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