Rebecca Perry has already garnered a lot of attention and a number of prizes in her short career so far. Her Seren Pamphlet little armoured was a PBS Pamphlet Choice and this book is a PBS recommendation. This book shows just why Perry has gained this recognition, but it is a book I admire rather than actually like.
The address of the poems is very direct. The sentences are often quite short and compound. And at the beginnings of the sentences, the subjects of many of the verbs are either ‘I’ or ‘she’. The effect of these is quite centripetal; the poems pull inwards even where they move outwards, i.e. the world of the poem is constantly reiterated through the prism of the subject. In ‘Soup Sister’, for example, ‘Last week I passed a tree/that was exactly you in tree form,/with a kind look and tiny sub-branches/like your delicate wrists.’ Of course, most poetry emerges from an authorising consciousness, and Rebecca Perry makes a virtue of addressing the notion of herself as creator; placing herself and the artifice of her writing on the surface of the discourse. In the lines quoted above, Perry deals directly with the personification of the tree and the adoption of its characteristics to describe a friend. In ‘Immortelle’, Perry places ‘the writer’ at the entrance to the poem, ‘At the time of writing a single apple costs 45p/the writer is sleeping well//at the time of writing/the glasses in the cabinet have never been quieter//. Clearly the writer cannot be ‘sleeping’ ‘at the time of writing’, but the reader gets the idea; the writer is in control and not in control. Such awareness of control extends to Perry’s forms on the page, which range from dialogue in ‘The Execution of Lady Jane Grey’, to the Google accumulation of ‘The Year I was Born: the day by day chronicle of events in the year of your birth’, to the Anglo-Saxon-esque splitting of half-lines across the page.
Elsewhere, Perry’s technique is to accumulate images which present a sense of consciousness accreting experiences. In the final poem of the book, ‘A Woman’s Bones Are Purely Ornamental’, Perry sets out a range of experiences accumulated by and amongst adolescent girls at an all-girls’ school. Her juxtapositions are quirky and often very funny. They portray the attitudes of these girls in a way which seems completely realistic, ‘We learnt tricks/ like how to make our collarbones/ as prominent as possible/ and how to be interested/ without being too interesting.// My friend’s hands were beautiful,/as were everyone else’s./ I looked at them when they tapped pens in maths/or painted PVA on their fingers./…//Our English teacher/had a keen interest in serial killers/and their motives./He mentioned this twice.’ It is in poems such as these that the poems are moving and involving in the way other reviews have seen Perry’s writing. Beauty/beauty is a powerful, arresting debut; it will be very interesting to see where that power takes her next.
Ian Pople