Aloneness is a Many Headed Bird, Rosie Jackson and Dawn Gorman
The Hedgehog Press, 2020 £5.00
The Hedgehog Poetry Press, 2020 £5.99
Telling secrets, sharing wisdom
One of the reasons we turn to poetry at times of uncertainty is to find the wisdom to see us through. In this clear-sighted, compelling and generous pamphlet we’re offered it in abundance.
Framed as a conversation between the two poets, these poems alternate with the grace of a call-and-response. The pamphlet becomes a room where secrets are shared:
What I didn’t know was that her womb
had fallen completely outside her body. No-one knew.
[Rosie, ‘Untouched’]
Here, no subject is taboo: not the feats and failures of the ageing body, nor experiences of sexual assault, nor even meditations on death and dying. Reading these frank, unheightened poems becomes a way to eavesdrop on some of the questions women ask themselves when they’re alone:
What would they make of me,
walking from so many men?
[Dawn, ‘Bloodlines’]
Yet not everything in this conversation is transparent, graspable. Some secrets are partially held back or only hinted at:
[...] Nanna’s house whispered of things
I’d not known — tin bath in front of the fire,
my coal hewer grandfather,
beer on his breath, what happened next.
[Dawn, ‘It All Adds Up’]
This combination of sensory detail (‘tin bath in front of the fire,’ ‘beer on his breath’), held in balance with a troubling lack of specificity (‘things,’ ‘what happened next’), is compelling. As the conversation deepens, we become privy to other forms of knowledge, intangible but dangerous:
[ ... ] the light wanting to enter
is too much to see. I don’t speak of it much, even in poetry.
In the past, such notions took you to the stake
[Rosie, ‘The Hanged Man’]
Both poets draw on the symbolism of light and dark as a way of figuring the revelations and concealments at stake both in conversation and in life:
We are capable of more love than we know.
That’s something to reach for, isn’t it,
in the dark of the night?
[Dawn, ‘Hands Like Ours’].
This is contemporary confessional poetry at its best: a place to be seen in private, a place to be alone yet heard.
Kathryn Bevis
The power of co-creation, and women’s wisdom
This pamphlet is a joint creation from two established talented female poets. And it is truly joint: you can almost hear the two different voices — one in free verse, one in couplets — bouncing off each other’s train of thought. I found it engrossing — like listening in on the most intimate and philosophical poetical conversation between two wise reflective women.
The poems cover a host of subjects. ‘It All Adds Up’ is one poet’s recollection of her father’s attempt to ‘warm the coldness between us’ through sharing his passion for birdwatching with his young daughter — only for her to recognise too late he was reaching out. She writes of:
a rush of regret,
late love for an old man trapped
in a crumbling body,
counting down.
This is met on the opposite page by one of the most impactful poems in the collection. ‘Floored’ shares the other poet’s recollection of the day her father died, and how she:
fucked the shock of the news
and the shock of the sex into me so it never left
and I can never think of my father’s death
without feeling unclean.
In ‘The Hanged Man, Hard News and Yet’, both poets reflect on the deaths of friends. There are other subtle connections in the pamphlet too — like the coal mining heritage in both ‘The Ground We Stand On’ and ‘It All Adds Up’; and a woman’s relationship with her own body in ‘All That Glitters’ (a long overdue poem about HRT!) and ‘Untouched’, which reads:
What I didn’t know was that her womb
had fallen completely outside her body. No one knew.
Even a doctor had not come close enough.
The whole collection is an exquisite and intimate piece of work beautifully executed and full of revelation. In ‘The Light We Can’t See’, one of the pair writes:
I’m just thankful to have arrived
at the harvest of myself, to have come through, able to look back.
We should be grateful that both poets have chosen to share their combined harvest with us in this beautiful way.