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Cat’s Cradle, Genista Lewes, 2007, Oversteps Books.  £8 ISBN 0-9552424-8-7

 
Lewes’s work is restrained, quietly written, but also ambitious and, at times, richly ambiguous. I was probably expecting, in a first collection, a balance of reflective with feisty and amusing poems. Actually, the tone is more than usually serious, though she can be wry. One poem, Contralto, is broadly comic, with its delicious description, “chins without number joined in the vibrato”, “Her breasts heaved-ho as if two whales / were surfacing...”.  Some poems here share subject matter – children, family, for example – with many other women (and men) writers of a certain age and range of experience. But there is something different, more interesting, about her approach to relationships. An element of detachment, of timelessness is factored into the language. The tone is set by the first line of a poem (The Futility of Metaphor), “Talking together about love and uncertainty.” A good example of her need to test and explore is Last Rites (about the death of a parent?):

Still warm like cooling bread,
and if I gently breathe on her,
her features will assume a fixity
that cannot be gainsaid,
each muscle stiffen to its final mask,
as if the complex patterns of a life
have glanced off ice.

One drip of water on her skin
might start a thaw, as snow
diminishes under winter trees,
becomes a porous crust and vanishes bit by bit;
assimilated by the frozen earth.

While carrying strong personal emotion, the poem gains universality by its free exploration of ideas of hot and cold, freezing and thawing; the writer’s pain is subtly conveyed by the way each positive thought is capped by a negative; bread is warm but “cooling”, gentle breath leads to “a fixity”, thaw leads to “a porous crust” and, soon, vanishing (a fluid movement) into “the frozen earth” (rigidity).

Similarly, the eponymous poem Cat’s Cradle is about a family incident, but this spins the poet’s thoughts into the different territory of mysterious creativity, “Yet now, those strands can somersault and twine, / find devious ways to express / old facts, old fictions.” There are several ambitious, longer poems here. She has thought quite deeply about form, though sometimes this leads to idiosyncratic layout on the page which I find a bit distracting.

I found, How to Explain Paintings to a Dead Hare, the most successful of her longer poems, though (as perhaps all good poems should) it resists step-by-step explanation. The poem takes the form of an argument between two voices of how to deal with /dispose of a dead hare. I concluded that it was a poem about using your imagination: how to use and not to abuse your own creativity. One voice is timid, the other bolder and more pressing with promise of success, “bonfires will ignite his fur / and he will grow luminous some dark night”.  This poem is a useful locus for considering Lewes’s talent. Let her carry on, on this independent path, we feel, daring to be serious, adventurous and sometimes rather sad.