Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Brittle Bones, Janet Fisher, 2008, Salt. £12.99 ISBN 978-1-8447140-2-5

“Her work is imbued with
energy and pace, the elegance of
tone and form and her gift for
the vernacular...”

Fisher is not a poet who, in Adrian Mitchell’s words, ‘ignores most people’. With (“nothing / but the lie of the land / under her boots / and the stars in her head” Getting There) she draws the reader into her receptive gaze beamed gently on a range of partially disclosed, gently held characters.

In her poem Chopsticks, the compelling blend of physical detail and imagined, submerged narrative sets a tone which reverberates throughout the most successful poems in this collection. Written in response to Edward Hopper’s Room in New York, this poem is one of many which announce a shared credo with the painter who believed that the artist’s goal was to reveal the truth about the everyday and the interior life of ordinary people. His paintings, as are the best of Fisher’s poems, flooded with penetrating beams of sun or moonlight which reveal the yearning or pain of lonely figures. Fisher has the ability to create absence and inverted longing in one inseparable sweep (“ ‘There are no oranges in Nevada’ / and it made me want to go there” Chopsticks).

In the poem Rusholme, Fisher explores the trajectory of possibility, holding oppositions in delicate tension, capturing the momentous and the trivial in an almost unremarkable gesture: (“Someone who sat on the bed with an empty glass, / reaching out to straighten the rug”). And she is very good at the glimpse, be it of a room strewn with clues or a narrative glanced mid-flow, as in Foster Place (“books, are piled at your elbow, / left a century ago when the reader popped out for a smoke”). Or in Snapshot: (“and I hear myself saying the same thing / I say every year or so, / a mistake, I can’t help it”).

A powerful aspect of this poet’s work is her ability to locate the precise, authentic image without overplaying her hand: (“He did more for her than any man could, / held the car door, warmed her coat by the fire”, Gina’s Story). She has the ability to imply darkness, the shape of it, in the ordinary, bringing to such poems the understanding of how it so often resides in the dullness of want and disillusion.

She creates a fluid connection with manifold lives and in her most evocative work, succeeds in suggesting how little we can truly know of the human narrative, by holding the reader at a discreet distance. The poems which strike me as weaker are those in which her ability to evoke the tension between the given and the imagined, the half-heard, half-seen and the closely observed, falls short and the reader is left with wit and jaunty realism but nowhere to go beyond the verbal surface of the poem.

This collection explores love and the familial, captured through vivid images, places further away: in St. Petersburg, the ‘harnassed ferret’, ‘the shivering squaddies’ and (“Balloons bunch from the tram wire / like cheap red caviar”). She has a wonderful eye for light, as in Spinney, “In the yellow shorts my mother made me / I run down the path of pine needles under the trees”). Moving Pictures and He Carries His Innocence About Him take up, more explicitly, the theme of cinematic gesture and the problem of authenticity and truth.

Her work is imbued with energy and pace, the elegance of tone and form and her gift for the vernacular: “Then he ups and offs to his bit in London / leaves me swinging in the wind” (Fishmonger’s Daughter). But the more minimal, deeply atmospheric poems, built with sparse but potent detail, are the ones I know I will want to revisit in reflective mood because they bring the reader up close without allowing any diminution of the subject’s privacy.