With its sensual language, Geraldine Clarkson’s second pamphlet draws the reader into its oneiric world. In ‘Nuala, Nuala, Nightwatchman’s Daughter’, ‘Days Round like the Moon’, ‘Triptych’, ‘Bridal’, and ‘the last thing’, the book has an artery of references to Christianity, more specifically Catholicism, and opens with a poem creating a sense of otherworldliness, ‘I had a red silk cloth for a mother / …We lived at the end of a / stick.’ (‘Biography’)

This otherworldliness continues in a myriad of ways throughout, and held me captivated even in places where I didn’t fully understand all I read. The reader is lured by the language, surreal qualities and unusual decisions in relation to punctuation (in ‘a young woman undressed me and’, there are no upper case letters, giving a sense of hastily recorded memories shared intimately).

Imagery is powerful and memorable and creates a sense of an inner world,

‘Last night I dreamt I was a cake, a squat brown gateau
dimpled with cherries above a piped creamy smile. Inside,
falling-away fudge, and smudgy…’ 

                                                (‘Mise en Gâteau’)

and,

‘she touched my lip with a shapely thumb: shhh …
don’t fret. her voice like jinxed june breezes
in lime leaves. and then. her voice like rills rushing over flint’  

(‘a young woman undressed me and’)

 There is a beautiful musical quality to the poetry, exemplified in the title poem,

‘… (they mate, like carapaces, in parentheses),
Dora feels coolness in new places, lifts a reused
razor shell, mother-of-pearly and straight’

(‘Dora Incites the Sea-Scribbler to Lament’)

and also in ‘A-Man-at- a-Bus-Stop sees a Perfect ‘O’’, where, in addition to the title, every line begins with ‘A’, followed by ‘m’, (Amanatta, American, ampersands, a mutilated, a mayfoil,  Amitriptyline, amateus, A.m.), and reaches a crescendo with ‘amo / amo / amo’.

Reading the poem has a dizzying effect and, placed as it is after two poems dealing with confinement, a sense of hope and playfulness.

It’s a book of contrasts between a sense of containment and freedom, between the inner and outer world, and explores female desire with emphasis on the female body (‘a young woman undressed me and’, ‘caress’, and ‘The thing about Grace and Laura’).

It’s a short but sumptuous pamphlet to be read in one go at first:  lose yourself in it, then return and peel back the layers, dive underwater, revel in the world, in the confinement and the escape.

Moniza Alvi’s book length poem in twenty parts, set in 1947 at the time of the partition of India and Pakistan, tells the story of a family’s migration to Lahore and is a lament movingly related which marries a personal story of loss with the fracture and trauma of a nation. 

The poem, with a steady pace generated by the use of short lined couplets which captures the sense of a journey, weaves historical fact, ‘Sir Cyril Radcliffe finalized the line / ... in the time / it takes to sort out a school timetable.’ (p. 12, The Line), stark fact about the change of religion in the city, ‘… the mass departure / of its Hindus and Sikhs, / to cope with the influx / of a million Muslim refugees.’ (p.46, On the Brink); with metaphor, ‘A line so delicate a sparrow might have / picked it up in its beak’  (p.12, The Line); and sums up how this beginning is an end too ‘…but for my grandmother / India draws away, irretrievably/ like the tide going out.’ (p.13)

Although predominantly structured in couplets, several sections end in single lines, creating a pause to reflect before moving onto the next section. For instance, ‘Lahore, still-beating heart of the Punjab,’ (p.47, On the Brink); and, ‘Nothing was certain.’ (p. 62, Continuing). Occasional use is made of single lines to create fracture and a sense of a chorus of voices, for instance at the loss of Athar,

‘We’re sorry they said,
the friends of friends.

So very sorry –
He isn’t with us –
He disappeared at –
He vanished between –
The last time we saw him –      

                                                 (p.39, The Camp)

One of the most powerful aspects of the poem is the use of contradiction and duality: ‘the-past-in-the-future’ (p.61, Continuing) ‘The risk of departing / and the risk of remaining’  (p.22, Ever After)

Alvi makes skillful use of repetition to create an incantatory effect. References to prayer, Allah, the sun, sky, and darkness, ‘Only the sun rose every day / with no sense of loss – / overcame its spectacular death / of the evening before.’ (p.46, On the Brink), along with a chorus of voices, form further refrains throughout the book. In Praying, reference to prayer becomes salvatory ‘she would build her house of prayer’, and ‘In the camp, the lifeline was prayer.’ (p.44)

It may seem strange to end my review of this book I highly recommend, with reference to the first section of the poem but the sense of an end being in the beginning was paramount to me as a reader. The first section, The Line, contains a seed of hope like a prophecy, ‘there will be a resurrection’; and although there isn’t what might be perceived as a happy ending to the poem; as we follow the grandmother’s story, her prayers and supplication, her movement through loss – from bewilderment – to ‘the fine escarpment of hope’ (p.61, Continuing), and the building of a life in Pakistan, there is a sense of some resolution in finding a new home, albeit not the same as that left behind, a sense reinforced by the repetition of lines from the first section, in the final section,  

‘A line so delicate a sparrow might have
picked it up in its beak’.  

                                                (p. 63, Crossing Back)

This review was originally published in Antiphon Issue 14

When I read Matthew Sweeney’s Twentyone Men and a Ghost, I understood his own comment, ‘The Men poems took me by surprise’. Although each man has characteristics which might seem familiar, aspects of a person we can recollect from experience in daily life, Sweeney’s men taken together are a menagerie, an image which is enhanced by the animals both familiar and exotic, which swarm through the book to an equally varied backdrop of music, taking in banjos, reggae and classical composers.