Polly Atkin reviews
Changeling
by Clare Pollard
But, an eerie tale to tell,
Ay at the end of seven years,
We pay a tiend to hell,
I am sae fair and fu o flesh,
I'm feard it be mysel.
Ay at the end of seven years,
We pay a tiend to hell,
I am sae fair and fu o flesh,
I'm feard it be mysel.
‘Tam Lin’
A changeling:
a faery child exchanged for a human one – a cuckoo child left to be reared by
unsuspecting human parents. This exchange is almost always about survival. Sometimes,
but rarely, the term refers to the human counterpart, scurried away to grow up
in Faery. Lives are lost, or only forgotten. A changeling is often unaware of its
otherworldly nature.
‘Changeling’
as a term only appears once in Pollard’s collection, but it is an idea – of difference,
of dislocation – that weaves through the whole. In London, the poet is party to
the make-believe described in ‘Adventurers in Capitalism’, whose speaker
‘bought a house, but it’s like playing house’, and whose ‘wardrobe’s a Fancy
Dress box’. She is dislocated from a childhood of flower-pressing and tree-language,
as in ‘The Language of Flowers’:
Once I pressed flowers, so learnt
their names …
but then the siren song of cities
cooed from my TV’.
The
flower-names have been replaced by ‘too many’ words for shoe, and bourgeois
middle-class London things: ‘Selfridges, mojitos, latte, weed’. Without the
words she has forgotten, she ‘can’t think clearly’.
‘Skulls
of Dalston’ seems to suggest that living in Dalston – ‘white, pushed here by
price’ – she is alien, endangered by her
obvious difference to the hooded youths who are her neighbours:
And he’s watching for the Love of
money crew
the DNA boys, the Murder Dem
Pussies,
and I’m looking at the Arcola
theatre, up-
and-coming shows, acting out a play
in my head:
rape – the spurt of blood –
stairwells –
I am rehearsing a play called Hell.
Both
survive by keeping their head down, trying to disguise their obvious
allegiances. The poem, however, does not seem to get beyond the obvious,
effecting a litany of street detritus which seems to be trying too hard to be
‘edgy’. This hints at remnants of the ladette culture of some of Pollard’s
earlier work, which appear in poems such as ‘Thirtieth’. Although these poems have their place, I’m not
sure its in this collection.
The
changeling Pollard is no more at home in her old places than she is in London, as
‘Waiting for the Kettle to Boil, Lancashire’ deftly shows. Here, the speaker is
‘no longer afeart’ of her strangeness in her old home, where she was ‘the
changeling daughter/you never understood’. The poems opens ‘Now I’m free of you
I’m free to love you’, describing perfectly a common reaction to the home left
behind. She has chosen to go where she thinks she belongs, but as the speaker
of ‘The Lure’ relates, is now finding her ‘glittering’ dreamland ‘a blasted,
withered place’. Neither one thing nor another, the changeling is at home
nowhere.
This
book is an experiment in rewriting, and reinvention. Traditional-style ballads
such as ‘The Lure’ sit alongside more obvious re-imaginings of tales from myths
old and new, local and international, and the confessional, contemporary poems
Pollard has become known for. Guinevere, Cassandra, Circe, Queen Mab, The
Pendle Witches, The Hodden Horse, The Mermaid of Zennor, a host of saints, The
Beast of Bodmin Moor, Tam Lin and the Erl Queen make appearances. So, however,
do those gangs of Dalston, The Book of Mormon, CCTV cameras, Youtube and
Pollard’s ‘lucky and disgusting’ city friends, ‘still partying on a Sunday
afternoon’.
Where
this juxtaposition works, it works brilliantly, producing such evocative
doubles of the familiar works as to partly anihillate them. This can be seen in
‘The Two Ravens’ (more commonly known in the form of ‘The Twa Corbies’), which
Pollard repositions in the context of the recent Iraq War, cleverly playing
with histories of conflict and rewriting implicit in the popular ballad. Pollard
has called these re-imaginings of folktales ‘new versions’, deliberately
placing them within a culture of malleable narrative.
A great
deal of our best-loved poems rely on exactly this – making something new out of
something familiar. In Changeling Pollard is drawing not only on a rich
heritage of myth, legend and folklore, but on a long literary heritage of
readdressing these in poetry. Just think of Keats’ ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’,
which draws on the same sources as Pollard’s ‘Tam Lin’s Wife’, a poem that also
calls up in its title and approach Carol Ann Duffy’s well-read collection The
World’s Wife (Picador, 1999).
Similarly,
the atmospheric ‘Whitby’, might otherwise have been called ‘Mrs Harker’
perhaps, or ‘Mrs Dracula’. These female-perspective poems continue a theme set
up in Pollard’s earlier poetry, particularly those poems Bedtime
(Bloodaxe, 2002) which
re-imagine
Mrs De Sade and Eva Braun.
Barely a
student gets through school now without studying Duffy’s poetry, or Angela
Carter’s ‘The Bloody Chamber’, which are A Level texts. Which begs the
question, what is new about Pollard’s new versions?
Pollard
has said that for her ‘Tam Lin’s Wife’ describes marriage – and in this – and
as it is conveyed in the poem’s last line – ‘love has no conditions. None’ –
she does indeed make her own version. In the ballad, Janet has to hold onto Tam
exactly because they are not married – if anything, he is more legally wed to
the Faery Queen. Janet holding on to him as he changes – when ‘all those things
I prize in you/your beauty, kindness laugh, –/are stripped off one by one’ – is
a physical contract to override the earlier one. In her version, Pollard makes
this timeless story into a narrative about her current concerns, which could be
said of the whole collection, whether those concerns be marriage, consumerism,
or terrorism.
Pollard
uses the framework of myth to comment on contemporary politics: Cassandra
predicts Climate Change, ‘The Cruel Father’ uses a classic trope to comment on
honour killing. Poems less obviously contemporary, such as Pollard’s version of
‘Reynardine’, still have a politicized message. ‘Reynardine’ is one of many
narratives from around the world that follow the model most familiar to the
majority of readers through the tale of Bluebeard, or ‘Captain Murderer’ as
Dickens’ knew him. ‘Reynardine’ falls into a subgroup of these tales in which
the male protagonist has fox-like characteristics, associating it with ‘Mr.Fox’ (or ‘The White Road’) quoted as
an ‘old tale’ by Shakespeare in Twelfth Night, and most recently
reimagined in Helen Oyeyemi’s synonymous novel (Picador, 2011). Although
Pollard’s narrative is set in a a-temporal fairytale world of ‘cloudberries’,
‘disappointing market lads’, ‘dark castle[s]’ and ‘fens’, set as it is
alongside her contemporary poems, this too becomes a moral about the dangers of
capitalism, and consumerist culture. The narrator will wander forevermore in
search of Reynardine because within his castle he has ‘everything you want.’ It
is desire, not men, who pose the danger.
Pollard
has been compared to Anne Sexton for her confessional style. There are clear echoes here of Anne Sexton’s
1971 collection Transformations, based on Grimm’s tales, which marked a
departure for Sexton from more introspective work, as Changeling does
for Pollard. Just as Wordsworth and Coleridge drew on a culture of popular
ballads to create the radical poetry of Lyrical Ballads back in 1799, Pollard
seems to be aiming at a radical shift in this, her fourth collection.
Whether
she achieves this or not may lie only in the individual reader’s reaction.
Nevertheless,
these poems have something to say, and say it evocatively, and sometimes quite
beautifully. Changeling’s strengths lie in the poems which draw on myth
but also investigate Pollard’s own life and concerns – hybrid creatures grown
out of her earlier confessional poetry, and her newfound interest in folklore, such
as ‘Caravan’, the closing poem – an unsettling love poem in which hooded hawks
brood comfortably alongside the ever-present TV and ‘broken washing machine’. Its
weaknesses lie in the same hybridity: like a changeling, this collection does
not quite know what it is.
Polly Atkin lives in Cumbria and
teaches at Lancaster University. Her pamphlet ‘bone song’ (Aussteiger, 2008)
was shortlisted for the 2009 Michael Marks Pamphlet Award.
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