Helen Ivory, Waiting
for Bluebeard, Bloodaxe
Ira Lightman, I,
Love, Poetry. Knives, Forks and Spoons Press
“I would like to
extend my thanks to everyone who has ever liked my poems,” writes
Helen Ivory in her acknowledgements. This is an eminently sane
remark for a sane, witty and slightly discomforting poet. If you are
both attracted and repelled by her subject matter, so you should be.
The first half of the book is about women and death, and women's
conspiracies with death, and the second half – dealing with
Bluebeard – is about, well,. Women's attraction and repulsion for
death.
Written concisely and
in short poems and stanzas (with the occasional equally short prose
poem), it is all about subject with Helen Ivory. The book can be read
as a horror story or as single poems which would often be hilarious
but for the creepy draught of skeletons,suspicions and omens. These
controlled and detailed poems, fearlessly dealing with human and
physical small sufferings.
Each poem shows a
mastery of nerve as layers of survival are unravelled. Matchboxes are
coffins too small for their content: skin comes off people ion
layers. Even the colours are sinister: lemon, grey-silver. Ordinary
things like “a decent cup of tea”or waiting for buses have us
looking over our shoulder in terror; the television walks out of the
house with Bluebeard. Vertebrae can be unbuttoned, jelly rabbits come
to life. Nothing is as it seems, and after a few of the poems nothing
seems able to be trusted, either.
Helen Ivory is also an
artist. There is something neo-Victorian in the kind of miniature
assemblages she produces, from photographs and objects. They are
fascinating and precise. Her poems are exact reflections of this
outlook. You can hardly get more Victorian than your female
ancestors' submission to Death, nor the Jekyll-and-Hyde, Jack the
Ripper type of Bluebeard whose wives disappear. We can all; imagine
how, but not as precisely and chillingly as Helen Ivory, whose
incongruous mixture of sadness and humour can freshen the dusty
corners of our muddled fears. I can see why she has been compared to
Stevie Smith in this respect, and there are time when her conciseness
brings Emily Dickinson to mind. Those are fine women masters, indeed
– and look at our language there – for who would dare call
Stevie and Emily mistresses?
Another connection with
her art is the awareness of the human (or animal) body – often
expressed as parts. There's the little girl padding out the bra of
the ball gown, and even the “thinly sliced tongue sealed up in wax
paper” from the butchers. Indeed, in this way of anatomy, she links
people and animals – there's that flash of insight where she is
filing her nails “so they wouldn't catch on things. She wasn't,
after all, a beast.” She can even turn the earth and stars into
creatures. In What the Stars Said, she
tells us the stars
heaved themselves under the bed
and began to burn holes in the rug.
What
does the author make of men in this book dedicated to women? She
makes Bluebeard a privileged man with a leather desk – the old
master-of-the house image, divorced from the women's life as they are
divorced from his. There a re constant suggestions of the werewolf.
Gender relations are so relatively equal nowadays, it is salutary to
be reminded of the ancient confederacies of women who, excluded,
exclude men.
Helen
Ivory's impact is all in the content, rather than the language
itself. Not a word is out of place. Language is used superbly to
obtain the effects she seeks.
When
you look at the work of another poet/artist,
Ira Lightman in I,
Love, Poetry,
also a book of predominantly short poems, you'll see a total contrast
in the use of language. Ivory entertains and instructs by what she's
saying. Ira Lightman's work is all in the language. It's about how
what you think or see is affected by the way in which you say it.
Full of grammatical hiccups, puzzles, tricks and puns, Lightman's
work defies translation (a great definer of poetry) and provides
collections, strings and blocks of words that dazzle and confound
with meanings that could not be got without these exact words. And
to take the meaning you have to absorb the words as the poet gives
them: you must be receptive to poetry. Take a simple example,
Restorant:
on our tablecloth
the besuited drops /
leatherbound tomes
for madame, monsieur
to raise, consult
weigh with frown
on page five,
smile at fifty
as if that's
all the order
they can sustain
It's a simple grammatical sentence describing the waiter as
“besuited” and the menu folders as”tomes” adding weight and
formality to the small incident of choosing from the menu, taking you
right there as they choose their numbered course, and “restoring”
sense (the pun).
A few pages on, As the petal splashes also takes you to the
heart of a tiny incident, this time even less concerned with
intrusive complex syntax:
Chins down, the roses are
(stems blithe children) picked
into air, car, bath
and (seabound river's) bed
Yet these and other statements in the poems, the contracted, their
essence extracted, are precise. One needs to get the feel of such
nuggets from Lightman before embarking on larger pieces where the
language is seen to work the same way. Snack on meaningful
evening is a sonnet (well, fourteen lines) in four sentences.
Each convoluted sentence is packed with information on a summer
evening walk round Leicester. Not just any walk: this particular
walk: the nitty gritty of the sentence identify it overwhelmingly,
and fix it as unique. The first sentence runs:
in Leicester, hardworking deco New York
shops marketry fonts the fronts that
want money not serfdom from the super
economics under English June evening.
The sound crackles in all these poems. Sound is more primary than
syntax, though syntax is never lacking even when it has to be hunted
for. However I set out by giving examples of the more traditionally
well-behaved syntactically of these poems. Others, having gathered
their confidence on how to proceed, give a whole lot more ammunition
for any surviving fossils of the old schoolteacher mentality to
grumble about. Here's how Air on A starts:
It stood dum dum for groin dum dum
their ver-er-er-er-er-tices' tether,
to peg there
and be, dum dum
the tie that fixedly dum dum dum dum
bound the crotch up dum dum dum dum with animal skin.
In this poem you can see how much Lightman is enjoying the sounds
and rhythms, so that it makes sense he is now regularly writing
songs. His writing is surprisingly sexy. This is poetry to enjoy
rather than understand. The vivacity and freshness of Ira Lightmans
poetry is a direct result of the verbal freedom to which he has laid
claim.
The invitation to enjoy rather than understand poetry has to be got
across to readers before we can regain a general readership for
poetry. There's a general belief out there (not discouraged by review
writing) that you always have to understand poetry. This is already
resulting in people only buying what poetry they are told to like,
and/or baby poetry.
So, Ira Lightman is a poet and artist who, a rebel with words and
sound, makes you listen and hear what you weren't expecting. He
offers invigorating and different poetry, putting words together in a
jolting, unnerving but highly enjoyable way and taking you to the
heart of language. By contrast Helen Ivory, equally poet and
artist, comes over as well behaved, sticking to simple form and
traditional syntax, while actually having unnerving (and secretly
enjoyable) things to say. Thus she tales you to the heart of her
subject.
Both these poets are highly contemporary in outlook and offer
important ways forward for the current poetry scene.
