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Anne-Marie Fyfe considers different engagements with feeling

Maggie Sawkins
The Zig Zag Woman
Two Ravens Press £8.99

Jackie Kay
Darling: New and Selected Poems
Bloodaxe £9.95

Brigit Pegeen Kelly
Poems: Song and The Orchard
Carcanet £9.95

The figure silhouetted on the cover of Maggie Sawkins’ first collection, The Zig Zag Woman, appears to fall between two shades of blue – sleeping, meditating, suspended between near-midnight cobalt and lowering-sky blue – much as the poems shift between a shadowed daytime and a darkness in which glimmers of light remain more or less visible.

   But the sheer welter of blues transcends clichéd correlatives such as blue for joy or for ‘the blues’, to include the blue-arrowed tongue on an embarrassed father’s wartime tattoo, a pink-eared rabbit disappearing faster ‘than a blue-arsed fly’ (‘Brass Monkeys’), an unwanted bacon joint turning nauseous silveryblue, and blue heat from a paraffin lamp. Blue is also in the childhood dress of a now elderly mother, once one of a ‘flock of children’ abandoned by a grandfather on the run. Poems on the emotional impact of Ireland’s early twentieth century Troubles (‘Migration’, ‘American Wake’) tell that grandfather’s story, while a preceding poem, ‘Blight’, describes potato disease (which may have some relevance to his politicization).

   A powerful central section, written when a daughter is diagnosed with serious mental illness, is titled ‘My Mutant Butterfly’, echoing the butterflies in the opening poem as well as, elsewhere, ‘weightless and blue’ birds, a leaf reduced to ‘a wafer of veins’, ‘air mail envelopes’ and ‘brittle honesty’ (presumably both the translucent, silver-leafed houseplant and the abstract virtue). Lightness is a wished-for contrast to these poems’ gravity, as in ‘Date Unknown’:

As we turn to go faces will stare
from darkened windows,
flowers will curtsey

trees uproot themselves
sprout wings
and fly.

Yet this insubstantiality, this fragility, this tentativeness, is shattered by countervailing realities: a house brick through a windscreen, a terracotta pot hurled to the floor, and the whole weight of redbrick, gothic institutional care (driveways ‘policed by poplars’, the authorities ‘with their instruments’).

   Sawkins explains, in her introduction, that the collection’s eponymous Zig Zag Woman in ‘Act’, whose middle section is displaced in a magician’s illusion, stands for the idea that displacing the heart is somehow necessary for survival, an idea echoed in her epigraph from Chomsky: ‘If we choose, we can live in a world of comforting illusion’. Thus the final section, ‘The Art of Detachment’ (a less absolute distancing than Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘The Art of Losing’) argues for the contortionist’s ability to displace the heart, to set aside the emotions. In quietly unassuming poems, this section focuses perversely on the art of engaging with the world, with rape and murder victims in Sudan, with refugee issues, and with the Madrid bombings, where a witty ‘say it with flowers’ Valentine’s Day poster is echoed by ‘flowers / slumped against debris’.

   ‘One Fine Morning’ is one of the strongest of Maggie Sawkins’ spare, spacious and restrained poems. The title echoes C Day-Lewis’s ‘Some Beautiful Morning’ and possibly Puccini’s ‘Un Bel Di …’. The poem soon undermines any implied optimism, however, with lines like ‘the heart tripping over itself’ or ‘tricked into running … over stiles’, until a phrase near the end, ‘the heart struck dumb’, and the poem’s date ‘July 22’, allow us to read back into the realization that the innocence, ‘skipping out of bed’, ‘reaching for its coat’ (that fatal and much misrepresented coat), is that of Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian shot dead at Stockwell tube station in the wake of the July 2005 bombings. The possibility of detachment is an illusion.

In Jackie Kay’s work there is no such ironical use of detachment. The poems of ‘Severe Gale 8’, published in 1991’s The Adoption Papers, address issues of that time directly: NHS versus private medicine, credit-card debt, AIDS, cardboard cities, health-foods, Nicaragua and South Africa. ‘The Adoption Papers’ sequence itself uses three voices (daughter, birth mother and adoptive mother) to dramatize the central issue of Kay’s identity as a woman born to a single mother by an African father and brought up by white adoptive parents in Glasgow. She returns to this issue later. When asked ‘Where do you come from?’ she answers ‘“Here,” I said, “Here. These parts’’’ (‘In my country’).

   Identity is central and many of the poems speak of the impossibility of divorcing love and sensuality from issues of gender, race, history and discrimination. All come across in a voice that signals Jackie Kay’s grasp of a form and language that mixes emotional honesty and complexity much as it blends the use of high and popular art (Pergolesi and Gilbert O’Sullivan, Shakespeare, Degas and Bette Davis).

   In the same way, Kay’s original Glasgow vernacular sits easily alongside more sophisticated expression: though one exception where dialect is used wilfully is in her ‘Broons’ poems where the Maw and Paw of the Sunday Post’s famous cartoon family confront contemporary issues from therapy to the Lewinsky scandal. Another is in ‘Old Tongue’, a poem lamenting the loss of accent and the inability, without what Seamus Heaney calls ‘the language of first utterance’, to ‘gie it laldie’, to express herself fully, to ‘go for it’.

   Loss of language is an important issue for Kay in exploring race and outsider status. Bessie Smith (seeing off a Ku Klux Klan deputation single-handed) had already proved an early link between Kay’s white, Scottish, 1960s world and the non-Scottish strand in her cultural heritage. In later poems she identifies ‘a Mulatto’ transported for theft, a maid beaten by her mistress and a Mississippi steamboat cook hoping to earn enough to redeem her son from slavery. The most tragic, however, the ‘Hottentot Venus’, treated as sideshow spectacle and anatomical specimen, has only enough English to echo words her captors taught her (‘Money. Freedom.’), thus allowing the courts to misunderstand and collude in her continuing humiliation.

   The poems of Life Mask (2005) offer less in the way of other voices and are generally shorter lyrics, more formal, more rhythmically measured. They spring in part from Kay’s experience of having her head cast in bronze by the sculptor Michael Snowden. But they also have roots in her search for the missing voice in the Adoption Papers’ three-voice drama, that of her father, a search in which she learns much about Africa, reflecting on Achebe and Soyinka, and about masks. The section ends with ‘Life Mask’, three five-line stanzas of lyrical imagery focusing on morning, spring and the possibility of loving again after hurt, loss and separation:

like a long-necked swan in the morning,
like the sea and the river meeting,
like the huge heron’s soaring wings:
I sat up with my pale face in my hands
and all of a sudden it was spring.

If the inclusion of poems from three collections for younger readers is unusual in such a selection, Kay’s concern with identity, candour and accessibility of language all remind us how many of her themes have roots in childhood. The short group of new poems at the end seem both an affirmation of the mood that the poem ‘Life Mask’ left us with and a reprise of some themes – Africa, Black women in history, Scotland and the lost past, and, yes, new love.

If Jackie Kay’s work is a model of openness, an exploration of private emotions and public concerns, Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s work, throughout the two collections published jointly here, Song and The Orchard, appears to reject mankind (apart from occasional jesters, cruel boys, mysterious intruders and, perhaps, ghosts of dead pilgrims). More than that, her work appears to reject the possibility of human emotion, while endowing the natural world with feelings and placing animate and inanimate objects at the centre of a strange, almost subliminal, philosophical discourse.

   The opening poem ‘Song’, tells of a severed goat’s head, the boys who hacked it off, the girl whose goat it was, and mostly of its singing all night in a tree; the song is ‘Not a cruel song’ but ‘The low song a lost boy sings remembering his mother’s call’, a song that is to haunt the unnamed perpetrators. Only the goat is named – ‘Broken Thorn Sweet Blackberry’. Only the goat has what we would regard as human instincts: ‘The goat cried like a man’. In a final elemental and poignant paradox, the heart dies of the sweetness of the goat’s song.

   In ‘Garden of Flesh, Garden of Stone’ – the pairing echoes Emily Dickinson’s ‘Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead’ – Kelly explores the ‘pact’ between a small bird and a boy, although the reader soon realizes the boy is part of a stone fountain, a crude statue contrasting with the bird’s vitality. There are real boys here, but the kind who, outside the walled garden, outside the pact between inanimate object and animal vitality, have no role except the seemingly predictable human urge to destroy nature, to destroy beauty, to destroy singing birds.

   There appears to be a hierarchy in the non-human, living world of doe, fawn, wolf, sheep and sick dog. Birds, the black swan, the whitethroat, the redbird, rise above earth-bound animals, rise above even the small bats in ‘Pipistrelles’:

     All that is birdlike

In us, in the bats, is illusion.
There is nothing at all of the bird in us…
Except for flight. Except for flight.

From boys who kill for pleasure, like hunters who kill deer and leave their carcasses, we move to other boys, bored small-town iconoclasts, who have knocked down the headstones, and one loved statue, in the Old Christian Cemetery, something the voice in the poem had already dreamed; time shifts, prescience, hindsight are common elements in Kelly’s world.

   Statues certainly outnumber other inanimate objects and, as inanimate objects which appear to mimic humanity, they have implied significance in lines such as ‘Stands, the way a statue / does in the mind’ (‘Field Song’). They seem, like birds, to provoke rage in the few humans who inhabit the poems:

The original that the madman leapt over the velvet ropes
To disfigure with his busy hammer keeps lurking
Behind it and laughing…
       (‘Courting the Famous Figures at the Grotto of Improbable Thought’)

In ‘The Garden of the Trumpet Tree’, an apple in the mouth of a stone head draws parallels between statues and dead animals and reminds the reader of the goat in Song’s opening poem. Even children play at statues in ‘All Wild Animals Were Once Called Deer’:

Though sometimes
A person pretending to be a statue seems farther gone in death
Than a statue does.

   Yet Kelly’s is not a completely depopulated world. It is merely that individuals are always distant. The most distant, in the vastness of America, are those who pass at speed. Trains criss-cross the poems from the beginning, from ‘Song’ where the girl lives on the edge of train tracks; at night as trains pass, ‘the sweet sound of the train’s horn’ signifies a larger, better world a train journey away, an unattainable world shimmering between hope and despair, as in ‘The Column of Mercury Recording the Temperature of Night’:

Like the train crossing the landscape. The landscape is flat
But still the melancholy grows steeper.

The world of constant passings, arrivals and departures is
also freighted with death imagery:

                               The train

Like a shovel in the garden. The train like a suited cadaver
In a coffin. All proper and on schedule. Though
There is no station here.

   Kelly’s poems can appear similar to those of Medbh McGuckian in that they achieve powerful effects by unfolding images to create a moving collage. The difference, however, is one of clarity. Where McGuckian’s images build to an often vague and disorienting sense or emotion, Kelly’s pictures are clear and sharp, though suggesting something troubling, mysterious and marginally beyond comprehension. As central as train travel to the whole American landscape are the door-to-door purveyors of religion:

“Don’t let the Witnesses in,” says my husband. “They
Pollute the place. Talk to them on the porch,” he says.

Suddenly we find Kelly slipping into the gothic of Carson McCullers, of Flannery O’Connor. Is it too fanciful to imagine the shot deer in the final stanzas symbolizing the Witnesses’ prey? And, in another poem, is ‘Percival’ with his heavy black coat death or simply a strange farmhand, out of Faulkner, standing in for fear in general?

Percival comes. If I pretend he is not here
He grows larger in the barn, filling all the shadows…

   We are left, in the end, with an enigma. Despite, or because of, the cascade of images, even the heart (something ‘fashioned’ from the few stray pieces of human conversation in all these pages, ‘handiwork’ like Yeats’ golden, mechanical bird) is likely, in Kelly’s world, to smash itself birdlike into windows, into the illusion of sky. Is Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s first image of the separated head and body actually a warning against separating the head from the heart, the intellect from nature, the rational from the emotional? Why do animals and stones appear to provoke the worst behaviour in us? Why does the poet see us as perpetually in flight? These ideas, images and paradoxes fill the imagination but ultimately refuse, in this rich, constantly appealing, constantly challenging poetry, to give us comfort or resolution.