Jane Lovell’s ‘On Earth, as it is’

This review first appeared in The High Window.

Jane Lovell has a gift of researching the most extraordinary facts for her poems and then bringing them to life with her distinctively sensuous choice of words and image. She effortlessly weaves scientific understanding into her poetry. The poems in her latest collection On Earth, as it is published by Hazel Press are not just about the natural world but about man’s cruelty and ignorance. The ingenious title is a phrase from the Lord’s Prayer but the cover illustrating an OS map from the 1930’s keeps the collection firmly on the ground.

Jane Lovell is a multi-award-winning poet and has read with Simon Armitage. Many of her poems have won or been placed in major competitions. On Earth, as it is contains ‘Ming’, the winner of the Gingko Prize in 2020, which is about a centuries-old bivalve mollusc which was accidentally killed by researchers:

Muscle and foot we scrape you
out, put you to one side,
globby and unfortunate.

Measured and elegant lines build momentum like lines on the mollusc’s shell:

Carved into your shell
we find trade routes, the wake
of explorers, contours of underwater
mountains, the migratory patterns
of whales.

It’s ironic that it’s the scientists who end up killing this most ancient creature and yet lovingly name it Ming:

We wrap your gummy form
in polythene, keep it on ice.

But mankind is not just careless of creatures but also of people and ‘Execution 1554, artist unknown’ hovers over the scene of Lady Jane Grey’s execution after which, it is said, her eyes were pecked by the Tower ravens:

It’s where the world disappeared
as the blade fell, the last scene
captured through a splint of light.

By focussing on the details of colour in the picture she renders this horrific scene both beautiful and mesmerising. The fragmented lines and stanzas add to this. The cruel execution of an innocent woman for political purposes is pointed up by the ravens’ gloating on their ‘treasure’.

There’s quite a lot of death and decomposition in this pamphlet including an Inuit fish skin bag, a butchered whale, a drowned skylark, Nabokov’s collection of butterfly penises. In ‘Laika, you must understand’ the stray dog is addressed directly. This was the dog that was sent into space so that scientists could measure and track:

your frantic heart inside
its shuddering cage,
mapped your fear from peak to peak.

In ‘Vitulus’ the poet imagines the calf whose hide was used to draw the Herefordshire Mappa Mundi. She delves into the minutiae of its life among ‘grasses, buttercups, a mash of nameless leaves’ before it was slaughtered, its ‘organs a muddle of bloody parcels’. The age-old craft of preparing vellum for important documents is graphically described until finally:

The world is drawn inside your skin,
its scribed parchment shrinking at light:
the endless raking of the lunellum
remembered in its translucence.

Lovell’s knowledge of birds is passionate and scientific. In ‘Snowy Egret’ she describes a carcass so vividly she brings it back to life along with the enigmatic suggestion of another ‘small unborn life’, the phrase repeated twice. She ends this poem:

It takes your breath,
this symmetry,
the tattered beauty of the hunter
hunched about its final pulse.

‘Reasons for Sanderlings’ celebrates these easily-overlooked wading birds that live on the edge between sea and land ‘the long dark stored in their souls’. Plants are named. The detail is rich. This poem is addressed to a mysterious other, maybe mankind in general:

In the scurry of waves across grassland,
the sanderlings will guide you, show you,
how to hunt for burrowing crustacean,
isopods and plankton.

With its rhythm of melodic phrasing as well as the breathing of the longer and shorter stanzas the poem emulates waves, a tide coming in or going out by degrees:

We hold their future like a sphere of thinnest glass.

This marvellous poem set firmly on the shoreline as if on the map of the cover, is almost a hymn and ends:

They have learned to skip aside from the debris
clinging to the beaches.
They are here to remind us we cannot fly.

I will treasure this pamphlet for its remarkable imagery, precision, confident use of scientific vocabulary as well as its rich tapestry of colours and forms and the living, breathing layer of history.

On Earth, as it is by Jane Lovell. £10. Hazel Press. ISBN: 978-1-7394218-1-6

You’ll Never Be Anyone Else by Rachael Clyne

The title of Rachael Clyne’s fearless and mirthful poetry collection, You’ll Never Be Anyone Else, published by Seren, is the title of the last poem in the book and, for me, is the thread that binds the whole together. The poems explore identity, personal history and sexuality as well as domestic violence though not simply from the narrator’s point of view but also exposes the damage generally done by people’s attitudes to one another. Lit by humour and wit and peppered with phrases from many walks of life, it’s a rollicking read.

The first poem, Girl Golem (a recurring motif) is based on the Golem figure made from clay by Jewish rabbis to protect Jewish people from persecution. Truth is written on his forehead and God’s name on his tongue but in this case the figure is the narrator:

She was made as a keep-watch

in case new nasties tried to take them away.

The family called her tchotchkele, their little cnadle

said she helped to make up for lost numbers –

as if she could compensate for millions. 

But things don’t turn out as expected and the cnadle has ideas and drives of her own and When she turned eighteen/ she walked away, went in search of her own kind/ tore their god from her mouth. 

In the short but powerful poem Three Piece Suite the family has migrated carrying all their mental and emotional baggage and the poet imagines her mother as a rickety chair, her father as a wooden ironing board, her Grandma a leathery pouffe between which I, their tailor’s cushion, bristle with pins. We soon find external danger is already lurking in the childhood home in the poem Bedtime when the young narrator hears voices shouting behind the wall of her bedroom and she has to shout back that her DADDY’S A POLICEMAN (though he isn’t: he’s a tailor) 

The collection is full of close observation and gives many opportunities for dramatised vignettes.  Jew-a-lingo is one of these and hearing Rachael perform this witty piece last month in Exeter at Uncut Poets was a treat as if she’s written a theatre script for herself. But the fun in this poem eventually turns bitter when the narrator encounters intolerance and prejudice:

Lesson 4 – In social situations

When refused membership of local societies eg the gold club, apologise

If they call you Jew girl or ask what you do for Christmas, smile.

Choose only words that are Formica-smooth.

Never make a drama out of a trifle.

Never dominate the conversation,

Try not to interrupt. Try harder.

Beware, those colour-coded smiles conceal teeth. 

There’s the best friend who said You can’t let Jews in. They’ll only take over   and the problem of having a NOSE that grows with the lies you tell about us. There’s a trip to Odessa where her grandparents came from, a grief that must be carried like a baby and laugh out-loud poems about early attempts at both kinds of sex, a failed marriage. The poems are racy and courageous, flirty and sad, sharp and compassionate. 

The poet plays with other contemporary forms of writing: for example Dateroo is fun with its music-hall rhythms:

He’s her fitbit, her chocky cupcake.

She’s his favourite app, his tinny.

Clyne’s ear for the vernacular is relentlessly acute.  But, in the end:

Araldite is murder to unstick after she goes viral.

She scrolls down his My Top Pubes collection

Spots a close-up of her Brazilian with bird tatt. 

Another witty and self-scathing example is the pithy poignant prose poem Tripp Reviews my Past where All those hearts on the floor, you could sweep them up. … I wouldn’t give it a 1* let alone 3***.

 

One of my favourite poems is Ronnie Scott’s 1976 for the way it brings the club vibrantly to life with all the characters caught so deftly in a few words. It is just one example (among many) of what Tony Hoagland called “the mind in motion”. The register here is spot-on:

       Always that thrill as I stepped through the door.

Everyone left their lives with the hatchceck girl for the table-lamp

Smoky dark, for Blossom Dearie’s whine, Dizzie’s inflatable cheeks

and Tom Waits’ gravel tones singing: The piano’s bin drinking.

I love the ending because the tables are turned when you realise everyone is watching everyone else:

Soho was safe, because within hours of joining the staff,

the Maltese gangs, the strip-joint owners knew exactly

who I was and where I belonged.    

Her take on life as a conventional woman (Susan Expects to be Admired) , on marriage, domestic abuse (Take the Medicine, Her Mind is Snagged) and divorce and coming out as a lesbian thereafter are all fuelled by sharp wit and intelligence. Girl Golem survives it all with her (Girl Golem is Stranded in Marriage) and like a chorus wryly comments on the dramas:

 Now I’m the pisher, the alte cacker

I managed your three score and ten –

which comes from Girl Golem Looks Back. But that haunting final poem distils the essence of this fine collection with its wisdom and tenderness to others and perhaps to her self:

You’ll Never be Anyone Else

so you – yes you,
with your warts and wings
will just have to do.

Acceptance is your food
and shelter without which
you are brushwood

for any foul wind
that cares to blow.
Stop using the poison

bottle labelled ‘Drink me’
it’s not OK.
It’s that simple.

I didn’t say easy.

Here she is reading it herself:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCaTPiSetBY  

To quote Hoagland’s The Art of Voice again: The self may indeed be an uneasy coalition of impulses, influences, misinformation, and truth, but it is stubborn to survive and, in the end, it is loyal to its body, its identity, and its desire to dance another dance. Rachael Clyne has explored so many different voices in this engrossing collection and it’s fitting it ends with a nugget of her own hard-earned wisdom.

Here’s what Rachael herself said of this collection:  https://www.serenbooks.com/tag/youll-never-be-anyone-else/