January 2009
www.stridebooks.com
By Bill Greenwell
What does a poetry-reader want? This one, I know, is not going to be happy unless there is some observational wizardry - there must be moments when a word or an analogy will nail a place or an action. And I need a degree of intimacy in the speech: someone to talk to me about interesting things. I also need someone to make me work a little harder than I might do if this was prose. I don't mind hard reading; I like a challenge; and I like surprises.
Tone is everything in some of these new collections. In Salvation Jane, Greta Stoddart frequently strikes an uncertain note, hesitates, retracts, tries to define what is going on, but can't be sure. 'Maybe it's this orange lamp...', 'I don't know/ what it is to belong/ / to any such group/ or what to say', 'The river... has nowhere special to go/ but goes there all the same' - these kinds of phrases are recurrent, and are epitomised in the best poem here, 'Faithful':
It's still a mystery
to me that time I woke, my ankles flecked,
the dull bloom of a bruise, when all I recalled
of the night before was a good soak, a book.
As is this. Me, here, content
night after night to bed down with you
but turn to the window we keep shut fast -
the better to make a running jump, the break.
The tension between the safe and the precarious is what makes Salvation Jane work. Stoddart is also a nicely unostentatious formalist, whenever she wants to be: you don't notice her occasional rhyme-work, her echo-patterns, which is at it should be. And her quietly agitated writing contains some occasionally startling phrases, as in an image of swifts, 'fluid/ workmanlike, fixing rips in the sky'. Sometimes, her images can confuse - for instance, here is one of the stars:
how like the dead
they far and away outnumber us
who find ourselves under their
continual shining remove
but holed up, leaning in
like beggars round the one light.
('Television')
I think the word 'remove' may be the problem (being under a remove is a slightly complex construction), but there are also too many plural nouns (stars, the dead, us/ ourselves) to make immediate sense of 'beggars'; and there is the distraction of the play on 'far and away', as there is the tangent about the dead outnumbering us. The 'one light' is, we realise suddenly, the television, and the simile has considerable power - but Stoddart is putting obstacles in the reader's way.
For the most part, however, Stoddart keeps her poetry clean and unfussy, leaving us to dwell on neat observations, many to do with new motherhood, as when (in 'At Play') she moves from observing the 'inscrutable law' of the havoc a toddler leaves in its wake, only to spot the child's 'first grasp of things. That hole/ you dug for the broken man.'
Bill Greenwell |
Greta Stoddart's second, Costa-shortlisted collection is founded on a contradiction. Salvation Jane is one of the common names - the other is Paterson's Curse - given to the "little purple sturdy thistle" of her title poem, which is simultaneously feted for its fine honey and feared for the damage it can do to pastureland and grazing animals (it spreads like wildfire and is fatal if eaten in large enough doses). Stoddart's plant is a paradox, a twist of contradictions that perfectly sums up a seesaw poetic universe in which every action has its opposite and emotions are never unequivocal: where conception is longed for but motherhood puzzled over; where children are "leavened" and "sweet", but always "just / about to turn"; where faithfulness satisfies, but the speaker who is "content/ night after night to bed down" with the same lover still sleeps with face turned to "the window we keep shut fast - / the better to make a running jump, the break"...
Sarah Crown |
