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The Alice Trap, Kate Rhodes, 2008, Enitharmon, £8.95, ISBN 978-1-9046346-4-5

Kate Rhodes’s second collection, The Alice Trap, is another exhilarating read. It is divided into three sections, The Alice Trap, Everyone I’ve Ever Known, and The Memory Club – each of which contributes to an overall effect of considerable range and momentum. I am not surprised to learn that she studied the playwright Tennessee Williams at Ph.D. level for these pared back, close-knit poems speak with a sharpness and deliberateness that fires dramatic urgencies and contrasts.

Her writing focuses the personal – with poignant poems about family, loss and love in ways that reverberate their truths and that have earned her a tribute from Don Paterson of having a style ‘pared to the bone, elegant and precise’. Here she is in the book’s first poem, The Alice Trap series about a disastrously unhappy love affair. Unprepared and unwary, she’d

forgotten the Alice traps
hidden in the ground,
narrow enough for a girl
or a thin woman to slip into.
You made no attempt to save me.

The angst is further elaborated in Sweetheart:

When I called you that, you flinched.
It made me wish I’d covered myself,
told you that where I come from
shopkeepers throw the word out
easily – a kiss goodbye
from someone you hardly know...

After pain, disappointment and finally letting go (“lovers who left me, lovers I left,” – I Will Not Think Of You At 4 a.m.), Rhodes’s focus moves. In Part II of the book, she quickens the pace, expanding her subject-matter, taking on her surroundings with some fine metaphoric exactness as in Planetarium:

          The heavens turn on at 8 p.m.
          Last show of the day –
          two thousand light-bulbs
          masquerading as galaxies.

She presents many vivid, insightful portraits and is particularly good on ‘outsiders’, characters who may be isolated but who remain true to themselves. In Café at the V & A, Rhodes addresses her subject, “This is your writing place, / hidden in the basement between dusty brick walls, / a clutter of uncomfortable chairs. / But it sells the good coffee you insist on / and in some ways it’s like you – / no pretences, face to the air...” Incisive. Along the same lines, there is a sympathetic portrait of The Last New Romantic: “Only he refused to change, / immaculate and geisha-mouthed, / alone in his seaside town.” There is her ‘loner’ father watching TV: “He watched the repeats on his own. / We could hear him through the door / laughing at men he recognised – / unsuccessful with women, overlooked,” – My Father Never Went Out. It would seem that Rhodes is quite a romantic herself. The Instant Husband (he’s a fisherman) deftly portrays a gentle love-story. “I walk to the harbour to make sense of it. / If I look hard enough I can find your boat / held up to the sky, at rest / on the sea’s wide palm.”

The book gathers further momentum in Part III, The Memory Club about the illness and death of a friend’s daughter. Told with great tact, sharp detail and with that well-paced precision and elegance for which she has been noted, Rhodes juxtaposes joyous occasions such as a shopping trip with the terminally-ill young woman and its underlying ironies: “Wandering from shop to shop / it’s a struggle to choose her winter coat. / Fashion decisions last all afternoon” (Belongings) with the stoic courage of the young patient in her plans to celebrate with an all-weekend party: “Two months, they said / or with luck factored in, up to a year. / By then you’d abandoned luck, decided to throw a party immediately” (Wells-Next-The-Sea). This is the very moving poem for which Rhodes was shortlisted for the Forward Prize. The power of the piece lifts as the poet gathers poignant detail, emphasising the ‘otherworldliness’ of such courage in throwing a party, at the same time sifting the poem’s argument of life over death and dying bravely with great feeling: “... I can’t do this. I can’t celebrate / knowing you, then losing you / before you’ve even finished school. // But you were lolling on a pile of cushions / head back, listening to the sea. / Come and sit by the mirror, you said. / I’m going to show you // how to do your eyes. / ... you won’t know yourself”.

Throughout this final sequence, Rhodes’s tone is elegiac, vulnerable, the tragedy building and enveloping so that, as reader, one carries unforgettably sad recognitions along with a deep appreciation of Rhodes’ dramatic gift: “... you loved cocktails, parties and old films. / You stayed up late, even when you were ill. / You danced for as long as you could” (Past Perfect).