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The Now of Snow, June Hall, Belgrave Press, £7.99

The Now of Snow is June Hall’s first collection and this eclectic mix appeals and exasperates in equal measure. Hall was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease in 1996, and the opening section of eleven poems is concerned with living with the disease. You will learn more about what it’s like to have Parkinson’s Disease from these eleven poems than from any number of erudite medical textbooks. These poems far outweigh any in the following seven sections, and the collection is worth buying for this section alone. With unsentimental directness Hall describes hearing the prognosis from a neurologist in the opening poem ‘Snakes’:

    Content he offers me his arm
    and offers too his malediction:
    Things will get worse!
    Cleanly he chops through hope
    then slivers and slices it dead...

She gives a rare insight into the intensely personal relationship between disease and host, as in the following extract from ‘Sufferer’:

    Your touch startles,
    trembles and feathers my hand
    like a wounded sparrow
    palmed in an unfamiliar hold...

and while these poems have a sharpness and a quiet anger, alongside the anger comes an acceptance of the disease as an uninvited guest, a part of life, an integration of self with a new diseased self. She describes the gradual slipping from normal abnormality “everyone’s hand shakes sometimes doesn’t it?” to clear disability. She covers issues of universal impact – how to explain the truth of what is happening to your children – as in the following extract from ‘The Truth Trail’:

    Shouldering alone
    the unknown contents of the sack,
    I fear its weight would flatten him.
    And so I measure out the truth
    in tiny less alarming heaps.
    He piles them up but doesn’t speak.

Hall uses simile effectively throughout the opening sequence. In ‘Normal’ it’s the act of frying an egg: “Middle runny, hard outside, I guess – / like me…” while in ‘Stile’ it’s a mis-angled oak tree:

    …Rooted in soil slip it’s out of true
    like me. I scramble up, shaky from the climb,

    perch off-centre on its disobliging frame
    and through a tunnel of hips and hazels
    watch the valley roll into shadow,
    a reminder of the downhill trek ahead, …

But what of the rest of the collection? This is where exasperation sets in. I’ll start with two poems I came across some months before being asked to review the collection. I’d found myself so exasperated by the way the final two lines of both poems reduced a good poem to banality that I’d taken copies to a women’s poetry group I’m involved with, to see if others would have the same reaction. And I found it wasn’t just me. Everyone felt the same. One of the poems was the title poem, the other was ‘Kitchen Sink’ which I give here in its entirety, so readers can make up their own minds:

    Men pee in the sink
    when nobody’s looking.

    Caught one once
    in the weak-bladdered end of night
    spraying to an old tune,
    the stable splat and splash of urine,
    cool white porcelain steaming.

    We spoke of other things
    but there his prick was,
    proud and free as a stallion’s,
    the evening’s wine tracing
    a faultless arc of gold.

    I’d pee in the sink too –
    if I could reach it.

I may be accused of attending too many workshops than are good for me, but I’m pretty sure those last two lines would be a universal target. Another exasperation is the way Hall uses relevant personal experiences but transports them across the border to that densely populated place where good poems die – the Land of Sentimentality. Sylvia Plath spoke of the need to avoid using personal experiences as an inward-looking narcissistic process, but rather to manipulate them with an informed and intelligent mind, to make them relevant to the larger and bigger things in life. The second section of the collection is concerned with children and parenthood, and for all their heartfelt honesty, they never go beyond the personal world of June Hall and her family. On the plus side, Hall enjoys
playing with language and has a good ear for the misquote which takes on a life of its own; one poem (‘Three Solos’) is a witty take on Eliot’s Four Quartets and gives Wendy Cope a run for her money:

    In my morning is my afternoon,
    in my afternoon my morning.
    What might have been – meditation,
    sun-tanning, novels, working late –
    and what has been
    remain a perpetual possibility in a child-free world.

The remaining five sections cover a range of topics, with one exploring the work of the painters Klee, Matisse and Picasso. The collection includes a couple of rather strained villanelles, and a series of unremarkable haikus.  What is so frustrating are the frequent hints that Hall is capable of making poems fly, but time and time again she takes a good idea, and overdoes it.