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With its emphasis on
the strangeness of every day objects, its coolness and concision, and its
deadpan humour, Root
bears a strong family resemblance to Linda Black's first collection of prose
poems, Inventory.
However, Root also reads
more as a kind of autobiographical whole. Here I should emphasise 'kind of' -
the book is made up of separate prose poems, most of them less than half a
page long; the 'narrative voice' describes and relates from a third person
perspective; and as Linda Black herself has said the 'she' might be 'her'
(the author) or it might not be. The starting point for this collection's
exploration is the desire to navigate, and in some way to bring together
under one roof, all those multiple selves, present and past, that we inhabit
in our daily lives. Or rather, which inhabit us, which come out to taunt and
haunt us just when we think everything is in order. And here as readers we
feel ourselves to be walking on very thin ice, for beneath these selves it is
not as if there is some core self sending the other selves out into the
world. 'They can't all be her, can they?' Black asks with astonishment (from
'She counts the children'). All we have, all we are, is these multiple identities, beneath which
lies only something we cannot know. This is not a case of having some kind of
'multiple-personality disorder'; this is the universe we live in but that we
have to shut out in order to be able to get out of bed and function. This is
the universe that Linda Black bravely and yet unassumingly investigates. It
can at times be a terrifying experience: 'And now the flames are catching,
racing, burning back, through the years and through the houses and it is more
than she can bear' (from 'On a cold night').
The book is divided into four sections: Conception, Procreation, Exposure and Emergence. There is, then, a kind of timeline, a
natural progression, around which the different selves coagulate and emerge.
Yet from the beginning, we are given a sense of the fragility of this, of the
things we are attached to coming to an end, of the past as memory which is
both ever-present and yet fleeting, which we want to escape and hang onto at
the same time. All this is
achieved not through recourse to philosophical language (though this does
come into it too, with a light touch), but through a focus on the most
ordinary details, for example in the poem 'She liked the space on the
landing':
Where the stairs turned as if it were extra, a place in which she might pause
leaning her back against the wall, where the sun might shine as on the lawn
at her grandparents' house, briefly; the lawn she had wished for her children
to run on in abandon. When she sees a photo of the children she thinks, how
familiar, how familiar these children in their clothes and their faces, as
though she could open a door and see them standing there with their faces and
their little feet.
The desire to understand past selves and their link to the present often
fills the narrator with ambivalent longing. The poignancy of moments like
these is achieved through focus on a single image, such as learning to tie
one's shoe laces in a bow (something which sparked off my memories of my own
as I read it):
Struggle and pleasure. How much she wanted to tie that shoelace. And then she
could. Now she is misleading. She wants to get back to the bow. The flat,
transitional bow. She could go downstairs right now, rummage and find it, but
she doesn't want to. It isn't about a bow then [...]
(from 'A bow will do')
Relationships, and the link between present and past, can be summed up
wonderfully in a single sentence, as in this short prose poem 'Hot water
bottle':
When she unscrews the stopper and pours in the hot water, squeezing out the
air before she screws it back, she thinks of her thin little father doing the
same for her.
The last section of the book opens out more to other family members, some of
whom return to memory 'uninvited' at awkward moments. There is a dark humour
here as Black takes a wry look at the different, contradictory stories that
we tell each other - or don't tell each other but which are still very much
present in our family lives:
Her
grandfather returns to tell her a story except he doesn't. The
story he
tells her doesn't she was
told wasn't was told her
by
her uncle except
he couldn't have. This is
that story not.
(from 'The story nobody told her')
The one difficulty I had sometimes with this collection is that I felt I
wanted to know just a little more, as if the narrator were dangling things
tantalisingly in front of me, only to withdraw them before I could get even a
glimpse of them. Shameful secrets are sometimes hinted at, for example the
possibility of sexual abuse, but are not really confronted in any way that
would render them convincing. Perhaps they belong to the 'unsayable', but
then that too could be made clearer. Or perhaps I am missing something
here?
In any case, Linda Black's Root is a collection which has intrigued and moved me. It has left me
hungry for more. I look forward with great anticipation to her next book.
©
Ian Seed, 2011
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