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Circling The Core, Myra Schneider, 2008, Enitharmon. £9.95 ISBN 978-1-9046346-6-9

 
Back in 1970 Stanley Burnshaw, in his book on creative process, The Seamless Web, pointed out that ‘something deeply desired can be imagined into believable existence’ and that language is one of the tools capable of bringing this about. 

In her new collection, Myra Schneider confronts difficult familial situations and re-enters the battleground of the past in order to imagine healing processes into being; this is indeed a significant function of the poet, to enable language to illuminate and restore our hurt places. 

Not content with what she rightly terms “the stodge / of every day”, Myra Schneider searches deeply and without compromise for the fullest expression of life’s possibilities.  She enters the daunting yet essential regions where we face ordeals and seek understanding in and of the toughest places of the world, both private and public. 

The associative magics and essential realities to be found in Circling The Core attest to this writer’s fidelity to the ‘unpredictable power of human imagination,’ the imagination which orders the world into being, knowledge and value. 

But that beautiful telling line from Edward Thomas, “I cannot bite the day to the core”, stands at the threshold of this book, reminding us that no matter how deeply we venture into the heart of things, much will evade us.  And it is the following-through of this paradox which lies at the heart of this ambitious and realized collection. 

Circling The Core ranges widely in subject matter. I was very moved by the opening poem, Core, a sequence inspired initially by a visit to the Barbara Hepworth Sculpture Garden in St Ives. As this reviewer lives in Cornwall I can vouchsafe the attentive and compelling manner in which Myra Schneider captures the atmosphere of that magical and inspiring place. One wishes Hepworth could have read this poem. 

The five sequences which make up Core mesh together in a pattern; complex but seamless transitions take us from a study of the Hepworth figure Hollow Form with Inner Form –

The shell is tall as a shed, shapely
as a human back travelling
down from shoulders through a poignant
hint of valley to two buttock mounds –
but this is a cylindrical world
winding inwards.

to the examination of an apple core –

                                      …then ease a pip 
                          bright as an eye from its slot, island it 
                          on your palm, contemplate what it houses:

and on to the heart core of a human body, its vulnerability –

                           …the flesh within walls
                            that breathes, stirs, eats and makes –
                            the soft flesh so easily
                            stung, pecked or ripped apart.

The fourth poem in the sequence shows us two small boys at play, digging for buried treasure, for riches, and pivots on their innocence, for the children don’t realise that many miles below the earth’s surface exists the molten iron core and

                              …within it spins a single
                            iron crystal almost the size
                            of the moon, not cold though – hot, hotter

                            than the burning sun.

In the concluding section the poet turns the searchlight of language on her own core centre, and on the core of pain at the world’s centre.  But she concludes on an optimistic note.  The core of pain, of vulnerability, becomes a nest, a sheltering nurturing place.  Here she employs an apt and beautiful reference to John Clare’s chiff-chaff’s nest –

Today I see it as the chiff-chaff’s nest
John Clare found, built like an oven, inside
soft as seats of down, a place where threads from
other lives are part of a new creation.

In the muscular stanzas of Heron, a deceptively quiet opening description of the bird powers on into an exhilarating wildness of spirit and re-makes the world, reminding us that the heron:

…inhabits channels that have swum free
from scum to catch the moon’s thin edge
and depths with realities which no one

has fathomed – territories I can’t resist
tapping, as if at an egg-shell, where the tock
of time, fear, possibility, all co-exist.

Here, again, is a world that is not ‘stodgy’. 

As I read and re-read this volume, I found myself thinking of possible affinities with an Enitharmon poet from an earlier era, Frances Bellerby.  And although Bellerby wrote within the traditions of her day, while Myra Schneider creates her own and very modern idiom, I found something of a spiritual affinity between these two poets, a continuity within the Enitharmon ethos, if you like… I’m thinking of a Bellerby poem also titled The Heron.  Here is an extract –

But that was not the whole story.
The night fallen away, you could stand up to your ankles
In platters of frozen snow on the flooded grass
And stare, and curse a supposed god of some kind,
And at last touch, as guilty as though to break faith
With an absent friend:  spreading the rounded wing
Tenderly grey as an archangel cygnet might be,
Springing it again, inappropriately elastic for death,
Lifting the flopped and folded neck, empty
          Rubber, absurd to imagine as support for that hard
                     Weight of head and great sword bill…’

This is a big, ambitious work (like many of Myra Schneider’s poems) and the acute observation, intellectual purpose and metrical skills of the earlier poet are abundantly present in the beautifully-shaped and purposed poems of Circling The Core. Indeed, Bellerby might be seen as fore-mother to Myra Schneider and other women poets, including this reviewer. We remember Bellerby was a poet dear to Frances Horovitz.

I have just a few cavils regarding the inclusion of some weaker poems here, however, and I felt a stronger edit was called for at times.  A minority of poems falter under the burden of over-expansion.  Contrast the somewhat heavy-footed huff and puff of Journey with the extraordinary and beautiful Nothing.

The ‘answering-back’ poem, Thin White Girl, a riposte to Frances Cornford’s To a Fat Lady Seen from a Train, falls rather flat and laboured for me.

I was most disappointed by the long poem Hotel. I don’t understand the inclusion of this clumsy poem. A predictable tale of a couple of holidaymakers, he impervious to anything, she anxious, quibbly, are not interesting characters. While this too-long poem would have made an interesting short story, I feel it is miscast as a poem, and it weighs the overall collection down somewhat… In fact the short poem To Go Away, placed immediately after, works identical material into a tight and assured poem.

However, there are many riches here, as in the epiphanic arrival of Vivien Leigh in Images, or the poet’s relish in the uninhibited Mud. Cat in the Bag, a tautly realised conceit on the old saw of letting the cat out of the bag, is sharply witty, Stevie Smith-ishly sly.

Her eye for the natural world is sharp and yet tender (see Letter from Birsay, Maeshowe, Blakeney and Arran) as is her colour sense; she has a wonderful ability to find vision in the most ordinary domestic object, as in the poem Milk Bottle.

In the superb poem The Mincer (surely an anthology favourite of the future?) she conveys through furious yet controlled language a readiness to be herself despite the forces that attempt to control her; the language is as strong and indomitable as the memorable enemy, the mincer itself.  Unshakeable insistence on discovering or rescuing a true self and hanging onto that true self, no matter what, is characteristic of this collection.  In section four of Room she describes an encounter between her seventeen year old self and her mother that is chillingly effective, haunting the reader long after the poem has been read.

And I recommend the virtuosic and richly textured Goulash to all readers, be they cooks or otherwise!

Here is a poet who puts heart and soul into the quarrel with herself.  This is her richest and most assured collection to date; she makes her demons take responsibility; she finds vision and truth in the secret places where they hide.

The core at the centre of this book (be it molten core or sheltering nest) is poetry, the central imagination by which we explore and comprehend the world, even if we can never bite to the core… Language is the core of our being, and this book sustains that fact. I commend the searing honesty of the enterprise.