Guerrilla Brightenings, Joanna Nissel
Against the Grain Poetry Press, 2022 £6.00
Brightened with colour
Colour features strongly in Guerrilla Brightenings. The first poem, ‘Hove Lawns to Brighton Pier – March’, opens delicately:
and every morning the beach
the dawn pale as pink innards of seashells
getting earlier now
And the third stanza has:
the pebbles in taupe and ivory and charcoal
and some almost mustard as the sun rises
Later in the poem, the ocean is first ‘jade’ and then, when the tide turns, ‘becomes glassy and oh the blue blue the blue of it’. The poet recounts the way the light changes in ‘It’s the only time I see them’: ‘from fragile pinks, pale blues to brash cerulean and shamrock lawns’.
A ‘master of rigs’ influenced the poet’s father and we hear of ‘guerrilla brightenings’ in ‘The Long Man of Wilmington’:
Skinny light-man master of rigs
he infiltrated forests lined the branches
with fairy lights tubes of colour devils saints
Nissel offers the worlds of David Bowie, and Noel Fielding in the prose poem ‘Did I Say Starlight?’: ‘a land of discoballs and rainbow shards’. By way of contrast to that urban tone, the poem that follows, ‘Look at Me’, sees a relationship through the medium of an orchid, describing a bud as:
A knuckle of a thing, tiny,
barely a suggestion of green.
That poem’s final image is vivid:
I thought of how thrilled you’d have been
of the shock of cerise in each centre,
like the bright silk lining of a twill coat.
Other visually-striking images include Anne Boleyn’s ‘Shivering grey velvet’ in ‘Time Travel’, and the ‘burnt umber of red helianthus’ in ‘On rediscovering a favourite dress’. In the final poem, ‘Hove Lawns to Portslade — April’, the poet returns to the beach setting of the first poem. This time kayaks and canoes are ‘glazed bright as boiled sweets’. The reader shares the moment of being bathed in light:
I need to turn back Oh give me five more minutes
in this glorious light I was not prepared
for a love like this
Colour permeates this pamphlet and really lit up my enjoyment of the poems.
Sue Wallace-Shaddad
Poetry of the tides
Sandwiched by two long poems, both with the refrain ‘every morning the beach’, Joanna Nissel’s pamphlet is brought to vivid life by the ebb and flow of tides. The two aforementioned poems detail the speaker’s early morning walks on the shore during the lockdown of 2020. Repetitions swell and build like a wave, deftly capturing the simultaneous urgency and meditativeness of the pandemic’s early days: ‘time has become / every morning the beach’.
This littoral setting pervades the poems. In ‘Found on the Seafront’, the interior of a house becomes the beach:
My teacup releases
the static of waves.
Inside my cupboards
dawn over water leaks
In ‘The Facilitator’, the centrality of the seafront becomes even more apparent: ‘The beach is the only real thing there is anymore’.
Even in poems which make no direct reference to the shore, the tidal rhythms hold sway. In ‘Look At Me’, repetition creates a tide of loss and longing, as the speaker addresses someone who is leaving. ‘Before you leave / you must know’ begins every stanza.
The pamphlet includes two ‘found’ poems entirely composed of snippets from social media posts. They are like flotsam delivered by the sea; they present readers with the debris of a particular moment in history, underwritten by a current of anxiety, loss and (perhaps) the survival of hope. A post talking about ‘suicides’ ‘committed by men’ is juxtaposed with one telling us to celebrate ‘the broad bean flowers’ (‘Now More Than Ever’).
Nissel also makes wonderful use of space. In ‘The Night Lockdown Came In’, the poem is punctuated by gaps that call to mind the speaker’s ‘footsteps’ as she walks past the ‘promenade’. The poetry comes in pulses reminiscent of waves as well as the disjointedness of that time. Just as we all had to keep our distance from each other during lockdown, so too is the poem perforated and restrained.
Guerrilla Brightenings is poetry for our time. As elemental and vital as the tides which flow through its pages, it perfectly evokes not only the atmosphere of 2020, but also the loss, longing and love that come together to make a human life.
Isabelle Thompson