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.