Article Index

Sleeping Through, Faith Lawrence

Smith | Doorstep, 2019 £7.50

In celebration of the short poem

In Faith Lawrence’s rich debut, we see a writer who has such mastery of her words that she doesn’t need very many of them to communicate some of the biggest ideas and the most complex of emotions. One of her many gifts to us, in this pamphlet, is the quality of contraction — for which she praises winter for in ‘The Gift’:

The gift of winter
is to limit us, to make morning
in an hour

There are also some sequences of small poems in the book — for example, ‘Flowering’, a piece ‘after the eleven paintings by Sophie Breakenridge’, and the fantastic ‘Three Songs’, ‘for Delia Derbyshire’ where the poet uses words from an interview with the electronic music pioneer as her springboard. The poet weaves these excerpts (from the interview) into snippets of thoughts that led me back to some of the theme tunes of my life. For example, we learn the inspiration behind the Doctor Who theme was

that no human music
could ever be as remote
as this.

In ‘Windfall’, she gives the full life of an apple in just five, short, three-line stanzas, until it is taken back into the earth

As if its edges meant
nothing, as if it had always
belonged to the earth.

And at the end of the book, this is how I was left feeling — as if this collection of beautifully-crafted thoughts and moments has somehow always been with me.

Jane Thomas

The casual pun

It’s easy to miss the wordplay in Faith Lawrence’s subtly-crafted short poems. There’s a slipperiness to the imagery and a simplicity here which lulls one into being forgetful of mechanics. However, it’s worth taking time to notice the careful diction: double meaning adds to the enjoyment.

The word 'blue’ in ‘Futures’, for example, operates to add another layer:

It was blue weather on the island
for both of us that day

At first glance, this is a poem of ideal holiday imagery where there are ‘no phones’, and ‘we were listening to the birds’, but this is quietly undercut by a sense of the temporal, and by ‘our small hopes’ and the future only being ‘provisional’. The ‘blue weather’, then, may not just be literal, but also psychological in the sense of feeling sad. This turns the reading of the poem so that the ideal now looks like a more complex human experience of being abroad.

Sleeping Through is divided into five sections, and includes two sequences. The first of these, 'Flowering', has some of the shortest pieces, and these brief meditations are some of the most engaging in the pamphlet. This is at least in part due to the casual wordplay. The eighth poem, ‘Pod’, in 'Flowering' reads:

Milk and seeds
ready for time-travel
our dark capsule.

Again, Lawrence contemplates time, here with the play on the words ‘Pod’ and ‘capsule’, both of which can mean time-travel devices while simultaneously referring to the outer layer of a seed. The wordplay makes an unusual connection between rural, earthly nature and time-travel. It also links the poem to the title of the sequence, expanding on the idea of flowering to include human destiny.

There are many other short, thought-provoking poems here to contemplate. In our advertising-saturated society where we’re used to intrusive wordplay, it’s good to find poetry which doesn’t scream cleverness, but employs wordplay in a subtle fashion, changing the reader’s viewpoint, and adding depth to the reading.