Zelda Chappel, The Girl in the Dog-Tooth Coat – (Bare Fiction, £8.99), reviewed by Ken Evans
Zelda Chappell’s poems takes a jagged-edged penny to the ‘Scratch Card’ of love and relationships and never rub through more than two in a row – always there is loss, diminution, a relinquishing. She is adept at grounding yearning and nebulous longing in the concrete everyday, to prevent it becoming merely vague or suggestive. There’s cold chips; kitchen-clocks; cappuccinos; the hem of a nightie; and lots of whisky (which in ‘Interlude’ is spelt thus; by ‘Afterwards’, four poems on, it has become ‘whiskey’ and is again in ‘Sticks’ – showing a preference for a drop of the Irish?)
She blends this with an almost preternatural sensitivity to, and poetic use of, the elements and the elemental in us: skin, lungs, salt, light, water, wind. Not only skin, but as in ‘Pause’, ‘under-skins.’ Skin contains and reveals, releases and imprisons; skin is stitched, unravels, slips, hides and covers, ‘your skin a fine-spun web.’ (Flesh.) It is like glass, transparent or opaque. The poetic sensibility here is like one of those delicate aphids, so slight that sunlight passes through them to the leaf they are poised upon; you see straight through the wings to the small pulsings of the organs beneath. Their protective covering never seems enough.
The opening poem, ‘This can be what you want it to be,’ sets a pattern of someone almost trying to slip out of that delicate carapace of skin and merge in an almost transcendent way, with the world of people and objects out there:
‘wondering how
to unzip our caged bird’s chest and find her
tiny heart still beating, how to search
her air-made traps and hold them
let them lead us out of here.’
Her panache in melding the small, spikey and painful-sharp, with the transcendental and bigger-sweep ‘romantic,’ is best portrayed in the short, eight-line poem ‘Trickster’, where the startling, ‘Daylight is a revelation like the apocalypse and I/come ready shattered’ is juxtaposed with the gorgeous, ‘Comfort is a darkness deep enough to get lost in, the scoop/of the Plough’s sweet cradle, the moon’s solitary stance.’ Or in ‘Dead Cert’ where ‘Time is a broken clock you dismantle/precisely only to stuff my cracking skin,’ the conceptual and abstract gracefully poised against the real pain of ‘my cracking skin.’
The poet’s blog describes her as a ‘Poet and Artist’ and her attention to light and atmosphere, and the visual, is evident. The slightly dilapidated, corrugated iron seaside shack of her blog photo seems to appear again, repeated in the almost post-Apocalyptic, black and white, brooding cover of her collection. The self-referential seems a possibility in the opening poem:
We’ve been locked in the backstreets
of Whitechapel’s undertone, instinct
nagging like an echoing bass
Is Chappel Whitechapel’s undertone? Is this the poet, locked in her own ‘backstreets’? I ask because it hints to me of why I was left with a simultaneous sense of great accomplishment in the poems, but also a small disappointment as to their range. So many poems of love and its impossibility, loss, longing, and resignation, in this collection: the striking cover, and her almost universally well-received work – seemed to promise more ‘sturm and drang’; a wider range of responses, than the wistful or the gently desolate.
There is a slight repetition of subject and tone in almost sixty poems here. The beautiful, fine-net of gauzey words the poet floats over her head and heart to let me, as reader, see into it better, despite the often tender and painful images, left me feeling I wanted something more: more variety of subject, a greater range of tone, a change of register, perhaps. Maybe a rawer anger, even rage, or outrage, or courage, or just something more than the slow, reductive diminuendo of the attenuating. Her adeptness with form – there are short, clipped-line poems and more supple and sinuous longer-lined ones, incorporating interesting line-breaks and multiple space gaps lines, suggests a poetic voice that is prepared to risk, dare and challenge, but with the almost singular subject matter, this formal elasticity was not reflected in the narrow-bandwidth of themes.
The poet of ‘The Girl in the Dog-Tooth Coat’ is described by Dundee University reviewer Rachel Main as one who: ‘cuts to the core of a distinctly female experience.’ The over-worn ‘One to Watch’ epithet is pertinent; she is clearly an interesting new voice. Moreover, she is launched from a rare, new bright spot on the poetry landscape, the Bare Fiction imprint run by Robert Harper, with its much-to-be applauded high production values for a small publisher: reason enough to celebrate this new beginning.