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Virtual Eden, Pat Earnshaw, 2008, Gorse Publications.  £4.50, ISBN 9780952411385

Earnshaw writes about the first eight years of her life, unearthing a remarkable series of memories which include first explorations of her own sexuality aged two and watching her parents’ bed from “the lowered elevation / of my cot”. The message conveyed in the opening poem Dredging for Memories is that memory is an amazing, an awe-inspiring process:

I creep through silence, press
my finger-tips against a door
that swings open into a room
crowded with twilight

...

Lost in a wilderness of fantasy
mismatched with memory
I tuck myself into a crevice 
underneath the torrent of a waterfall

...

blurred through the thick translucence
of the thundering glass.

There is a lot of detail in these poems – possibly too much when the significant gets lost in the obsession with a complete record – though she has great skill in pinning down mood and incidents with telling detail, “the stick above his legs jets liquid gold, / a drumstick rattle in the chamber-pot” (Earliest Memory). The strength of the book is the dual sense that, first, the child’s eye does not lie (“sliding myself under the lives / of others, skimming them off...”, Substance and Shadows) and, secondly, that the child sees human nature in the raw: inadequacy, greed, cruelty, frustration... 

Some poems here enact the process of remembering, such as Scrying Bowl, with its striking opening, “Beyond and through my face / a silver coin is shining. / It is the moon grown small”, and the remarkable, Lost, “I guide the long-armed plough / across the field / to carve its furrows through the mists / of sleep, but nothing grows, no concrete form appears / no smell, no voice, no touch”. Other poems report (very much as Dickens does in the opening of Great Expectations) the many ways in which a child’s-eye view – a child’s reactions and deepest concerns – are so different from those of adults. Working through the grave-yard where family are buried, the child delights in the adults “feast of talk” but fears the dead will hear (The Cemetery). 

Nearly all of us write something about childhood, but this collection goes well beyond the conventional. At the end of the book (Paranoia, Wonky, Coma) there is a series which moves away from the ‘childhood memories’ context to look at the mind in free fall, where fragments of memory play a part in the disorientation caused, for example, by anaesthesia. Very exciting writing.