Things Only Borderlines Know, Olivia Tuck
Black Rabbit Press, 2019 £7.00
Fairy tales and fables: stories of extremes
Things Only Borderlines Know opens with a quote from a nursery rhyme and is peppered throughout with references to fairy tales:
There was a little girl,
Who had a little curl,
Right in the middle of her forehead.
When she was good
She was very good indeed,
But when she was bad she was horrid.
This opening quotation from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow sets the tone for the whole pamphlet — these are poems about extremes of emotion. Tuck makes innovative use of children’s stories to explore, amongst other things, mental illness and autism.
In ‘The Princess and Her Sensory Processing Disorder’, the story of the Princess and the Pea is used to explore a condition common in those with autism, namely hyper-sensitivity. In the pamphlet’s final poem, ‘You Took Five Stanzas’, a patient whom the speaker met in a psychiatric hospital becomes
manic Jack I met in Devizes
with a cigarette, instead of a cow
on a rope or an enchanted bean.
In ‘Changeling’, a woman’s baby is replaced with ‘an elfin decoy’. The poem seems to explore post-natal mental illness through the use of this fairy-tale device.
One interesting choice is to refer to the speaker’s parents throughout as ‘Mummy’ and ‘Daddy’. With the poems’ subject matter and style, and with at least one direct reference to Plath in the poem ‘Unstable Talk’, it is perhaps not too far-fetched to draw links with Plath’s ‘Daddy’. Although the speaker’s relationship with her parents here is much less troubled than Plath’s, nevertheless ‘Daddy’ also makes use of childhood stories and language to speak of extreme situations. Its opening words, for example, draw to mind the nursery-rhyme figure of the old lady who lived in a shoe (‘black shoe / In which I have lived like a foot / For thirty years’).
Tuck’s poetry equally makes reference to archetypal stories to tell a tale of extremes of emotion and situation. Through using the language of childhood to explore dark subject matter, these poems share something with those of Plath, perhaps one of the best-known poets to write about mental illness.
Things Only Borderlines Know is a powerful and intense pamphlet. Its fairy tales and nursery rhymes work well to bring home the essence of its subject matter.
Isabelle Thompson
Desperate remedies
This is poetry of desperation. The desperation of a young and vulnerable person, a bag of bones, who often, in her own eyes, is too fat.
The opening poem ‘The Function of Emotions’ is a strong start. It’s a list poem in which each statement explains what emotions are for, with one of the bleakest endings I remember. The final function of emotions is:
To break both your parents’ hearts
with one stone.
To demonstrate failure
to your little sisters.
To leave you with no grace to fall from.
Reading those lines, I wanted to throw my arms around the speaker — while knowing all too well that such desperation isn’t fixed with a hug. The speaker has to find her own way through, which she does. She maps the difficult, dangerous journey through her writing.
For me, the poems formatted with line breaks work beautifully: they open out the business of what it is to feel broken and confused, in fragments that the reader processes slowly. The handful of prose poems are harder going: little thickets, dense with words and long lines.
But I am moved by the many reminders that this is all happening in teenage years: the Maths lesson, the GCSE Art class, the Chemistry lesson, the History classroom. And in the school poems, the poet also evokes a younger self, a little girl who thinks about dolls’ houses and teddy-bears, who thinks of her parents as ‘Mummy’ and ‘Daddy’, a little girl who is different and desperate. As she says in ‘Watching the M4 from a Maths Lesson’, ‘A lot of puzzles stay puzzles.’
There is one thing she can do though, and that is write about her predicament. There is reassuring courage and humour in the way the last poem (‘You Took Five Stanzas’) ends:
Perhaps it’s right
I can’t ask you to manipulate
any bones. If I get old,
I expect I’ll want X-ray prints
of all the forms I’ve taken:
dodgy line
breaks
and worse.
We need this poet to continue, to get old and older, and to write about that too. Because she has a feeling for it.
Because she can.