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Fruitcake, Selima Hill, Bloodaxe, 2009. £9.95, ISBN 978-1-8522484-8-2

“Hill is an icon for many fellow-poets,
admired for her dark humour, Swiftian exposure of human cruelty and discontent...”

In this substantial new book (238pp) the prolific Hill is the docu-dramatist among poets, selecting painful subjects and communicating as directly and vividly as the best TV documentary drama. She brings suffering and isolation home to us, not through searing photography, but with potent imagery, some savage humour and ‘cutting to the quick’ through the power of words. The book is composed of four studies of (mainly) damaging relationships between children and adults.

Bougainvillea (a series of 67 short poems, one to a page) is in the voice of a growing child who first speaks to us from the cradle and becomes a knowing child of, say, eight-years-old. The child, a girl, bears two crosses: skin disease (baby eczema?) and an incompetent mother, whose every move, in the child’s view, makes discomfort worse. The poems are linked by repeated images, including a strong, and rather appalling, sequence likening eczema patches to jewels. Blue-bottles attracted to the sores are also jewels. The focus of these poems is the abrasive effect a mother may have on her child from infancy onwards. Irritation by skin disease, heat, tight clothing are aspects of the narrative (a true story?) and metaphors for the way people drive each other mad. In the end it is the child who is the survivor and the mother who is disintegrating.

Nylon (next in order) is also a sequence of short poems (77) which might be the sequel to Bougainvillea. It is also about a girl (aged about eight?) who is fostered (there is a sinister mother hospitalised in the background). The child is between a rock and a hard place: cold sadistic aunts and indulgent Aunt Bobby, who is possibly dangerously feckless but, to the child, a benign figure. On the whole, this is a richly comic portrait of a child enjoying a house-made-of-marzipan existence amongst hedonistic adults who are having the time of their lives. There are more than a few authorial promptings about the feisty little girl being in some danger but, on the whole, the poem is lively, colourful and upbeat. In the end the child is dispatched like a parcel to the bad aunts.

Bunter Sacks consists of 69 short pieces, this time set out continuously rather than one poem to a page. It is in the voice of a career woman who can’t adapt to being imprisoned at home with her baby. There are strong suggestions that the woman is shallow and petulant and is moving towards violence. This, indeed, is where the action of the poem is heading. The murdered baby in a sack is torn to pieces by a group of wandering harpies.

Grunter is in the same format as Bougainvillea and Nylon, 52 short poems, one to a page. The poem is in the voice of a child with Asperger’s Syndrome and is the most clinical of the four studies. It is clear that Hill has a good knowledge of the syndrome and gets into the child’s head, but I found this a bleaker, less vital, more mechanical poem than, for example, Bougainvillea. There is also, by this stage of the book a sense of repetition.

Repetition already diminishes Bunter Sacks, which overlaps with Bougainvillea. Bougainvillea, though too long, sizzles with the immediacy of anger and frustration. All the subsequent series fall flatter. It might have been better to publish the last two parts of this collection separately? Despite elements of overlap, we cannot but admire Hill’s inventiveness. Insights are often strikingly expressed: “The powder / in my mother’s powder-compact // smells of chalky gas / and makes me sick, // either on her neck / or on her shoes” (Bougainvillea); “my little bony mother // disintegrating / in the City hospital // like someone’s arm / inside an old lion” (Nylon); “The handbag where she kept her contraceptives / now contains a nest of golden centipedes” (Bunter Sacks); “I’m like a three-legged bird who roams the world / searching for another three-legged bird” (Grunter).

Hill is an icon for many fellow-poets, admired for her dark humour, Swiftian exposure of human cruelty and discontent, and also for a kind of craziness or ‘feyness’, a continuous ‘cocking the snook’. The greatest claim that could be made is that her work derives from compassion and creates better understanding and compassion. At the least, she can shock us out of complacency, sometimes deliciously. Both elements are intermittently present here (and in earlier collections).

However, there are questions to be asked about a poet who, apparently, has never written a purely beautiful or a consoling poem. This is the nature of satire, you could argue. Pity lies only on the other side of ruthless exposure and a writer would only explore human misery to this extent if he/she was actually seeking some kind of truth. Satirists push to the limit and, as in any deep search, sometimes get lost and lead us to dead ends. Hill is an ambitious, revealing writer – it is good that women poets should be this adventurous (almost reckless). But how far should we accept her weaknesses and go on praising her without reservation?

For me, there are three factors which reduce the impact of this collection (and previous ones): repetition of the same effects; arbitrary surrealism which sometimes seems more obscure than integral; an apparent (perhaps only assumed) childish or adolescent penchant for sheer nastiness, which, far from enlivening her work, makes some parts of it fall very flat.

Why does not somebody, preferably herself, edit Hill? I suggest that in the opening, say, 25 pages of Bougainvillea, perhaps the most telling work in this collection, you could remove one third of the poems without loss. This process would set up some of the most potent image groups (sores=jewels, flies=jewels, flies buzz in hot, smothering clothes) which are weakened by a truly amazing amount of ‘harping on’. I was tempted to list all repeat references to bluebottles, but restrained myself in the interests of hygiene... For the striking effects she does achieve, I accept that Hill’s obsessionalism, even her ‘feyness’, may be necessary – her idiosyncratic journey is indeed a difficult and rewarding one. However, only she, by becoming her own best critic, can confound those of her admirers who seem blind to her faults.
Dilys Wood