{"id":10962,"date":"2019-09-25T20:08:34","date_gmt":"2019-09-25T19:08:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=10962"},"modified":"2019-09-25T20:56:40","modified_gmt":"2019-09-25T19:56:40","slug":"witch-by-rebecca-tamas-penned-in-the-margins-9-99-reviewed-by-rebecca-hurst","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=10962","title":{"rendered":"Rebecca Tam\u00e1s | WITCH<\/strong><\/em> | reviewed by Rebecca Hurst"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rebecca Tam\u00e1s | WITCH<\/em> | Penned in the Margins \u00a39.99<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Rebecca Tam\u00e1s\u2019 WITCH<\/em> answered a question I didn\u2019t know I was asking.<\/p>\n

Before reading WITCH <\/em>I heard the electric crackle of its imminence: from the social media marketing campaign and Poetry Book Society recommendation, to the sold-out pre-publication performance in Manchester into which I failed to finagle my way. And I read the blurbs promising sex, strangeness, feminism, ecology, history, obscenity, mysticism and the occult: \u2018poems as spells\u2026hexes that cling to your body like sweat, full of a messy violent joy\u2019. There was a lot going on around the publication of Tam\u00e1s\u2019 first full collection. And as an object the book, published by Penned in the Margins, proves to be a lovely thing: its cerise cover is decorated with an inverted triangle\u2014symbol of water, the moon, feminine energy and female genitalia\u2014within which a group of women dance, to its cinder-rose end papers. Tucked inside the first few pages I find a feather and a tarot card (Rider-Waite\u2019s the 8 of Pentacles). I put these artefacts to one side and began to read, hoping to love WITCH<\/em> but aware of the pre-emptive prickle of disappointment that can be aroused by heightened expectations.<\/p>\n

The collection is comprised of a sequence of 21 poems about a character\u2014the Witch\u2014interspersed with spells and bookended by interrogations and hexes. It opens with a \/penis hex\/. Although my reading rule is to put myself into the poet\u2019s hands, to allow them to lead, I did not want WITCH<\/em> to begin on a phallic note. If I had trusted Tam\u00e1s and read her matter-of-fact and compelling first lines I would have been immediately reassured, for \u2018the hex for a penis isn\u2019t really all about \/ the penis\u2019. Instead, looking for another way in, I leafed restlessly back and forth catching glimpses of Cleopatra, Iphigenia and Lilith, wolves and woods, pornography and mint pantsuits, sunlit jars of honey, bonfires and blood, fucking, an absence of punctuation (largely), some CAPITALIZATION. I wanted these poems to be messy and disturbing, to knock me off my perch, to deliver on the promise of \u2018a small, bright, filthy song\u2019. WITCH\u2019s<\/em> much heralded fierceness led me to wonder if the approach to the idea behind the collection felt like a place I had visited before in the company of Sexton (who provides one of the book\u2019s epigraph\u2019s), Rich, and Duffy. I wondered if we should fear repeating ourselves on this well-travelled path. What I did not wonder was where the question had come from. I knew where the question had come from. It is a question only a woman who has internalised a great deal of patriarchal shit would ask if women have anything new to say about the historic persecution and genocide of other women. Men have made art addressing the same tireless issues for millennia without ever asking themselves: has this maybe been said or done before?<\/em><\/p>\n

WITCH<\/em> is a book that effortfully returns language to women who have been silenced; to women who have been violently silenced; and to women who have internalised that silence. Breaking open the silence Tam\u00e1s tells us what we already knew: that \u2018when Orpheus was singing it was so marvellous\u2019. But she also tells us what we didn\u2019t know, or hadn\u2019t considered, or had forgotten: that \u2018Eurydice\/sang too\u2019. Yet in spite of this, a women who can also sing, who has words of her own to say, when:<\/p>\n

Orpheus went back to get Eurydice from death as we know<\/p>\n

but he wouldn\u2019t let her make her own way out of the rubble<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

her song is still down there somewhere<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

On finally reading WITCH<\/em> from beginning to end, from \/penis hex\/ to \\cunt hex\\, I learned that Tam\u00e1s\u2019 poetry was answering a question I didn\u2019t know I had been asking. I found (and was discomforted by the fact) that the poems were saying out loud the things that I and my women friends tell each other on nights when we sit around a kitchen table drinking, laughing and hexing: that poetry is spell-making; that poetry is a woman\u2019s art, even if men have taken it as theirs and held onto it fast for millennia. But these are things I have never said out loud and so, as I read WITCH,<\/em> I experienced a rush of emotions including embarrassment\u2014to meet these ideas out in the world, to encounter them as poems, written in such violent, visceral language. As I read WITCH<\/em> I become insatiable for the histories Tam\u00e1s reveals. I devoured her poems, one \u2018small, bright, filthy song\u2019 after another. I discovered that I needed WITCH<\/em> the way I needed, without knowing until I found them, Hilma de Klint\u2019s paintings, or Jane Campion\u2019s films, or Joni Mitchell\u2019s album Blue<\/em>. As a woman in the world I was ravenous for these poems; I was waiting for them patiently and impatiently, and now here they were.<\/p>\n

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

Rebecca Tam\u00e1s | WITCH | Penned in the Margins \u00a39.99 Rebecca Tam\u00e1s\u2019 WITCH answered a question I didn\u2019t know I was asking. Before reading WITCH I heard the electric crackle of its imminence: from the social media marketing campaign and Poetry Book Society recommendation, to the sold-out pre-publication performance in Manchester into which I failed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nRebecca Tam\u00e1s | WITCH | reviewed by Rebecca Hurst - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=10962\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Rebecca Tam\u00e1s | WITCH | reviewed by Rebecca Hurst - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Rebecca Tam\u00e1s | WITCH | Penned in the Margins \u00a39.99 Rebecca Tam\u00e1s\u2019 WITCH answered a question I didn\u2019t know I was asking. 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