Andrew McMillan reviews
by Alicia Stubbersfield
It’s a
rare pleasure to settle down with a book that cuts the crap, cuts the
pretention and is smart enough to wear its learning lightly. With Alicia
Stubbersfield’s fourth collection you feel immediately in the presence of
someone at the top of their game; someone who understands the true power of
poetry lies within the confident layering of poetic image with plain, direct,
arresting statement. The first poem in
the collection, ‘Stone’ ends with the stanza
Stone- not shell. No
faraway tide sound,
no ocean-memory or lost
sea creature.
Basalt, smooth as
someone’s skin.
The
opening of the collection underlining that it is a collection concerned with
reality rather than fantasy, the realistic rather than the overly-romantic and
the human rather than the blatheringly academic. ‘Stone’ appears in the first of the book’s
three sections, ‘More Musicians’; which is followed by ‘Marking’ and
‘Influenced’. Undercurrents of medicine, surgery and mortality run under a lot
of the poems, in ‘Lazarus’ (“I know that place, waking/ from anaesthetic, still
in a dream”) and ‘Frozen’ (“Under the ice/grief’s small creature still quivers
its fins”) and one of the most interesting conversations which emerges from the
book is the dialogue between such fear and the spirit of ‘freshness’ and of new starts which appears
in poems like: ‘Just changing the car’ (“now I’m sitting here, doing a deal/on
my own”) although the resolute independent statement is destabilized slightly
by the ending: “Sat Nav/ so I know where I’m going”. Such is the strength of this collection, it
isn’t a monophonic tract on death or on new starts, it embraces the human
condition of having to deal with both at the same time- and everything is
honest- a new direction might be embarked upon but the Sat Nav, a machine not a
human, might have to be relied upon for navigation.
On a
personal level, I’ve always been fascinated by the parts of poems which reach
beyond themselves, reach through Poetry (in the proper noun sense of the word) into
an arresting plainness which seems to be as honest as it’s possible to be, the
most truthful to a reader. Stubbersfield gives us such moments; in ‘My Ex-Mother-in-Law’
(“Home became the smell of old lard”), in ‘The Prescription’ (“Stanley leaps to
meet me, his whole body pleased”) , in ‘March’ (“I still think about March
1998/when I lay on the sofa, waiting,/ while the final chemo raced through my
veins”). The power in the last quote gaining its strength from its honesty,
from its plainness.
Another
thing which interests me in poetry is the power of the negative, the depths
that the word “not” opens up when considered against what something is.
Stubbersfield uses this technique to great effect, particularly in ‘Sunday
Morning’ (“One magpie tearing at roadkill/is not necessarily an omen”) and in ‘November’
(“not looking as it melts back to mud”). The latter quote also showing
Stubbersfield’s strength of craft- any other poet might have simply ended with
a twee “not looking back” but here it is the snow that is melting back to mud;
a much subtler metaphor is achieved. Another example of deft
handling of metaphor comes at the very end of ‘Yorkshire’ where the line “males
showing off what they can do” in relation to the mating calls of Curlews opens
out into a statement on war and love- the biggest subjects of all, handled
minutely and delicately by Stubbersfield.
The poem
‘Miles Away’ is illuminating into the craft of Stubbersfield; in a witty poem
about the pitfalls of internet dating profiles, the poet recalls a moment when
a friend “suggests I write poems about them./ A sequence perhaps” but this idea
is firmly rejected with the act of swiftly removing the profile. There will be no cheap tricks in the collection,
nothing extended beyond its necessary borders, no sequence on internet dating
which would have felt false to the true experience. Whilst on the subject of craft it seems
pertinent to consider one of the overall abilities of poetry- that of contraction,
of distillation. During the book’s second sequence, based around
Stubbersfield’s time as an English teacher at secondary schools, the opening of
‘Marking’:
Piles of exercise books
next to my chair,
the oily smell of them,
the stickiness
of Year 9 pages
captures
everything of the angst, the turmoil (both biological and emotional) and the
physical manifestations of adolescence. What some poets would labour over
suggesting through the journey of an entire poem, Stubbersfield is able to
contract and distil into three accomplished lines. The ‘Marking’ section of the book contains
some intensely powerful endings to poems, which are built up to perfectly and would
be spoilt by quotation (but read ‘Year 7, Period 1, Wednesday’ and ‘Keeping it
Back’ to see what I mean). What strikes you on reading this collection is how
so much of contemporary poetry uses the end line of a poem to tie itself neatly
off in a bow, to close in on itself; these endings seem to do the opposite,
they open the poem out further, pull the reader into the white space below and
add depth; in the poem ‘Over’, where Stubbersfield recounts having her
contraceptive coil removed, the poem ends with the haunting:
[…] it looks fresh,
he says and I feel
obscurely pleased
as though I’d kept it
nice on purpose.
Rather
than closing off the poem that opens it out into other considerations, other
thoughts and feels somehow more satisfying than an ending which mutes itself
and sews itself up.
What
this review hasn’t mentioned yet is the heart of this book, it’s ability to
break it, it’s ability to mend it- it’s ability to move it. ‘The Game’ and the poems dealing with
familial alcoholism are profoundly moving as is ‘In Need of Some Updating’
which deals with maternal and paternal loss. Such heartbreak is foiled by the celebratory,
such as in ‘Valentines Day’ where Stubbersfield is seen “doing
something/different with my heart/holding it in my own cupped hands/watching it
swell again”. Once again we get not just one or the other, not just heart swell
or heartbreak, we get the very human honesty of having to live with both. The
titular poem of the collection, which appears in the third section ‘Influence’,
could perhaps be read as a summation of the project and craft of Stubbersfield
as a poet. The yellow table which was
‘mother’s defiance of post-war monochrome’ is dismantled at the end of
the poem
I unscrew four pale-oak
legs, the extending flaps
from each end and place
the top along the skip side,
yellow Formica facing
outwards, still gaudy, still doing it’s best
stripped
of all its extras, the legs and the flaps, the table still retains its
characteristics, it is still “gaudy, still doing its best”. This collection is offering us poetry with
all pretention, all artifice, anything unnecessary stripped away but the poems
still retain the qualities which make great poems; human honesty, human
frailty, heart-breaking and heart-mending love, deftly handled metaphors and
tightly controlled distillation. “This
one’s in the story” writes Stubbersfield at the end of ‘Change the buttons…’: this collection is in the human stories it
tells, both the poets’ and those people she encountered, stories which might
otherwise have been lost, stories which needed to be told, stories which we
needed to hear.
‘Above the Roof Terrace’ closes the
collection, it returns partly to the concerns of the collection’s first poem,
‘Stone’, considering mortality and an afterlife whilst beginning to slightly
embrace a spirituality which the opening poem of the book rejects. The poet has
moved during the book. The poet has moved the reader during the book. . This is
the kind of honest, direct and beautiful poetry which should come to “inhabit
the emptiness of air” puffed out by poets who wear their learning heavily. They
would do well to look to these poems, “soaring”, they would do well to
“transform into their human selves”; they would do well to learn from
Stubbersfield, that it’s “in the story” that true poetry can be found.
Andrew McMillan was born in South Yorkshire in 1988. His most recent
pamphlets are the moon is a supporting player (2011, Red Squirrel Press) and a
new pamphlet-length poem protest of the physical will be published by Red
Squirrel Press at the end of 2013. He is a lecturer in Creative Writing and will
be teaching two Poetry School courses in Manchester during the summer. He is
working on a first collection.
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