The Night Nurse, Selima Hill
Fair Acre Press, 2022 [publication date October] £7.50
The undesirability of desire
Selima Hill’s poems get under my skin as if by witchcraft. I read the strange, brief poems in this pamphlet out loud in about twelve minutes flat, before returning to them again and again. I found them seductively addictive; both sensual and sensuous. There’s an unhinged quality which escalates poem by poem but feels in the end cathartic. The poems in this sequence describe an old woman’s infatuation with ‘The Beautiful Young Man with Piercing Eyes’ who walks his dog daily past her gate:
Here he comes, the beautiful young man,
walking to the woods with the dog
whose long white legs barely touch the ground,
whose bony back is arched like a shrimp.
You see? Already we’re unsettled. Whose long white legs? Whose arched back? The dog’s, presumably, but the image somehow also encompasses the man and the woman herself.
Eccentric animal imagery abounds, as it does in much of Hill’s work. In the second poem, ‘Jerboa’:
He bounces past my gate
like a ping pong ball,
a ping-pong ball
that thinks it’s a jerboa
In the poem ‘Zebra’, we read:
Like somebody who coaxes a zebra
through the narrow door of her house,
I coax the bony man and his dog
through the door that leads to my dreams
There are sensual food images too, as in the poem, ‘Golden Syrup’:
I want to say Young man
you’ve got to love me, now, on pain of death,
really love, I mean,
like golden syrup,
single-handed, workman-like and dumb.
The old woman suffers an agony of sad desire. In ‘Woman in a Cardigan’, we see her spying on the young man:
Peeping through my window in my cardigan
and wishing I was free,
like a fly
free to flit about the lily pads,
on perfect wings like pages of the Bible,
its little heart incapable of love.
I was reminded of the first Selima Hill poem I ever read, ‘Desire’s a Desire’, which ends: ‘My only desire’s a desire to be free from desire.’
She may indeed wish to be free, but she writes desire so well!