E.E. Nobbs reviews
by Nichola Deane
Nichola Deane's My Moriarty was
co-winner of the 2012 Flarestack Poets Pamphlet Competition. Its 15 poems are
an intriguing mix of the philosophical and the personal. They are reflective,
I'm guessing, of Deane's well-read, questioning mind. Born in 1973, she
has a PhD, and teaches school in Warwickshire. Clive James (on his web site)
praises her Romantic-literary and contemporary-music reviews and essays –
calling them ‘critical prose at the level of poetry’. Her poems have appeared
in Magma and other poetry magazines.
This is her first pamphlet.
The opening poem ‘Elizabeth Bishop and
the Card Table’ is also my favourite. It’s an ode to Bishop in which, many
years previously, the elder poet had appeared to the speaker in a dream: ‘As
unfixing as a fixture, she sits across from me at the card table – my first
desk/ as a child. To my delight, her fingertips steady its familiar wobble’. The poem itself is delightful – and inspiring.
Though the speaker can't remember what the dream-Bishop told her, ‘It's the
feeling in the words that stays and stays,/ that's in me this moment, sweet and
flickery like the flight/ of a wren, tail-up, here before it got here’.
The voice of these poems is, for the most
part, objective, good-humoured and well-reasoned; and always intelligent
and observant.
‘A St. Christopher for Iris’ is a
startling exception where the speaker rages and grieves about a family
injustice that's been carried down through generations; the daughter asks profound
questions, some perhaps rhetorical: ‘Whose sadness, mother, is the dark dark
water?’
Darkness and shadows are recurring
motifs. As are mountains. The speaker approaches the impersonal,
indefinable, dangerous mass of a mountain in ‘Towards Suaineabhal’ with
‘averted gaze’; there's the confusing ‘spectacle of a queen turned beggar with
no domain’ who is in rags. It’s not clear why. The speaker keeps questioning,
and tries to confront the harsh cold facts of human limitations and
impermanence. The mountain returns near the end of the pamphlet in the
brief and beautiful ‘After Weing Wei’. Here the mountain is still ‘apparently’
empty and impersonal, yet significantly there is now a hint of warmth, comfort
and human presence in ‘echoes:/ the trace of voices and sunlight/ piercing the
canopy,/...the give of green moss’.
In ‘Fru Ida Hammershøi Discourses on the
Subject of the Pianoforte’, Deanne cleverly uses anaphora-type lists to show us
the frustrated, lonely wife striking the keys of her pianoforte – over and
over, obsessively: each line in the first half of the poem stridently starts
with ‘I play…’ In the second half of the poem, the music starts to stop: ‘I
would almost rather play than kiss or eat or talk’, but some days ‘I do not
play at all/ choosing instead to open the piano in the locked room of my mind’.
The poem turns into short lines at the end; the music stops completely; leaving
sad and impossibly quiet sounds ‘like the rusting of metal’.
I had to play the detective (with the
help of a more literary friend) to discover the reference in the title poem – and
that seems apt. Deanne is saying to me, I think, that we're meant to be
curious, to explore, to use our minds – to find our meaning, to choose, and to
make the effort.
In ‘Wittgenstein's Deckchair’, the last
poem of the collection, I was tickled pink to learn about the philosopher's ‘anti-furniture’.
Deanne frames her collection with a
mountain poem near each end. And it pleases me that she also frames with furniture
metaphors at the beginning, as well as the end: in her first poem – Bishop is wonderfully
and ‘weirdly part of the fabric, ontological/ as a chair’.
The pamphlet's epigram is John
Donne’s ‘Our dust blown away with prophane dust, with every wind’. And
behind Deane's poems, I feel strongly that age-old question: How are we to
live? In the deckchair poem, the speaker finds meaning in ‘the clownish
seriousness of pure endeavour!’ There is wry observation, and hope for us,
in the speaker's final vision of ‘the taut fabric/ of our lives stretching
across time/ carrying somehow our shape and warmth,/ somehow taking all our weight’.
After carrying Deane’s little
blue-covered book with me for the last 4 months, wondering what I would write
in this review, and – after each re-reading – discovering new thoughts, new
things to appreciate about the poems – My Moriarty has become
my good friend.
E.E. Nobbs lives in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada; and
blogs at elly
from earth.
She was raised along with other animals on a small farm. Poetry is now
her practice.
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