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.