Realms of Uncertainty: Christopher Horton on new poetry from Paula Jennings and Anne Caldwell

Paula Jennings, From the Body of the Green Girl, Happenstance, 2008. ISBN: 9781905939244. £4.

Anne Caldwell, Slug Language, Happenstance, 2008. ISBN: 9781905939206. £4.

Paula Jennings is a poet who frustrates. Although capable of considerable subtlety, too often in this collection she is guilty of cluttering her poems with a confusing array of characters, overly ornate metaphor and disjointed imagery. It is a shame that ‘Driving in Autumn’ — in which the narrator’s car becomes as “animal” as the natural world that surrounds it — and ‘Night Road’ — which creatively envisions the rebirth of roadkill as emblematic for spiritual liberation — stand alone as poems of real distinction. Of the two, it is ‘Driving in Autumn’ that most deserves rereading, if only for its despotic depiction of nature:

A beetle drums its gleams across our path
and in this night’s cacophony

of smells, our seeded pelt
yelps out its acrid scent.

Here, the poet sustains a high level of intensity and, unlike in other poems in the pamphlet, resists a tendency to obliquely bring to life mythical or folkloric characters. Its last two lines are particularly well-judged: “even the tarmac is alive, / even the ticking flanks of my car.”

As with the image of a car as part of an all inclusive ecosystem, the poet is perhaps most adept when addressing subject matter that is out of the ordinary or challenges conventional or orthodox perception. ‘Seabird, What Has Death Left in Your Belly?’ is a disturbing poem written in response to Salvador Dali’s ‘Oiseau’ and engages the reader through its raw physicality and counterpoising of a dead bird with its “changeling” still alive within its “dog belly”. The narrator is, finally, compelled to try and save the creature, to “reach through the frame”; there is something desperate and oddly Plathian about this action as she tries to “scratch away paint” to release the little bird from its confinement.

Conversely, when Jennings’ poems tackle subjects such as God, gods, mythology and belief she begins to lose this reader. In these poems, the poet seems determined to present herself as being in direct communication with spirits and God or gods, and this indulgence renders her grandiose: “Sometimes, lulled by reds and blues of stained glass miracles that move across my body as the sun moves across pews” (‘In Search of God’).

In ‘First of May’ there is a profusion of gods, both Celtic and non-Celtic, as well as a maiden who blesses “tree after tree”. This mish-mash of characters, seemingly popping in and out of the poem for dramatic effect, feels unnecessary, the language used to describe them clunky and vaguely archaic: “It’s Beltane, and the Maiden laughs / to see us making love beneath the gleans / Christ the son of God is laughing too”. Elsewhere in the collection the poet uses religious or royal elusions to create metaphors that overreach themselves. For example, ‘Elegy for Ben’ presents “a mountain of suffering” and in ‘That Dress’ we get “golden trumpets of desire.” Such indulgences are not so prolific in the collection so as to spoil it for the reader, but they do detract from the whole.

Anne Caldwell’s Slug Language is a seductive, though at times chilling, pamphlet that demonstrates careful craft and a deftness of touch. The word ‘touch’ seems particularly apposite here because Caldwell so frequently expresses meaning through the human senses, bringing to bear the rawness of physicality. This is perhaps most apparent when she writes about childbirth. Her poem ‘Baby’ describes an alienating, impersonal hospital environment where “no one speaks except to give you orders”. This is contrasted with the realness of the birth itself, simultaneously intimate, excruciating and miraculous: “Fingernails are fishhooks / in your lover’s palm, / the baby’s head — a melon of pain.”

Caldwell also applies deeply physical imagery when writing about formative experience. In ‘Sledging’, the memory of a sledging accident is loaded with deeper significance when the poet’s mother simultaneously “drops a bag of oranges across the kitchen flags / and smells their skins bruising”. Although on first reading this last line might appear to be the easy option, there is more to it: the mother’s unbroken maternal ties to her children, the implied fragility contained within the natural world, the universal nature of all experience. Caldwell knows what she is doing, is aware of the multiplicity of possible meanings inherent within her work, and is happy to leave us in that realm of uncertainty.

Throughout Slug Language, the natural world is reconfigured, providing the poet with the arsenal of imagery she requires to impress on us a range of complex emotions. In ‘Snake’, it is the longing to be outside of oneself, for reinvention, that follows the “dog days of marriage” that the snake embodies through its innate ability to change its skin:

She would cast off a layer of skin like a cobra,
Watch its slow passage across the surface of the water.

‘Slug.Language.Kitchen.3am.’ is similar in approach but weirder as it describes the slugs that have left trails during the night on the poet’s lino — trails that smear the soles of her feet with “silver calligraphy”. The poet subverts our perception of slugs, presenting them instead as a source of sensuality. They are “pure tongues” and their bodies have “the sheen of a vulva.” The last line contains a playful ambivalence, as the poet “paints the whole house with desire” with her feet. She is liberated by the slugs, but this liberation is both sensual and creative. It is the image of poet as artist, as imbued with a unique mode of self-expression that is strongest here.

What impresses about Caldwell’s pamphlet is that it covers a breadth of experience and subject matter most poets would normally only contemplate covering in a full collection, from the innocent discoveries of childhood, to the revelation of love, to a relationship in its final, painfully cloying stage. If there is a common thread it is the temporality of lived experience. Set within this ephemeral universe, all that sustains is the vividness of the moment or that which is re-imagined — variously manifested in a song title, a fragment of speech or mere imprint.