Fear of Forks, Hilary Menos
HappenStance Press, 2022 £7.00
Games
Games, and conversations relating to them, caught my eye in some of the poems here. The placing of these, and the way in which they reflect or underline what else is happening, is of particular interest.
‘Lifeline’ recalls an occasion when the poet and her partner had to take a young son to A&E in France. He’s injured his thumb with a whittling knife, so ‘to distract and amuse him’ they:
played Lifeline,
an interactive mobile phone game where Taylor
is stranded on a space station on the moon
and needs our help to find his way back home.
Help which Taylor and the injured child both get in this lovely, tender poem.
Later we are introduced to Fluxx: a game containing chance cards, some of which alter the rules even as the game is being played. There are various versions, with different settings. Menos & co have their favourite:
Sunday morning. Family time. Zombie Fluxx.
We’ve had eggs and coffee, and now more coffee.
We need a lot of coffee to play Zombie Fluxx, doughnuts too,
and a chainsaw and a baseball bat and a shotgun.
And a car and gasoline and a piece of four by two.
[‘Fluxx’]
Soon the conversation turns to zombie apocalypses, stockpiling toilet paper, and rising numbers of Covid cases. (The altering of rules…?)
By contrast, Goûte Sel — which would have merited footnotes in the days before Google — manages to relate the taste of salt to zombies and a literacy project in Haiti.
In ‘Red Dress’ the family are discussing the nature of memory as they travel to a funeral collation. This leads to the question of whether or not zombies ‘repeat behaviour from their old lives / like the shopping zombies in Dawn of the Dead’. But ‘The boy says no, that’s not in the comics at all, zombies don’t / have memory, because memory is what makes us human, / see?’
Exactly so. And there is much evidence of memory doing just that throughout this highly intelligent, humane pamphlet.
Rob Lock
The domestic and the dangerous
In Fear of Forks, Hilary Menos balances domestic objects with moments of peril, or reveals the troubled meanings and histories associated with these everyday items. In doing so, she uncovers the ways in which our homely existences are under threat, but also poignantly evokes how precious these existences can be.
As the name would suggest, cutlery is very present in this pamphlet. In the title poem, the many meanings of the word and object ‘fork’ are probed. ‘Fear of forks’ is revealed to be fear ‘of fine dining’, ‘of being an outsider’, ‘of being found out’, ‘fear of forked lightning, of things branching’, of ‘divergence’, ‘splay, sprawl, splits’.
‘White Star Line’ — named after the British shipping company to which the Titanic belonged — lists the vast numbers of utensils kept on a ship, such as ‘table knives’ and ‘dinner forks’. There are thousands of these, but the poem ends by noting there are only ‘20’ lifeboats. Poetry ostensibly about humdrum objects is continually undercut with a sense of threat.
The poet does not only use cutlery to explore the fragility of our everyday lives. She also uses common family activities to hint at this flimsiness, perhaps most notably in her excellent piece about the pandemic, ‘Fluxx’, in which a board game featuring zombies (zombies occur in three different poems!) takes place during lockdown. The family discuss how many cases of Covid-19 there are in Australia, at first believing there are ‘eighteen’, and finally realising there are in fact ‘a hundred and twelve’.
However, everyday objects also reveal the value of ordinary lives. In ‘Rack, From Left’, the speaker lists a series of different types of knives belonging to her son, before concluding that ‘with these tools to hand / our son is fit for this, and that, and any other world.’ The care taken in describing each knife seems almost like an act of love from a mother to her child.
These are just a few examples of the skill and dexterity with which Menos manages to portray the frailty and beauty of human lives and relationships through ordinary objects and activities. These are understated poems that achieve a great deal despite, or perhaps because of, their seemingly modest subject matter.
Isabelle Thompson
Listing cutlery
This pamphlet makes me see poems as equivalent to apostle spoons in a velvet-lined presentation case. Each poem is set in its own white space — all similar but different.
Twelve of the twenty-two poems in Fear of Forks are structured around lists and most of the others contain elements of listing. The title poem, for example, is a list of fears prompted by forks. The word ‘fear’ appears eight more times after appearing in the title. It is fascinating to see how the author makes the list both interesting and surprising by varying images and the inclusion of detail. She gradually develops and internalises the fears, moving from mere ‘photographs of forks’ to the ultimate self-questioning fear, ‘of being neither fish nor fowl nor good red herring’, which is to say, unfit for purpose or ineffectual like the ‘spork’, a combined spoon and fork, with which the poem ends.
There is wit to enjoy. In a collection which focuses on knives and food preparation as much as forks, it is unexpected to come across, in ‘Fluxx’, a discussion of toilet paper and its alternatives. ‘We discuss bidets, and newspaper, and dock leaves, in that order’.
These poems walk a knife-edge between everyday life and the fear of death. Life’s refinements are listed in ‘Fear of Forks’ as, ‘the pickle fork, the spaghetti fork, the two-tined snail fork’, but one of the fears listed along the way is, ‘fear of the road disappearing into the dark’.
By listing cutlery and landing squarely on its final word, ‘bone’, ‘Pickle Forks’, the opening poem, flags up a level of anxiety which is developed throughout the book — the next poem refers to cutlery as ‘like pale corpses’, and the next is titled ‘Lifeline’. The poems link across to Zombie Apocalypse games, parenting, hospital visits, the pandemic.
The final poem, ‘Spõn’, includes the lines, ‘and I am learning to embrace chaos’, and, ‘there’s no straight line, no sure end.’
These poems sit on their pages like boxed silver. As the poet says in ‘Auction’, ‘each one a perfect treasure’.