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’.