Hill’s sixteenth poetry collection Jutland unites the award-winning pamphlet Advice on Wearing Animal Prints and a new sequence, Sunday Afternoons at the Gravel-Pits. The former is comprised of twenty-six short, single stanza poems, each titled and ordered alphabetically. The omniscient narrator introduces us to ‘Agatha’, a social outsider who is possibility on the autistic spectrum (a subject previously explored in Fruitcake). Her age is ambiguous, appearing childlike at times: “[she] arranges her unicorns / up and down the carpet in the dark” while in the poem ‘E’ she goes clubbing: “The other girls are blonde and wear tutus./ Her bodice creaks as if it’s made of floor-boards.” These images link to a recurring theme for Hill, cumbersome dresses being a motif, representing how individuals are pressurised into assuming or performing rigid feminine roles. In this instance, the noise and appearance of Agatha’s dress draws attention to her fraudulent femininity, but also her inability to fit in socially in more general terms.
Although Agatha lives independently, a reference to visitors in the opening poem ‘A’ creates an institutional atmosphere:
It’s lying on the floor as good as gold.
It never moves. It never cries.
It likes to simply lie there doing nothing.
But visitors complain it smells of stew.
The impersonal address and apparent disinterest in this concerning behaviour suggests absolute disconnection between Agatha and those around her. Childlike praise implies that docility is expected, while remarks on her odour are dehumanising and shaming. Incidents of physical and emotional abuse towards Agatha – “anyone could come in here and tread on it! / Could? They do! They kick it down the hall!” – may be a metaphorical depiction of distress she experiences as a result of being misunderstood. The punctuation generates a boisterousness that communicates the narrator’s perverse enjoyment, and this unsettling tone continues in ‘R’ which discusses the size of Agatha’s flat:
It’s like a lady’s hand-bag it’s so small –
but that’s OK, she’s only got one arm!
(That was mean. I’m sorry. I should say
How neat she is, and that her needs are modest.)
Dark humour and a contrived apology exemplify how Agatha’s mannerisms make her vulnerable to ridicule, heightening her detachment and shame. References to the missing arm, which is at one point spotted lying on the ground (‘X’), could be characterised as a form of synecdoche whereby parts come to stand for an unnameable whole, demonstrating the cultural fragmentation endured by individuals like Agatha, but also the difficulty others encounter in relating to her.
Agatha’s disregard for social convention provides a lighter moment in ‘U’, sparkling with defiance and eccentricity: “they told her not to time and time again / but here she is, on the actual day, / walking down the aisle wearing animal prints!” This occasion becomes a liberating act of rebellion, subverting traditional notions of feminine reserve. However, the final poem ‘Z’ returns, with grim inevitability, to echo the opening lines:
They hear her gnawing at the skirting board
but by the time they reach her
it’s too late.
She’s lying on the floor as good as gold.
No wonder she can’t breathe. She’s got no breath.
Hill captures how those who seem different are often neglected, ignored, punished and shamed by the society they inhabit; only when it is “too late” is Agatha spoken of as a person (she) rather than an object (it).
Sunday Afternoons at the Gravel-Pits is also concerned with shame, and the difficulty of intimacy. The sequence traces a father-daughter relationship, from the daughter’s (the narrator) birth, until the father’s death. This aspect of familial relationships is lesser documented in Hill’s poetry which predominantly focusses on mothers.
In the opening poem, the narrator explains: “My father, when he sees his new-born daughter, / stiffens like a golfer in the snow.” Typically masculine, sporting imagery implies that his discomfort relates specifically to the baby’s gender. This barely detectable movement signals an emotional and physical recoil, setting in motion a relationship that is fraught with extremes of closeness and distance. ‘My Father’s Chair’ is suggestive of incest, a possible metaphor for the anxiety associated with giving and receiving intimacy: “I never go towards it. On the contrary / I back away and then a firm hand / guides me from behind until I’m held, / beside myself with rage, between the knees.” This claustrophobic scene contrasts with the detachment present in ‘Cupboard’:
He’s standing by my bed like a cupboard
standing with no face in the dark
but if I start to walk I think the cupboard
will suddenly start to walk too.
The lack of a face or body precludes the possibility of conventional human interaction, leaving the narrator uncertain as to how to proceed; attempts to traverse the gap between them results in frustration and further distancing. Similarly, fragmented descriptions of the father’s body imply she cannot relate to him as a whole, but only in charged parts. In ‘My Father’s Crochet-hook’ “the smell of crabmeat made his hands / smell of severed hands police might find,” conveying fear that the loss she experiences daily will become permanent, with no means of recovery.
The father’s elusive nature elevates him to mythical status; he is never seen with a beard “because he only puts it on / afterwards, when he’s left the house / to go and live his other life, as God” and he dresses enticingly “the way a wolf is smartly-dressed in stories.” Allusions to God appear throughout Hill’s oeuvre, symbolic of pervasive and controlling masculinity – here it serves to augment the narrator’s shame regarding her father’s rejection. This may be why she engages in small acts of rebellion (opening the cage door for her father’s canary) and more sinister, unspoken behaviours at the ‘gravel-pits’ where she claims “I myself am the most violent, / or so my father thinks, but even he / has no idea how violent I am.”
The tone becomes increasingly direct and contemplative as the narrator considers possible routes out of this emotional impasse, including forgiveness: “by which I mean / hope for an entirely different past,” kindness, which carries its own perils: “but what if being kind is exploitative, / redundant, ineffective and demeaning,” and love “that comes so close yet seems so far away | that flickers with a light we are unworthy of.” ‘Rage’ arrives at the realisation that being absorbed in our own emotions creates a blind spot: “it never crossed my mind that I myself / neither knew nor cared who he might be.”
The event of the father’s death appears to place the possibility of transformation through forgiveness, kindness or love permanently out of reach. However, in the final poem there is a sense of something hard-won, after a great deal of reflection. The narrator describes being touched by someone “yesterday,” triggering an image of her father:
only for a second, which is nothing,
but to me it was like everything:
I saw him, or I thought I saw him, shiver,
as if he were a pool or a whippet.
These final lines, so characteristic of Hill’s startling, inventive imagery, reflects a moment, tremulous and full – far from being a frustrating flicker just out of reach, it feels inviting and comforting.
Lucy Winrow