Sarah Westcott reviews
The
blurb on the back cover of Heidi Williamson’s first collection focuses on the
poet’s “fascination” with science and the exploration of what her publisher
Bloodaxe calls “less usual territories” for poetry, including maths, computer
programming and space travel. But
Electric Shadow is written from a more integrated, subtle area than the
traditionally diametrically opposed cultures of poetry and science and their
‘territories’.
While
Williamson does indeed write about sciency subjects, this collection is less
notable for its scientific substance and content - and more for its clear-eyed
approach to the world and its mysteries, with poems often written in the spirit
of Keat’s negative capability.
Williamson’s
writing has an openness to ‘not-knowing’, a spirit of exploration tempered with
quiet rationality, a drive to convey the ‘astonishing state of possibilities’
in the world. It also stems, like
science, from a state of curiosity, with clarity of thought and close
observation of natural phenomena key in the search for knowledge and
groundedness:
While
every poem ever written
about the moon rises before me,
about the moon rises before me,
I
wait here, in the dark,
with
my eyes wide open.
(‘Aurora’)
Electric
Shadow is concerned with forms of light - skylines and sunsets, aurora borealis
and shadows on the palm of a hand, a vertiginous view of a world where ‘space
is only one mile up/closer than the next town.’
Again
and again the reader is unsettled and tipped into something approaching a
parallel universe - Williamson’s poems are peppered with the quotidian -
caravans and card games and campsites - and yet they also zoom into the
troposphere with sometimes giddying speed as she explores the slippage between
times and states and places with precision of thought and language.
She
acknowledges the essential chaos and instability at the heart of a universe
‘running away with itself / like a child on a red bike on Christmas Day,’ and
often writes from a fixed perspective, where the present is a fulcrum from
which to hang this shifting, sliding world.
There
is a strong sense of being a still point, a distinct consciousness in many of
her poems. In ‘James Dean escorts his
mother’s coffin’ the poet addresses the nine-year-old Dean in the second
person, managing to inhabit his psyche and capture the sense of a relentlessly
moving world as he looks from a train window:
Each
stop you check your tender cargo
is
not yet lost...
The
world speeds past, begins to blur to nothing.
...Something
inside you is peeling away.
...Somewhere
within you a small cargo shifts.
Some
things take a lifetime to travel past.
The
centering effect is strong, too, in the poem ‘Flickr’, an unusual meditation on
photography: ‘How quickly each country contracts/to thirty-six bits...The fact
of being // far away recedes, becomes a fiction / you tell yourself over and
over./ You check the evidence often / lacking something to hold / in your hand
and believe. Like this.’
Most
striking though is Williamson’s representation of two states existing
simultaneously - be they psychological
or physical realities - a conundrum beloved of quantum physicists. In lines
reminiscent of Frost’s 'The Road Not Taken', she entertains the possibility that
being both incorrect and correct is compatible - that multiple possibilities
can exist simultaneously.
In
my favourite poem ‘Circus pony,’ ‘chosen / and not chosen become pathways,’
while in ‘Old tricks,’ a wonderful description of learning to swim, a girl
takes her ‘first experience of flight, buoyed up, / surviving in two directions
at once.’
The
numinous partner in ‘The grand dance’ is ‘always there / and not there, against
my cheek.’ And the subject of ‘The Travelling Salesman Problem’ is a construct,
who ‘travels in the minds of mathematicians’
and who ‘has no form but going - a pure line.’ Yet Williamson also makes
him tangible, sitting in jams, flogging ballpoint pens, a fallible and frail
human being.
The
sense of multiple selves is captured most explicitly in ‘At the hands-on science
centre,’ which describes the
disorientation of standing in a hall of mirrors and saluting ‘our many selves
... apart / but linked by science.’
...A
slide to the right leaves
a
curved staircase of ghosts rising behind us.
We
spool endlessly away, the real us just
a
frame in a film running before and after
(‘At
the hands-on science centre’)
There
is a refreshing lack of braggadocio in Williamson’s writing - lofty scientific
concepts do not create an intellectual barrier for the reader, as they so easily
could. The poet leaves space for poetry to bloom; sometimes subverting
theoretical concepts to create some arresting, and almost comical imagery:
For
her, theoretical physics
is
a bird soaring next to a plane.
(‘Schrodinger’s
pregnancy test’)
A
discourse on static electricity - surely the first poem to do this in the
world? - is also notable: ‘You collect it daily anywhere ... You’re barely
aware of the loss / as each charge transfers / from you, to you ...’ (Static.)
Some
of the most memorable poems are those that draw from personal experience and
transmute it into the universal. Williamson’s apparently personal writing about
childhood is especially powerful, beautifully evoking a British childhood of
the 1970s and 80s - an era of Little Chefs, salt n shake crisps, and plastic
jelly shoes:
...Prawn
cocktail crisps and card game
punctuate
the rain. The salt of sea and crackers
coats
my lips like doughnut sugar. The sand
works
my skin, smoothing, smoothing.
The
chevronned, stainless steel steps,
removable,
lead my jelly shoes to a world
of
bare open skies.
(‘Hopton-on-Sea’)
I
was struck, though, by the number of poems written in couplets - a quick count
found twenty or so in the collection - and found myself occasionally wishing
for a poem that experimented or even exploded form, a craving for an opening of
white space on the page, in tandem with the openness of Williamson’s ideas and
the lightness of the collection.
These
are open-minded poems written in a spirit of exploration which offer up a
liberating, expansive view of a world where ‘meaning brims/almost always.’
Highly recommended work which wears its metaphysicality lightly and with charm.
Sarah
Westcott is a poet, blogger and journalist living in London.
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