Rosalind Hudis Terra Ignota (Rack Press) £5.00
Susan Grindley New Reader (Rack Press) £5.00
It is a cliché of contemporary criticism to say that art treats the liminal, that which sits on the edge. Often the liminal is treated as just that; a thing which simply sits at the edge, representing a kind of boundary, or no-mans-land. And art often effects to be that boundary; porous, osmotic, allowing one side or both sides of that boundary to bleed into the other. Susan Grindley has witty, oblique view from the edge, that engages with the way that reading bleeds into our lives. Such bleeding provides us with worlds that not only provide perspectives on our lives but may sometimes anchor them. In the first poem of her pamphlet New Reader, ‘Face Down’, the narrator as a child is being read Alice in Wonderland. Thoroughly frightened by Tenniel’s illustrations, and particularly the faces with their ‘sharp, thin lines’, the child realises that actually she needs to hear the story finished so that she can absorb Alice’s bravery against these faces.
Grindley can also suggest the ambiguities and ambivalences of reading. Here, reading is not only and anchor and a solace, but may also lead to uncertainty. In ‘Soliloquy’, a contemporary Hamlet could have learned his lessons from ‘the notes from Guildenstern/and easily caught up. It’s not as though/ I haven’t done the reading, ‘Words, words, words!’ And, yet, for Hamlet, too, reading might just have led him to a more comfortable, even mundane existence.
Grindley’s favoured form is a poised and warm un-rhymed sonnet, and she works the demands of the form with great dexterity and aplomb.
Rosalind Hudis’ Terra Ignota not only explores an ‘unknown land’, but attempts the immensely difficult task of seeing from both sides of the border between the known and the unknown. And in so doing, the poetry acknowledges both the impossibility of the latter and the utter necessity of trying. Hudis’ musical and poignant writing describes the interaction between those whom society designates as ‘unimpaired’ and those whom it diagnoses as ‘impaired’: a family who live on the Welsh hillside with the legacy of Chernobyl and leukaemia; a woman with Alzheimer’s, and a father who has died from it; and the relationship between the mother and the Down’s daughter.
What Hudis’ achieves in these poems is a profound empathy with both ‘sides’ of these relationships; an empathy which is never sentimental. Hudis avoids sentimentality by employing an iron grip on reality which, in turn, is couched in an exemplary detailing of the world. In ‘Rupture’, the woman who ‘stares/ at the kettle, but can’t retrieve its connection to water.’, remembers a war-time bombing raid; ‘… the moment when/the glass sides shower out/ and, all around her, tenements/flower into a once in a lifetime/spasm of absurd heat./ Of course, this is the writer’s painterly description of the scene observed by the protagonist of the poem. But Hudis sidesteps that issue by so deftly pulling the reader into the woman’s perspective.
In the title poem, the writer’s father, ‘in his final illness’ watches a television programme about the explorer, Shackleton. ‘But he locked eyes to the plot,/ mapped it with strategies to push// beyond stalled ice-anchors and feet/ whose nerves were shot.’ This exquisite conceit not only mirrors the father’s struggles with dementia. It also mirrors our own need to engage through the screen that dementia places between us and those we love in order not only to understand but also realising a fuller humanity in ourselves. Hudis’ deft and moving writing shows us compelling paths towards that realisation.
Ian Pople