{"id":10511,"date":"2019-08-21T09:54:32","date_gmt":"2019-08-21T08:54:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=10511"},"modified":"2019-08-21T10:16:39","modified_gmt":"2019-08-21T09:16:39","slug":"girl-carcanet-by-rebecca-goss-reviewed-by-eleanor-ward","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=10511","title":{"rendered":"Rebecca Goss | Girl<\/em><\/strong> | reviewed by Eleanor Ward"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rebecca Goss | Girl<\/em> | Carcanet Press: \u00a39.99<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\u201cI spent the day being Rachel\u201d is what Rebecca Goss tells us a few poems into her third collection Girl. <\/em>It is one example of the many identities of \u201cgirls\u201d we are to meet over the collection, and the many understandings of her own identity in the reflection of others. In Girl<\/em> we find multiple complex ideas of womanhood interspersed with alive and intriguing poems about the physical nature of bodies and how they experience the world.<\/p>\n

Four years after the Forward Prize-shortlisted Her Birth, <\/em>Goss has returned with an intriguing mix of poems providing a constant confrontation with other women\u2019s bodies, as well as a juxtaposition between these same bodies and their experience in the world. The movement between colour and the draping of white found in \u201cSomething Beautiful was Created by Their Leaving\u201d is evocative of the slow movement between identities in her poems and the gaps between them: \u201cDraw them up \/ in this drapery\u201d, she states.<\/p>\n

The important moments for the characters of her poems include motherhood and other relationships. Often confrontational, the characters of the collection are the women she knows in detail: her mother and daughter; but also, anonymous women and responses to art and culture.<\/p>\n

Let me amass<\/p>\n

All the loved<\/p>\n

Of my life.<\/p>\n

(\u201cSomething Beautiful was Created by Their Leaving\u201d)<\/p>\n

The cast of these poems reveals a glimpse into different kinds of love. At times Girl <\/em>leaps through time, chasing the inevitability of changing experience. In \u201cTalking about the old house\u201d we see the house now \u201cforsaken to ghosts,\u201d and the recollection of these moments in the past. They observe how things have changed, they were \u201ccontent with painted floorboards\u201d the speaker notes, marking the smaller changes in their lives.<\/p>\n

Goss\u2019s ability to zoom into the bodies of her collection is particularly impressive and the collection itself is punctuated with shocking moments, like in \u201cDodgems\u201d where the speaker \u201cthrows my body into accident.\u201d The sudden violence, after the quietness of the poems that come before, heightens the feeling of change and evolution. These juxtapositions are also clear in the use of medicalised bodies and their comparisons to normality. In the final poem of the Pleurisy series, \u201cPleurisy v\u201d, Goss writes:<\/p>\n

She is<\/p>\n

studying my fatigue.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This child<\/p>\n

inhaling the space<\/p>\n

between us.<\/p>\n

The short line here allows further comparisons and highlights not only the themes of the poem, with the difficulties in gathering breaths, but the spaces between the different bodies and identities of the poem too. Throughout Girl <\/em>Goss plays with these ideas of time and space to allow to reader to observe the space between different and distinct ideas.<\/p>\n

Powerfully, the poem \u201cDrinking Their Capri-Suns,\u201d reveals the mixture of adult and child identities and the importance to Goss of blurring these artificial boundaries in her collection. Throughout Girl <\/em>we see the themes of mother and child often. Perhaps not a surprisingly, considering Goss\u2019s last collection centred on her own experience of her daughter\u2019s birth and short life.<\/p>\n

The title poem \u201cGirl\u201d is one of the poems that seeks inspiration from art, after Alison Watt\u2019s \u201cHollow\u201d (2009): \u00a0we find \u201cAn opening: marquise cut\u201d and an evolution of her childhood dressed by her mother, to her own consideration of motherhood, \u201ca somersaulting into love \/ that made a daughter.\u201d The circular nature of this poem eventually leads to the final line that declaratively states \u201cidentify me as girl\u201d linking her bodily understanding of being a woman with identity. The positioning of these different concepts of identity and motherhood allows the reader to zoom into moments of realisation of the \u201clawns of childhood\u201d mixed with how the speaker states \u201cI\u2019ll tell her\u201d, as she returns to the first person to talk directly to her daughter.<\/p>\n

The themes in Girl <\/em>are looked at over and over in different ways. Just as Goss considers the inspiration of physical art, she also returns to defining identity as part of a name. In \u201cRachel\u201d we see the speaker becoming someone else: \u201cI apologised in a way Rachel \/ would have apologised: prone to genuflection.\u201d This is also found in \u201cNomenclature\u201d where the speaker is \u201cturning back to reach for you,\u201d the \u201cyou\u201d being another Rebecca Goss who occupies this poem. The identity inherent in a name is revealed through the similarities and differences between their lives.<\/p>\n

There are also symbolic identities to be found in \u201cMy Sister Has a MRI Scan\u201d: not only is the reader presented with the medical objects that surround this experience and \u201cher brain recalling the child of the sea.\u201d We are also told \u201cshe will tell me that she slipped off \/ her wedding ring for the first time\u201d revealing something of her symbolic identity and the disruptions to it that take place in our lives.<\/p>\n

Sometimes the poems drop into fact, the amounts of paracetamol prescribed for example, or the facts about law that surrounds women. That said, these factual poems punctuate the intense and unwavering emotional imagery in the rest of the collection and allow us to reflect on the lenses she has placed over these same identities. \u201cWas she bathing \/ as you raised the lens\u201d she asks, considering how watching and being watched change our behaviour and construct our identities.<\/p>\n

Girl <\/em>is intense and unrelenting in its pursuit of different kinds of identity for women. Goss\u2019s ability to describe how complex relationships are built in the reflection of others occupies a lot of the collection. The poems add to this feeling of the importance of the female body, and it asks if these bodies are fragile or strong. Goss works at changing how these stories are told in poems and moves through the difficulties of defining who these identities of womanhood belong to \u201changing onto my girl voice\u201d (in \u201creverse-charge call\u201d) and further grasping what she considers is the identity of being a \u201cgirl.\u201d<\/p>\n

by Eleanor Ward<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rebecca Goss | Girl | Carcanet Press: \u00a39.99 \u201cI spent the day being Rachel\u201d is what Rebecca Goss tells us a few poems into her third collection Girl. 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