “famous or interesting enough”, although she is paranoid about that, but because she is applying the very observations required to be a good author to her actual relationships, layering psychological insight upon psychological insight, as though she is in a game of chess with herself and finally finds herself in check-mate. Ultimately, the reader leaves Berry’s speaker tangled up in a final sentence that takes a particular effort to unpick:

“He had done almost everything in his power to assure me that I had every reason to feel secure, except by going to such lengths that he himself would feel insecure in the event that I failed to assure him of his security.”

We can pull from this the criticism of the male writer for his hidden, but ever-present and ever-fragile, ego; but this criticism is itself hidden within the speaker’s own insecurities, which clog up the narrative in a way that, for me, brings to mind Sylvia Plath’s descriptions in The Bell Jar of the physicality of words on the page coming between a reader and a text’s meaning, impeding rather than facilitating progress. Is this writer, too, on the brink of a breakdown?

We can only guess, because there we leave our speaker, trapped in the box of a prose poem, a little like Proust sitting in his Paris bedroom not going anywhere but thinking himself into eternity.

Two lonely walkers meet in the usual deep wood,
A glade perhaps or a meeting of ways,
And as they sense the aura or click of the other,
Before even suspicion kicks in, there is terror
That this is the end of the world, and they’re right.
But nevertheless their paths have been forged
By previous travellers in this same dense jungle
Which disappears on every side into the night,
And so they arrive, in a state of high tension,
Before a new and unfamiliar pair of eyes.

What strikes them first is that someone is missing –
Or at least someone is there they cannot see –
So again, before they even begin, they understand
As all living things do, that though they are two
They should be three. What then ensues in this wood
Could be called the distrustful creation of a third.
They negotiate a structure between and above them
To compensate for this one great missing thing
In the silence, and they do so by building
Word upon word upon word upon word
Upon word upon word upon word upon word.

In order to allay their fear of each other they want
To create a forest of their own, where every leaf
And root is of their design and in thrall to them.
But the basic matter of their being confuses
And causes them (a) to mistake this structure
For theirs alone and their opposite pilgrim
For a statue or an ants’ nest, or (b) to fail
In their fury to notice that all they are doing
Is gathering small stones and withering flowers,
Constructing a frame of brittle twigs
With such care and laughable solemnity.
They are making a little castle like children
In the soft dirt at the feet of trees.

None of which matters as the two lonely walkers
Move on, changed forever, leaving behind nothing
But what the deep wood accepts beneath its canopy.

• 

Shash Trevett’s debut pamphlet, From a Borrowed Land (Smith|Doorstop) begins with what feels like a cleansing, or perhaps a renewal. As a recent arrival to the UK as a refugee from the Sri Lankan civil war, in the first line of the opening poem, ‘New Words, New Clothes’, the speaker declares: “I discarded the words first”, immediately evoking not so much a sense of loss as one of self-will . The verb discard is surprising here, it is a deliberate action, not a passive one; we do not get the sense, even in a strange new country, that the “mute silence” she finds herself in is something happening to her, but rather it is being done by her; and I think there is a manifesto of strength in this short opening line. The speaker then begins observing – “I watched and learned like a mynah bird” – and building, as she replaces one language with another, transmogrifies one into another would be closer, as Trevett uses Tamil script (“அ became A”) to emphasise the physical transformation entailed in the process of language learning.

After a while through whispers and croaks

new words emerged

in the borrowed tongue of a borrowed land.

This first poem gives an authentic sense of a new-language user’s building confidence, from the symbol-changes, to the child-like simplicity of Edward Lear’s nonsense alphabet lines, to the “single, stuttering, borrowed syllables”, to the final graceful torrent implicit in “and the new words began to flow”. The new words, like a new set of clothes, have transformed the speaker, made her new again as she has escaped the painful history contained in her own language.

I abandoned two millenia

of poetry, mythology and history.

No Pallavan or Cholan could claim sovereignty

over my tongue, my mouth, my mind.

There may be guilt here; there is certainly irony in the fact that the speaker finds this sense of escape from Imperial repression in the UK, but the succeeding poems show that Trevett, though she may have abandoned her mother tongue, has far from abandoned her mother land or people. English and England remain, after all, a “borrowed tongue” and a “borrowed land” and there remains in that word borrow the suggestion that the day will come when what has been borrowed will have to be returned. Touchingly, at the very end of the pamphlet in the Acknowledgements, she juxtaposes this sense of impermanence with something more abiding when she expresses love to her family, who, she says “have made this borrowed land my home”. But still, there remains the sense, as in much diaspora poetry, that her new home is not entirely hers. The poet’s life in the UK is not the subject of the pamphlet though, which on a basic level is twofold I think: the memory of violence and the role of language in that memory.

The “mute silence” of the first poem stands in comparison to the “fug of silence” which wraps the speaker’s father in the second (‘In Your Old Age’) which “clots” and “strangles”, not only trapping the old man, who is perhaps a victim of aphasia or silent simply from having witnessed too much, as though in a windowless room (“so thick it will not let the light in”) but also severing his memories from his voice, and so from his child, the speaker.

Appa, in your muted world

what do you remember now?

And the sensation of a collapsed, decaying internal world returns at the end of the collection, in ‘My Grandfather’s House’, where the crumbling words of ‘In Your Old Age’ are replaced with the physical, and of course metaphorical, crumbling of a family home back in Sri Lanka.

There is moss growing in the bedrooms

of my grandfather’s house and raindrops

sing a lament on deserted floors.

This neglected, decaying house also sits in silence, apart from the “music” making mosquitos, who are the “inheritors of (its) rooms” and “the sum total / of our dreams”, all sound reduced to a buzz, all traces of everyday human activity to an empty and slowly disappearing space. The poem is a potent symbol of lost language and a lost time – the falling away of memory.

But between these two bookends, Trevett’s pamphlet is an excerise in measured rage.  Rage at the supression of the Tamil language, for example, in ‘The Sinhala OnlyAct, 1956’, the second half of which is addressed, wonderfully, to the language itself: “Oru naadillaathe aatkal, in exile, / bearing the beauty of your music, still.” – the ‘people without a country’ and the music, of course, returning at the end of the pamphlet tragically decimated as insects and absence. Rage at international indifference to the juggernaut of endless war, in ‘Things Happen’:

When they shoot blindfolded men in the back

and take souvenirs of mutilated lives

and hopes. When they rape girls and grandmothers

and celebrate the hecatomb of their success –

things happen

and the world moves on.

And rage at the betrayal of vulnerable refugees by politicians in ‘Psalm’, which condemns the British MPs who voted against the 2016 Dub Amendment to the Brexit Bill by incorporating their names into an enormous (almost page-sized!) single word: ‘NO’.

But From a Borrowed Land is more than just rage, it is a celebration of the beauty of the Tamil language, and of the culture it represents. Trevett presents two poems by other Tamil writers (Cheran and Vinothini) in their original script, followed by her own translation and then, enlighteningly, a third poem, a response to the original. This tripartate approach to translation is stunning in both concept and execution. The original versions, to a non-Tamil speaker reading from the page, appear like a garden of strange and beautiful flowers, presented as though Trevett is challenging the reader – if you want this, she seems to be saying, you’re going to have to come closer, read more, listen more carefully – and the translation then provides shape and shade, with the response expanding that into a different context and country. ‘Psalm’, mentioned above, is the reponse to the Vinothini poem translated by Trevett as ‘My Songs’, which celebrates a child’s creativity, tenacity and most importantly her future, which is then taken away from her in the most leaden and symbolically violent manner with that single negation of the final response. This is from Trevett’s translation:

Those unwritten songs rest

in the hands of that little girl

who won’t release them, easily.

I could dwell for a long time on a number of other lovely poems, such as ‘Blue Lotus Flowers’ which is written using the classical Tamil Akam form and which contains such a brilliant description of a young lover, that I can’t resist adding it here:

As beautiful as a peacock on the hillside.

As strong as a bull elephant

swaying among the young grass.

Bright as a green parrot

skimming the mango tree

he called to me.

Or ‘The Last Mango Tree’, which stands as a requiem to, and in soldiarity with, “a lost people”.

But I will finish on my personal favourite poem of the pamphlet, ‘I was Na’amah’, in which ‘the wife of Noah’, who “was known by many names and now by none”, wrestles an identity away from the patriarchy using the many alternative names by which she has been known across the world and throughout the ages. This poem seems to me to encapsulate much that is exciting about this pamphlet: the various names for Na’amah burst onto the page like the flowers of Tamil in other poems; the strength is that of the ‘mute’ refugee arrived in the UK in ‘New Words, New Clothes’; the celebration is for those who are repressed yet stay strong nonetheless; and the rage is aimed at the deadening blindness of a subjugating force which is unable to see the beauty and profundity of the lost meanings this character’s old names represent:

I was Emzara, Noyemza. Norea to the Gnostics.

The Babylonians called me Tytea.

I was the sunrise of creation

the moon glow of eternity.

This poem (like the responses to other poets’ work) brings to mind Carol Ann Duffy, and I don’t see any reason why Shash Trevett should not be mentioned in the same breath as poets of that calibre. From a Borrowed Land is a terrific debut pamphlet, and I would fully recommend buying a copy.

You can buy From a Borrowed Land from The Poetry Business, here.

• 

• 

Supriya Kaur Dhaliwal’s first collection, The Yak Dilemma (Makina Books) provides wonderful evidence that Dhaliwal is a poet who understands instinctively that poems make sense of the world through asking questions which neither provide nor expect answers. The speaker of Dhaliwal’s poems asks question after question; in fact she says herself in the title poem that she stands “in a labyrinth of questions”. Some are rhetorical (“What month do sunflowers die? September”), some genuine (“…was this Indian lady sitting cross-legged in front  of me really Jemdanee?), some pointed (“where have I truly come to?”), while others feel like stop-offs on unfinished philosophical journeys (“In a city where desire is sold as livestock, / does it become the currency of lust?”), or ways-in to the internal monologue of an un-made-up mind (“Was it solitude’s better byword / for a happier state of mind? Was it a watchword / for failed solitude, the worst of all our fears?”). Even when questions are not asked directly, expressions of non-comprehension point towards a question just over the horizon (“I never understand the geometry of a mountain – the minute and vast distances between its several folds”), and some of the poems simply seem to stand where a surfeit of questions and dearth of answers has left an empty hole. This last is exemplified best by the first poem in the collection ‘Meet me in the morning on no man’s land’, where, in two prose columns of three stanzas each, facing each other on opposite sides of the page, the speaker proposes a dream-like space where two can come together in all the freshness and hope connoted by ‘morning’, where all the world’s solidity and division disappears into a place “where our heads float and so do our hearts” and where “we will create a daisy chain of ampersands”. Far from coming over as callow or naïve, though, there is a knowing strength at the centre of this beautiful poem – for one thing, the claim that in such a place of unity “we are not white nor brown or black but just the shade of our most loved colour” and that “Everyone will qualify to be a person of colour” strikes me in the current climate as a very brave claim to make, and one which shows great understanding of the enormous leap we as a society need to make to overcome the divisions between us – a poet’s understanding, dare I say? But the solid core of the poem is in its central conceit or wordplay of ‘no man’s land: is this a land that is not owned by men, or one where men are not admitted, or one which, to give it its prosaic Wikipedia definition, is “land that is unoccupied or is under dispute between parties who leave it unoccupied out of fear or uncertainty”, indeed is the poem referring to man as a gender, or Man as a species? Dhaliwal does not answer these questions, and neither should she – the poem stands in place of the questions and the answers.

The poems take us from “Punjab’s fewer than five rivers” to “the weightlessness of the sea” in Istanbul, to “the seven hills of Edinburgh” to “the correct blue // of the Dublin sky” and the constant jumping between countries causes the reader to sense the disorientation that the poems are negotiating, descriptions like those above adding to this feeling of dislocation, almost to the point where immigration and emigration come closer to transmigration. The speaker is a homeless soul and the “‘bulldozed dreams’”, “rubble” and “peeling paint” of the K-25 area of Hauz Khas in Delhi, the naked men she sees from her apartment window in Antwerp and the “four rented walls” of a hotel in Cairo where she rests “like animals forced in jars of formaldehyde” only accentuate the sensation that the speaker is like a bird looking in vain for somewhere suitable to perch.

So these are poems that work alongside each other to create a steadying sense that the speaker is working towards a new kind of understanding in a globalised world where the idea of ‘home’ has become detached from its moorings. She is feeling her way through the world as  a constant outsider, as she points out in ‘Poem in which I am an Interloper in an Art Gallery’, cannily picking up on and adapting Theresa May’s infamous 2016 phrase “if you are a citizen of everywhere, you are a citizen of nowhere; or just foreign”. Even when she returns to northern India – saying, perhaps provocatively, that she is “Dressed in black from head to toe / (to look as white as I could)” to learn more about the Irish actress Norah Richards, she discovers that something indefinable has changed: “I came looking for someone else, for something else // But who is it? What is it? // I have come here as an intruder”. With her sense of home, her sense of identity is slipping away – and it is no coincidence that in the following poem, “Drinking Coffee Together”, the speaker is in the middle of splitting up with her lover; the waning of a love affair having been working concurrently with a building sense of wider psychological loss throughout the first three quarters of the book, it now breaks, with restraint and kindness but decisively (“It matters / what we tell each other. / I do not tell you I do / not love you nor / do you.”). Restraint, in fact, and the thoughtfulness and dignity that go with it, mark the collection from beginning to end, although a sense of frustration builds subtly, only poking through the surface at the very end of the final poem, ‘What Jasmine Said’, where the speaker breaks a toenail while visiting Giza and feels “like a princess who is not a princess // because she is wearing boots / and they are so fucking tight.” The constricting footwear here takes the reader back to earlier poems, particularly ‘Reading Natalia Ginzburg in East Cork’ where shoes, old and new, seem to stand for comfort or lack of it within a language (“Words fail me often” she says “and so do shoes”). I’m not sure if there is link I’m missing between the antifascist writer Ginzburg and shoes per se, but it may be the speaker is reading in the original Italian rather than in translation and that her Italian is not as expert as her English so the text highlights to her the way exploring a writer’s work is like exploring a new city and the language(s) you have available to you, like footwear, affect your journey: those we have had longest will help us in our encounters with with subtleties and “little virtues”. It is not a straightforward poem and I’m not sure I am doing it justice with this reading, but Dhaliwal’s fascination with words, translations, and living between languages, is beyond doubt; it is if anything the central question in The Yak Dilemma – yak of course not only being an animal but a synonym for chatting, and so the dilemma here is about what words do to us, and what we do with words.

I don’t want to jump to conclusions but I guess, being from Palampur originally, Dhaliwal’s mother tongue is likely to have been Punjabi, but she probably learned English from a very early age, and her original language began to slip away (or perhaps her parents spoke English and she was raised as a second-generation English speaker?). But anyway, this bifurcation of her language makes its political parallel in the Punjab region almost impossible to avoid, with the India-Pakistan border running right through it, and all the horrific Imperial baggage that comes with it. (The border is treated most directly in the haunting ghazal ‘your bird/my bird’, which also brings a more overtly political dimension to the previously mentioned “no man’s land” of the book’s first poem, and of which “The bulbul on the barbed wire knows nothing”.) The speaker wishes to learn Arabic, we discover in ‘Arabic Lessons’, in order to connect with the Arabic-speaking world, hoping that the Urdu which had surrounded her growing up might be a way in. For all of her good intentions, it does not seem to have been a success, although it does perhaps signify a moving on to somewhere new: “Nothing came more naturally than the phrase / for bidding farewell, our minds ready to depart / wherever we had come from. // Ma-Issalama.”

Dhaliwal’s relationship with languages finds its way into most of the poems in the collection, but nowhere more beautifully and poignantly than in the brilliant villanelle ‘Migrant Words’ where she expresses “a vain hope” that the “buried…words” of her ancestral tongue “will grow / into a dialect of some hybrid descent” and that her Punjabi vowels “will plough / a cadence that my anglophone tongue could not invent”. It could not be a lovelier, sadder poem, which I think could stand as a fine representative of the collection as a whole.

On the evidence of this work, we have in Supriya Kaur Dhaliwal a poet who sees complexity with great clarity, and who does not allow her sadness to turn to rage. She writes with genuine lyrical beauty and while she has surely benefited from the several top-level Irish lyric poet teachers and mentors she lists in the acknowledgements, there is a sure-footed handling of cadence and rhyme, and a fluidity to both the stricter closed forms and the prose poems, which indicates that the heart of a natural poet beats inside her. As with much diasporic poetry (that I have read anyway), the work itself seems to become something not entirely unlike the hoped-for, intangible and perhaps impossible home whose absence drives the lyric – and this prompts me to ask the question (it seems appropriate to end this review on a question): where, I wonder, will this remarkable poet’s journey lead her next?

You can pre-order The Yak Dilemma from Makina Books here.

You can hear Supriya Kaur Dhaliwal reading three of her poems, including ‘Meet me in the  morning on no man’s land’, at The Lonely Crowd, here.

You can read ‘Reading Natalia Ginzburg in East Cork’, at the Irish Times, here.

You can read another poem from The Yak Dilemma, ‘Women who dine alone, dine alone’, at RTE, here.