{"id":6128,"date":"2016-02-19T12:34:09","date_gmt":"2016-02-19T11:34:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=6128"},"modified":"2016-02-21T19:15:56","modified_gmt":"2016-02-21T18:15:56","slug":"zelda-chappel-the-girl-in-the-dog-tooth-coat-bare-fiction-8-99-reviewed-by-ken-evans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=6128","title":{"rendered":"Zelda Chappel, The Girl in the Dog-Tooth Coat<\/em> (Bare Fiction) \u00a38.99, reviewed by Ken Evans"},"content":{"rendered":"

Zelda Chappel, The Girl in the Dog-Tooth Coat<\/em> \u2013 (Bare Fiction, \u00a38.99), reviewed by Ken Evans<\/p>\n

Zelda Chappell\u2019s poems takes a jagged-edged penny to the \u2018Scratch Card\u2019 of love and relationships and never rub through more than two in a row \u2013 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\u2019s 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 \u2018whiskey\u2019 and is again in ‘Sticks’ – showing a preference for a drop of the Irish?)<\/p>\n

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. \u00a0Not only skin, but as in ‘Pause’, \u2018under-skins.\u2019 Skin contains and reveals, releases and imprisons; skin is stitched, unravels, slips, hides and covers, \u2018your skin a fine-spun web.\u2019 (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.<\/p>\n

The opening poem, \u2018This can be what you want it to be,\u2019 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:<\/p>\n

\u2018wondering how<\/p>\n

to unzip our caged bird\u2019s chest and find her<\/p>\n

tiny heart still beating, how to search<\/p>\n

her air-made traps and hold them<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

let them lead us out of here.\u2019<\/p>\n

Her panache in melding the small, spikey and painful-sharp, with the transcendental and bigger-sweep \u2018romantic,\u2019 is best portrayed in the short, eight-line poem \u2018Trickster\u2019, where the startling, \u2018Daylight is a revelation like the apocalypse and I\/come ready shattered\u2019 is juxtaposed with the gorgeous, \u2018Comfort is a darkness deep enough to get lost in, the scoop\/of the Plough\u2019s sweet cradle, the moon\u2019s solitary stance.\u2019 Or in \u2018Dead Cert\u2019 where \u2018Time is a broken clock you dismantle\/precisely only to stuff my cracking skin,\u2019 the conceptual and abstract gracefully poised against the real pain of \u2018my cracking skin.\u2019<\/p>\n

The poet\u2019s blog describes her as a \u2018Poet and Artist\u2019 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:<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve been locked in the backstreets<\/p>\n

of Whitechapel\u2019s undertone, instinct<\/p>\n

nagging like an echoing bass<\/p>\n

Is Chappel Whitechapel\u2019s undertone? Is this the poet, locked in her own \u2018backstreets\u2019?\u00a0 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 \u2018sturm and drang\u2019; a wider range of responses, than the wistful or the gently desolate.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

There is a slight repetition of subject and tone in almost sixty poems here. \u00a0The 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:\u00a0 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. \u00a0Her adeptness with form \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

The poet of \u2018The Girl in the Dog-Tooth Coat\u2019 is described by Dundee University reviewer Rachel Main as one who: \u2018cuts to the core of a distinctly female experience.\u2019 The over-worn \u2018One to Watch\u2019 epithet is pertinent; she is clearly an interesting new voice. \u00a0Moreover, 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.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Zelda Chappel, The Girl in the Dog-Tooth Coat \u2013 (Bare Fiction, \u00a38.99), reviewed by Ken Evans Zelda Chappell\u2019s poems takes a jagged-edged penny to the \u2018Scratch Card\u2019 of love and relationships and never rub through more than two in a row \u2013 always there is loss, diminution, a relinquishing. She is adept at grounding yearning […]<\/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":"\nZelda Chappel, The Girl in the Dog-Tooth Coat (Bare Fiction) \u00a38.99, reviewed by Ken Evans - 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=6128\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Zelda Chappel, The Girl in the Dog-Tooth Coat (Bare Fiction) \u00a38.99, reviewed by Ken Evans - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Zelda Chappel, The Girl in the Dog-Tooth Coat \u2013 (Bare Fiction, \u00a38.99), reviewed by Ken Evans Zelda Chappell\u2019s poems takes a jagged-edged penny to the \u2018Scratch Card\u2019 of love and relationships and never rub through more than two in a row \u2013 always there is loss, diminution, a relinquishing. 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