{"id":2413,"date":"2013-04-07T10:32:01","date_gmt":"2013-04-07T09:32:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=2413"},"modified":"2016-01-23T18:20:21","modified_gmt":"2016-01-23T17:20:21","slug":"robyn-sarah-digressions-fitzhenry-and-whiteside-14-95-beverley-bie-brahic-white-sheets-fitzhenry-and-whiteside-14-95","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=2413","title":{"rendered":"Digressions by Robyn Sarah and White Sheets by Beverley Bie Brahic"},"content":{"rendered":"

Robyn Sarah, Digressions<\/em> (Fitzhenry and Whiteside) $14.95
\nBeverley Bie Brahic, White Sheets<\/em> (Fitzhenry and Whiteside $14.95<\/p>\n

In Digressions, <\/i>Robyn Sarah\u2019s beguiling collection of \u2018prose poems, collage poems and sketches\u2019, the texts often start with an object.\u00a0 The object is then often held up to the writer\u2019s gaze.\u00a0 That gaze will lead Sarah into what purports to be autobiographical reminiscence.\u00a0 An example of this is \u2018Sweets\u2019 which pulls the reader in with this opening, \u2018Shhh. I\u2019m remembering\u2019 <\/i>(Sarah\u2019s italics).\u00a0 Then follows a description of the sweets her grandmother left out for her grandchildren.\u00a0 This description is very close and detailed;\u00a0 and it is beautifully written in short, rhythmic sentences with the careful cadences one would expect of this very experienced poet.\u00a0 In the course of \u2018Sweets\u2019 we get to meet much more of the grandmother, \u2018(A tiny woman who had breathed away half a century on one lung, a survivor of TB in the thirties \u2013 now within months of ninety)\u2019.\u00a0 And then we meet the narrator, who is carrying on the tradition of providing sweets but also a very sensual engagement with tastes and smells.<\/p>\n

Through her engagement with the concrete, therefore, Sarah often outlines the ways in which an object is interpreted by more than one viewer. This is also true in the more \u2018cubist\u2019 of her texts, where an object is turned round in the gaze of the viewer so that it\u2019s facets appear spread out in the reader\u2019s view.\u00a0 In \u2018Pardon Me\u2019, for example, a rip in the sleeve of \u2018your jacket\u2019, is viewed by both participants.\u00a0 And the refusal of the narrator to mend the rip is metonymic of the state of the relationship.<\/p>\n

Of the found poems in this collection, perhaps the most striking and successful is \u2018A Brief History of Text: Digest and Subtext\u2019.\u00a0 It might seem easy to take a well-known prose book and fillet it into small gobbets.\u00a0 However, the challenge is to create a text which not only respects and reflects the original, but also has an existence in and of itself.\u00a0 Robyn Sarah takes Stephen Hawking\u2019s text and turns it into a poignant, glittering, but also funny poem, \u2018It is rather difficult to talk about human memory\/in our neck of the woods\u2019.<\/p>\n

Beverley Bie Brahic has already received a PBS Recommendation and a Forward short-listing for the British edition of White Sheets<\/i>, and it\u2019s easy to see why. At a time when so many volumes of contemporary poetry are so uniform in both technique and content, White Sheets<\/i> has a most pleasant variety;\u00a0 from translations from French surrealist, Francis Ponge, to renderings of Thucydides, from rhymed quatrains and third person narratives, to moving and loving poems about her elderly mother and the death of her father.\u00a0 The first poems in this book have a muscular almost stolid quality, and it is in this style that Bie Brahic elegises her father.\u00a0 She shows him surviving the evacuation of DDay, he himself, working to evacuate others and being wounded.\u00a0 Then Brahic moves the piece through time to the Peloponnesian War, in a surprisingly tender gesture which mimics but avoids the grandiloquence of Alice Oswald\u2019s recent Memorial. And the overwhelming note in this book is tenderness, and that is no bad thing.<\/p>\n

These poems are all resolutely grounded, perhaps in conscious contrast to Bie Brahic\u2019s day job as a translator of such as Kristeva and Cixous.\u00a0 A number of these poems have their starting point with gardens or planting, and Bie Brahic is particularly good at placing the detail of plant names at strategic points in the poems to pin down a mood or development.\u00a0 And plants in this book are handled with the same loving tenderness as other objects are. \u00a0Tenderness is necessary to handle the world and dispose things in it;\u00a0 not to control the world but to allow it to be most fully itself, \u2018But a bantam \u2013 oh, it\u2019s a fancy-dress hat\/with an extravagant plume \u2013 and when I pulled them\/ from the branch I had nothing\/in my arms \u2013 a beating heart\/baffled by all the seasons of leaves.\u2019(Compost)<\/p>\n

Tenderness is also part of the erotic and sexual, about which Bie Brahic writes with singular, and non-sentimental, brilliance.\u00a0 This book is to be highly recommended.
\n 
\nIan Pople<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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