Sarah Corbett, And She Was (Pavilion, £9.99), reviewed by Annie Muir
Whether it’s used as the refrain in the titular Talking Heads song or as the central narrative device of Genesis, the word ‘and’ holds the English language together like braces worn by teenagers to close the gaps in their teeth. In Genesis, as in all narratives, there is one thing and then there is another thing. In the infamous creation story: he was, and then she was.
Sarah Corbett’s 2015 book And She Was: A Verse-Novel, written for her PhD at the University of Manchester’s Centre for New Writing, is about a ‘He’ and a ‘She’. The first part of the ‘Nocturne in Three Movements’ begins:
And she was
Grist to his mill
And he was
Grit to her pearl
This poem is a list of metaphors that demonstrate the way this ‘he’ and ‘she’ complete each other. The images become longer and more complicated and then gradually simplify again, until it concludes:
And they were laughing and laughing and could not stop
The shift in form here suggests that the prior images of completeness were actually incomplete, because the words ‘he’ and ‘she’ were held apart by the white space of the page. But now ‘they’ are joined together in a laughter that excludes everyone outside of these two people.
In the next ‘Nocturne’, ‘(C Major)’, the form shifts drastically into eight line stanza blocks, where moments of relapse into the ‘and he was’/’and she was’ refrain are presented as interruptions in a seasonal narrative of the couple’s ‘first year’. In this narrative, the repetition of ‘and’ takes us quickly from: ‘and it was midsummer and they took off north/ to the coast,’ to next year:
and summer wouldn’t come and summer stayed away
and they ran out of talk and they ran out of money
This is followed by another series of metaphors: but, where in the first nocturne he was ‘scratch to her itch,’ now he is ‘meat to her trap’ and she is ‘noose to his neck’. This shift from love to violence is reminiscent of Hughes’s poem ‘Lovesong’ from Crow, which begins simply, ‘He loved her and she loved him,’ but descends into:
His words were occupying armies
Her laughs were an assassin’s attempts
Hughes’s violent imagery and harshness of syllables is extremely present in this section of Corbett’s book. This is followed by another change of form, in ‘(E Minor)’, where lines float about the page as if they too were ‘falling’ out of love like the couple depicted.
These ‘Nocturnes’ seem to condense the entire rise and fall of a relationship into a few pages. This is done by reducing the relationship itself into its most basic elements: a chain of events held together by ‘and[s]’.
The largest, middle section of the book, ‘The Runner’, is a surreal narrative made up of four line stanzas that travel diagonally down the page, like staircases. The repetitive, static form of this section seems to control the content rather than the other way round, unlike the preceding and following sections, where the forms fluctuate to fit the material being presented.
An example of Corbett’s efficient use of form is the poem, ‘A Conversation over Breakfast’, in the final section, ‘Pinkie’. Here, she uses indented stanzas to cleverly distinguish between the two consciousnesses simultaneously contained within a single ‘I’. At the same time as: ‘I tell her about my book,’ we hear that:
He talks with passion,
And there is a little curve
Of distaste at the corner
Of his mouth on certain words:
Parent, book, critic.
I am careful not to listen
The way that one speaker focuses in onto the mouth and words of the other correlates with the way that this poem focuses in on one particular moment of the complex, constantly moving relationship(s) presented within the different sections of the book.
It is a book full of shocks. Some shocks arise from the use of clichés – such as the poem arranged into the shape of a heart on the page – and others are through the use of raw material – such as the harrowing first-person account of a rape victim, who recalls:
They put me under where you don’t dream.
I woke re-stitched, the pain a distant
Ship I could wave to but not reach
Sailing its quiet ellipsis.
In these lines ‘pain’ is compared to both a ‘ship’ and an ‘ellipsis’. An ‘ellipsis’ emphasizes a void, but it also bridges that void by addressing it: by ‘sailing’ past it. Corbett’s book is proof that whenever there is something difficult to say, there is always another ‘and’ that can be used to force the words out of your self and onto the page.