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Wishbone, Caroline Price, 2008, Shoestring Press. £8.95 ISBN 978-1-9048867-8-5

"In this poem, a hymn to the
senses, the reader is seduced by
sound as well as setting and image."

Caroline Price’s key subject matter in Wishbone, her third collection, is the human situation and its complexities. She is a keen observer of detail and nuances of behaviour but her writing is never too dense as she is adept at cutting to the essential and making it point to meanings which lie beneath the surface.

Many of her poems are third person narratives which focus on a telling scene or a critical moment to underpin the story. In Calvados she catches in a fatalistic, film-like manner the happiness at a picnic immediately before a small boy is killed when the gun his father’s friend is cleaning accidentally goes off. She employs this mode too in the disturbing and potent poems about damaging relationships which open the book. A man who batters his partner is depicted reciting the names of stars. His gentleness shows another side of his character but with terrible irony and her acceptance of his violence, even though it has unnerved her, is heartrending. In The Boy Who Could Lay Eggs a father tugs down his child’s trousers in the hen-house, produces eggs from his anus and tells him he can lay eggs too. The boy stares:

…feeling inside him
the egg-shaped hollowness,
the way in his life afterwards
he’d not want to move or do anything
too suddenly for fear of breaking.

There is no comment – Price places the reader inside the heads of the people she writes about and I can think of no other poet who has written so compellingly about abuse. In other poems she looks at constraints women experience and their feelings of sexual yearning. Bicycle Race on The Goodwin Sands 1887, written in the first person as a letter to a friend, depicts a woman’s longing for escape from the life in which she’s trapped. Even the bicycle “wheels revolve / like monstrous spiders, splayed…” and the narrator sees the ruts they make as “deepening, keeping us in.”

Place played an important role in Price’s previous collection, Pictures Against Skin and it does so throughout this book. It is central in lighter poems like Hôtel des Alpes, which paints wonderfully a small French town where an old man who’s started to sing catches her eye, also in The Girls in the Miellerie with “its racks of gold / the crosshatched furls / of candles” where the “guardians of a shrine to honey” work. In this poem, a hymn to the senses, the reader is seduced by sound as well as setting and image. The sequence Falling, that begins with Hôtel des Alpes, moves on to poems which, in evoking a brief liaison, push to the edge of things. In these poems place and state of mind are inseparable. Drift, one of the few poems in which Price focusses throughout on herself, is about a swimming experience far from the beach:

With the sea filling my ears
I understand nothing;
only that, if I were asked
as I will be later
what I am thinking of, at this moment,
I’d say I want it to last for ever,
weight taken from me,
the small motion of water alone
responsible for my movement,
the way I am sucked
first one way, so slightly, and then the other.

The book is dedicated to the memory of her father and the poems in the last third of it relate to him. She leads into his death with Edward Jenner Anticipates A Letter Of Commiseration From His Friend Dr. Hunter. In this Jenner imagines his friend urging him to work and suggests to himself the experiment of weighing and observing a man “in the throes of love” and then weighing him again after the loved one is taken from him to “see / what he has lost”. In the poignant poems which follow, the poet tries to re-find her father in places he knew, pictures him at points in his illness and writes about his death through a parallel, the death of a greenfinch. She also re-creates his wartime experiences and in the final and title poem of the book she sees two boys shooting on the marshes, both of which are him:

you are a boy again, and your life
stretches ahead, beyond the empty bottles
balanced on the wall.

In these, in all her poems, the writing is controlled with consummate skill. She knows exactly how to use syntax and sound to build up tension and momentum. Wishbone is an outstanding collection – a book which should be read and re-read. I hope it will bring Caroline Price the reputation she deserves.