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The title of
Abi Curtis' first collection prepares the reading fittingly for the content:
poems which are frequently surprising in subject-matter and technique. The
opening poem, 'Lady Jane Grey', for instance, is about a painting
in the National Gallery, seen by both speaker and lover, and rendered vividly
and imaginatively through this dual perspective, and through shifts in time
from past to a present viewing:'here the bright straw confronts us,
spilling / from the canvas, spread like blonde tresses..' The imagery
is violent, heightened, painterly and the ending does its own characteristic
shift, something unexpected which is a device in many of these poems, to
reflect upon the relationship , 'Once I didn't know you.'and the
painting becomes not something doubly looked at but 'a portal' a
symbol of transition.
The heading of the first section of the collection , 'Fata Morgana'
alerts us to the idea of mirage: shape-shifting. This is entirely fitting for
'Loom' which in itself acts as a kind of portal for other poems
which re-work this concern. It's meanings are several and this fact is
enacted in the land / sea / skyscapes of the poem and inhabits its imagery,
'comes slowly through a weave of indigos / and greys, the warp and weft
/ of the dawn weather'. The rhyme and rhythmic patterning serve exactly
such an enactment. The poem is speculative. We are aware of the someone who
speculates about the meaning of the word as, indeed, a boat, looms through
'a web of mist', and in conclusion, in an almost metaphysical
fashion moves from the exterior world and its several conceits to an interior
one: remembered indistinctness
of lovers' bodies 'the overlaying drift and push of us'.
The poem 'Fata Morgana' embodies in its in form the properties of
the phenomenon and its mode is dramatic monologue in thirty lines: 'From
the summit of Elias they saw my dark, elongated towers, / squares of amber
light, a hint of railway, church spires, / hanging in reverse...' It connects with
'Loom', 'I have the power to change shapes / of sliding
boats..' and is a skilful mirror-poem with its 'hinge' or, indeed,
horizon where the poem flips over on itself, at lines fifteen / sixteen,
'...above which a promise of water, / Water above which shimmers a
promise...' The lines of the first section are mirrored but not merely
repeated and the voice never
wavers; stays persuasive, compelling.
The monologue is frequently which Curtis' vehicle for entering different
worlds and, indeed, dimensions, ' We change locations, meshing like
ghost-skin then melting again' ('Soliloquy of a Molecule')
.The circus becomes an arena of sexuality, 'my girl's body dazzles /
with machinery of heft and bone.' ('Bareback Rider') and in
'Lion-Tamer', the passion of man for beast recalls Angela Carter's
dark sexual tales: 'At night I rest my head and hands / in his dangerous
halo, / breathing the musk of blood and dung'.
'Death by Lightening' is a narrative and is almost prose. It's verb
tense-shifts halt the reader and offer a maze of perspectives. The speaker
wanders the streets of a foreign village, a partner staying behind, ' I
left you in the house, your eyes on me..' There is suggestion of tension
or upset. The rain disrupts, dislocates: 'thin fish lost their
bearings...sky a marbling of dark and unfamiliar faces'. The speaker
shelters under a graveyard yew, (I'm reminded of Stanley Spencer's
painting'The Resurrection', a scene which is both parochial and strange) another woman
beside her, ' She was not beautiful',and the poem undergoes another
time-shift, 'Later, I learned she felt the shock in her foot:', a
presumed death, and then the
present, 'I'm still here, now in the living room / where we question
each other'.
We have no real sense of how far back in time the various events have occured
and it doesn't really matter; the poem is deliberately kaleidoscopic,
dream-like. There are continuities, however, another scarring: 'Every
day you run your hands over /
the root-system printed red on my chest'. I think that could have
been the final line. We didn't need to know about the detected
'storm' in the eye of the partner as that notion is ever present
from the beginning. This poem demonstrates the risks Curtis takes with form,
language and perspective yet any workshop suggestions of excision seem
irrelevant.
'Hong Kong' is a perfect prose poem: a love poem where sound and
sense collide satisfyingly, 'Junks dunked in the brown water, lit up
from above by dragons of neon'. Particularly successful and compelling
are 'George Gabriel Stokes' and 'Tyndall's Flame': the
former's imagery and precise description of place, 'Clouds ... / possessed
by a wind that tunnels as blood / through the dark artery of headland',
being embodiment of the preoccupations of the natural philosopher and
scientist, and the latter delineating the curious physical emotional and
physical impact of the experiment upon an onlooker, 'I don't feel well or right. / A flame is a picture.
An orange-rind. / A flame is a quick thought of red'. The title 'Ignis Fatuus'
heading up the second section of the book is pointer to another phenomenon
that won't be fixed.
Some poems recall Alice Oswald's territory: 'Mole', 'The
Allotment', 'The Ghost of The Nature Reserve','...my hair,
streaked in silver / every evening by star-shine and
snails', and 'Mycelium', consciously or unconsciously, nods
towards Derek Mahon's 'A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford',
''Now our lights Braille across soft-bodied forms / not readily
given to the process of fossilisation.' Curtis' mushrooms do not speak
any universal message as Mahon's do but their names and physical qualities,
'Bell Cap bleeds... a crop of Dead Man's Fingers - the insubstantial
roof / above our bed', remind us of sex and death, once more
a strain of the metaphysical that pervades Curtis work.
This is striking, original poetry
© Pam
Thompson 2009
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