Reviews
Vicki Feaver and Alice Oswald
A book of atrocities and an anthology to read backwards
Helena Nelson reviews The Book of Blood by Vicki Feaver (Cape Poetry £9) and The Thunder Mutters: 101 Poems for the Planet edited by Alice Oswald (Faber £7.99)
Vicki Feaver is strong on doom. Take the perfectly horrible but compelling 'Medea’s Little Brother'. It is based on a grisly episode from the Medea legend when King Aetes, in hot pursuit of Jason (escaping with his daughter), is deterred by a brainwave from Medea. She kills her young brother, then hurls his limbs into the wake of their boat; Aetes has to slow down and collect them for burial, so Jason gets away. It’s a story which would exert sinister fascination in any context. Here Feaver heightens the human pathos: the boy is “heavy, warm, / still flushed with sleep”; Medea is “his clever big sister” who knows “the arts / of taking away pain”. Above all she doesn’t want to hurt him. It’s “that look” from Jason that swings it: “If you really love me / you’ll know what to do.” Women aren’t supposed to be violent: femininity is associated with gentleness. Feaver overturns all that. In her version of the story, Medea doesn’t pause to kill her little brother first; she just rips him to bits:
And then his other arm,
and a leg, and his other leg,
so the water frothed red;
and then his golden-curled head.
It’s as though the poet has ‘seen’ the image and can’t stop thinking about it. And once you’ve read the poem, you can’t forget it either. But why the focus on female atrocity?
It’s hard to answer that question. The final poem in this collection, 'The Blue Butterfly', is uplifting as though Feaver doesn’t want to end on a dark note (and yes, there are poems of reflection and tenderness in the book), but it’s the blood in The Book of Blood that you remember. Perhaps she herself is puzzled by the connection between violence and creativity. 'In The Gun', she observes: “A gun brings a house alive”. It’s as though she acknowledges a dark magic, the kind of spell Medea herself was under, though in the poem there’s no suggestion that enchantment absolves. Feaver is a painterly poet and her visual evocations often explore juxtapositions of life and death. 'The Gun', for example, ends with the King of Death “stalking / out of winter woods, / his black mouth / sprouting golden crocuses”. In 'The Sacrifice', there’s “blood falling / in bright gobs on earth / where corn will sprout / green and gold”. These are unquestionably powerful images and something similar troubles the reader in nearly every piece.
The verse forms, it seems to me, are not all equally successful. Or let me put that another way: some poems stand out because the potency of the image and the taut poise of the text match each other perfectly, but this is not always true. Feaver often breaks a line before a preposition, especially ‘of’. It’s consequently rare to find a strong stress at the start of a line, and the lines (usually short ones) are like little waves running towards a stressed end-ofline word which is often an ominous noun or strong verb. This contributes cumulatively to resolute finality at the end of a sentence or stanza. But there’s a lot of enjambment and sometimes I feel it a little mannered. In 'The Camellia House', for example, the mid-phrase breaks are very insistent: “…the wiping down // of a bench, the unwrapping / of gingerbread, the unstoppering / of a thermos, the pouring / of a steaming stream of coffee, / Grandma blowing waves in her cup.” It’s a relief to get to that last self-contained phrase. Whereas 'Girl in Red' moved me deeply at first reading and continues to do so – partly, I think, because the cadences are allowed to run a little longer, the music of a phrase completing itself before a line break: “I was born to a mother in mourning. // The mood in our house was black…”
The Book of Blood is definitely about people, most of them female – women who bleed to signify fertility and who sometimes draw blood. The Thunder Mutters, on the other hand, places fundamental emphasis on our environment, rather than on us. Some of the poems in this anthology have no people in them at all. I found the book worked best for me when I read it backwards. That is to say, reading from the beginning (forwards), I kept expecting something which never materialised – perhaps a clearer sense of what was going on, perhaps more texts I already knew and liked. I’m not sure what I was expecting; I only know I didn’t find it. When I got to the end and began again, working backwards, I enjoyed it much more. At least two-thirds of the poems were unfamiliar to me. And, on balance, I think that makes it more interesting, although I suspect the length of some texts will challenge many anthology browsers. You can’t read quickly here which is, I think, part of the point.
I’ll do the nit-picking first. It isn’t Alice Oswald’s fault that there had to be 101 poems in the book: it’s Faber’s. Someone – back in the early Eighties – started producing books, mainly for children, containing that magic number of texts: 101. I assume Dalmatians had something to do with it. Since then, the 101 Poetry Movement has proliferated: Faber has at least eleven 101 poetry anthologies. There are five blank pages at the back of The Thunder Mutters. These might have contained as many as ten more (short) poems.
Next gripe: the name of the poet appears in capitals at the bottom of the first page of each poem. This gives the impression the poem has ended which, for nearly half the texts, it has not. Two poets in the book (Tim Atkins and Sean Borodale) write in ways that undermine expected convention. Borodale ends:
See opening buds of a tree and a dark space of
shrubs and grasses. Hexagons of concrete. Read
POLICE. See lit windows uninhabited. An old
Reading this, with no poet’s name to signify closure, you assume there’s something missing. The final punctuation symbol in Atkins’ poem is a comma. Writing in a subversive way is one thing. Formatting a whole book to create unnecessary confusion is another.
Translated poems feature quite prominently in the anthology. However, though the name of the poet appears at the end of the first page, the translator’s details don’t appear until the end of the whole text – more potential confusion. With the anonymous 'Song Cycle of the Moon-Bone', the translator’s name appears at the end of its nine pages but there’s no note of the original (or aboriginal) language and no reference in the acknowledgements either.
Which brings me back to those five blank pages. There are many unusual texts here, some of which are simply listed as Anonymous – but that’s not enough. Poems like 'The Melodious Lady-Lord', for example, have fascinating origins. There was space to have included a little information: it should have been there in a set of endnotes. And I was perplexed (unless we infer ‘Anonymous’ to represent the eternal feminine) that so few of the 101 poems were by women: surely Katrina Porteous, Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, Stevie Smith and Elizabeth Bishop cannot be sufficient to represent a whole sex? This seems a strange irony, given that some of Alice Oswald’s own poetry (which she has nobly excluded) would have fitted in so well. Can it be true that women do not write the sort of poems Oswald is looking for here, namely “restless poems”, those that tend to be “accretive rather than syntactic”, poems that bring “living things unmediated into the text”?
That’s a lot of negatives. I don’t want them to outweigh the positives. The anthology has a fascinating preface, worthy of a review in itself. It dedicates the book to the garden rake (a “dew’s harp” in old Devon dialect) and talks about the “knack of enervating nature (which starts in literature and quickly spreads to everything we touch)”. To counter that enervation, Oswald suggests she has selected “restless poems” which “work like lists, little heaps of self-sufficient sentences that keep the poem open to the many-centred energies of the natural world”. I’m not sure I am wholly persuaded by this, but there is something in it – because working through the poems in reverse order, I’m sure I was reading differently. My early impatience with certain aspects of the book was replaced by a feeling of calm: I felt as though I had time for once – time to read lengthy poems without worrying about when the end was coming, time to read unconcerned about whether I understood or not, but letting the lines wash over me. As a result, I’m glad to have read all thirteen pages of Sándor Weöres’ 'The Lost Parasol' (translated by Edwin Morgan) and I’m not sure I would have been open to it in another context. And as for the poems by Charles Causley –which I’ve either never read or forgotten – they remind me how good he is: I must go back. And in this regard, The Thunder Mutters fulfils two time-honoured functions of any anthology – to send the reader exploring new leads, but also back to old pleasures with sharpened appreciation.
Helena Nelson runs HappenStance Press (www.happenstancepress.com) and edits Sphinx, a features/reviews magazine focusing on independent poetry publishing and poetry chapbooks.
Page(s) 61-63
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