Jessica Mayhew reviews
Division Street
By Helen Mort
And what she sees she cannot
tell,
But what she knows of distances,
And doesn’t say, I know as well.
(‘Fox Miles’)
Division
Street
is a collection marked by distance. Stirred by a sighting of a vixen in ‘Fox
Miles,’ Helen Mort sees this knowledge embodied by, and shared with, the fox. There
are many landscapes travelled in this collection, landscapes that are often
strange, or disorientating. However, the poet handles these with subtlety,
knowing what to keep concealed to brighten her scenes. This is a collection of
division and reconciliation; whether of the miners’ conflict, relationships
gone awry, or journeying to unknown places, things rendered are brought back
together with the poet’s delicate touch.
Mort’s
fascination with distance is introduced in the first poem:
...staring out to sea, as if, in
the distance
there’s the spindle of a
shipwreck,
prow angled to a far country.
(‘The French for Death’)
The French for Death’ reveals an
interplay between life and death, where the poet in her youth becomes, ‘a child
from the underworld in red sandals/ and a Disney t-shirt.’ The poet’s name,
despite the difficulties of translation, acts as an anchor; the distance here
is symbolic, an imagined shipwreck. This exploration of name and distance
culminates in ‘The Complete Works of Anonymous:’
...we’d spend a lifetime
on the vessel of a single verse,
proofing our lines,
only to unmoor them from our
names.
(‘The Complete Works of
Anonymous’)
Again, the use of sea imagery
here shows distance, but this time, the distance of personal obscurity.
The distance explored in this
collection is also physical. Mort explores the landscapes of the North with a
lively eye, always giving a sense of travel. The ‘North of Everywhere’ sequence
emphasises this revision of location, when Mort says: ‘dragged from a latitude/
I couldn’t even dream,’ her body becoming the compass needle (‘North of
Everywhere: I. Hermaness’). In the second poem of the sequence, ‘Shetland,’ the
words ring with the sound of the wind that the poet evokes:
Wind-whittled, turned on the
sea’s lathe too long,
...the trees scoured off, the
houses pared down
to their stones, the animals less
skin than bone.
(‘North of Everywhere: II.
Shetland’)
The sound echoed through the
lines emphasises the sparse emptiness of the text. This adds to a sense of
displacement that threads throughout the sequence. The fourth poem ‘Aurora
Borealis,’ re-imagines the landscape of Shetland in the form of a B movie:
the Shetland hills huge UFOs,
or the whole island slumbering
beast whose back
we clung to...
(‘North of Everywhere: IV. Aurora
Borealis’)
The strangeness of this third
stanza reflects the disorientation of the characters, leading to the bathetic
fourth stanza, where the characters miss ‘the sky’s brief fire’ because they
are looking down at their feet.
Mort is skilled at hazing reality
and fantasy in her poetry, without losing her anchor. In ‘Deer,’ the speaker
recounts ‘The deer my mother swears to God we never saw.’ (‘Deer’) The memory
of the animals brightens with every recall, becoming almost mythic, and yet still
rooted in the day to day, stepping with ‘pound-coin-coloured hooves.’ There is
a moment of surprise when the speaker discovers her mother watching the
much-denied deer.
One of the strengths of Division Street is the location and
portrayal of the gaps between – between miners and police, between people in
relationships, between cities. In ‘Rag and Bone,’ the speaker reclaims objects
that are ghosted by others, ‘a mattress moulded by another’s bones.’ They lay
claim to this between world:
No-one will miss
the world tonight. Let’s have the
lot.
(‘Rag and Bone’)
The title of the collection and
poem ‘Division Street’ is taken from the name of a street in Sheffield. We see
the larger conflict between miners and police in ‘Scab,’ violence hanging over
the text like the stone that was ‘lobbed in 84.’ However, where Mort presents separation,
she also shows reconciliation; later, in the same sequence, miners and policeman
come together in a re-enactment.
Mort is adept at zooming into
these microcosms of personal relationships from a wider landscape. ‘Outtakes’
discusses the deconstruction of film shots, lingering on the mechanics of
desire, showing, ‘a leopard cub/ who scrupulously licks each paw.’ This poem
shows the reader how:
It’s all a matter of perspective.
Look
close enough,
you told me once,
And
anything’s significant.
(‘Outtakes’)
The poem reveals a separation
between two people through film, ending with the striking image of watching
life go on from outside, through lit windows. The way that lives come together
is another interesting thread throughout the collection. In ‘Other People’s
Dreams,’ Mort explores the lives we have in other people’s heads with a
skilful, light touch, before gathering these divisions in her own dream:
Each morning, you must gather up
these lives
and hold them tight, walk
carefully downstairs,
slow as the girl in your own
brief dream...
(‘Other People’s Dreams’)
In ‘Outtakes,’
Mort recounts:
It’s all a matter of perspective.
Look
close enough,
you told me once,
and
anything’s significant...
(‘Outtakes’)
This sense of perspective is what
really shines through Division Street.
Whether it’s the backwards-looking view of the miner/police conflicts, the
minutiae of disintegrating relationships, or the distance of an unknown
landscape, Mort’s perspective is clear and focused. Division Street is an accomplished and engaging debut.
Jessica Mayhew is a young British
poet.
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