{"id":7452,"date":"2017-03-30T22:00:31","date_gmt":"2017-03-30T21:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=7452"},"modified":"2017-03-31T10:02:54","modified_gmt":"2017-03-31T09:02:54","slug":"emily-berry-stranger-baby-faber-faber-2017-reviewed-by-annie-muir","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=7452","title":{"rendered":"Emily Berry, Stranger, Baby<\/em>, reviewed by Annie Muir"},"content":{"rendered":"
Emily Berry, Stranger, Baby<\/em> (Faber & Faber, \u00a310.99).<\/h5>\n

Emily Berry\u2019s second collection, Stranger, Baby<\/em> \u2013 published this year by Faber & Faber, is luminous green and hard to put down. Berry\u2019s first book Dear Boy<\/em> (2013) is, as its title suggests, openly concerned with the nature of address. From the first line of the first poem \u2013 \u2018We always breakfast with the biographer\u2019 \u2013 the book is full of notes for other people, addressed to specific friends, doctors and lovers. They are jokes and anecdotes that we, the audience, are involved in, overhearing them rather than being spoken to directly. We hear for the first time in one of the last poems \u2018Manners\u2019 the story that takes centre stage in the second book:<\/p>\n

My mother is dead \u2013 it\u2019s classic.
\nIt means I\u2019m both precocious and heartbroken,
\nbut that\u2019s no excuse for bad manners.<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

This is thrown casually into a conversation with a doctor, and by now we are so used to hearing other guises and voices that we are immune to the farfetched claims of the poems and take every comment with a pinch of salt.<\/p>\n

The big jump from Berry\u2019s first to second book is shown in these first words of the first poems. It is the brave leap from that \u2018we\u2019 to this \u2018I\u2019:<\/p>\n

I stood at the dangerous shore.
\nSleeves rolled up to my shoulders.
\nMy fringe lifted to the wind in a long salute and I pushed it back.<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

This \u2018I\u2019 is not merely a voice but a physical body with \u2018sleeves\u2019 and \u2018shoulders\u2019 and a \u2018fringe\u2019 and the muscles used to \u2018push it back\u2019. This poem sets up a book in which its author comes out from behind the costumes and props and takes control of her own story.<\/p>\n

This is not an easy thing to do well. It is the kind of writing which acts as if it is giving everything away, even though it is the most embarrassing and painful thing in the world to do. It is the kind of writing \u2018biographer[s]\u2019 live for.<\/p>\n

Berry does it very well. She avoids clich\u00e9 by showing she\u2019s aware of it, for example the poem titled \u2018Now all my poems are about death I feel as though I\u2019m really living\u2019 where she speaker states: \u2018I photograph myself in the cemetery\u2019. She knows that by choosing a personal subject for her book she has become an actor in her own one-woman show, as she acknowledges with her script-poems such as \u2018Tragedy for One Voice\u2019:<\/p>\n

ME ONE: Somebody said: \u2018I am a master of elision.\u2019 I veil my tended wound. I veiled my narrative. […] I veiled my photograph of her in sixties playsuit<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

By manipulating the information given using different formal techniques, Berry demonstrates her complete control over her subject. The later poem \u2018Freud\u2019s Beautiful Things\u2019 includes a direct quote from Freud that: \u2018What makes all autobiographies worthless is, after all, their mendacity.<\/em>\u2019 Here, Berry uses a specific photograph as evidence of the real-ness of her mother, despite the fact that this photograph is \u2018veiled\u2019 from the reader and could easily be another dream or invented memory.<\/p>\n

These poems are written in the voice of a person mourning for a lost mother, someone who lost their mother long ago, and has had a lot of time to process and manipulate that sensory information into language. In the final section of the sequence \u2018Picnic\u2019, where the lost mother is mentioned for the first time, the speaker exclaims:<\/p>\n

Stop, language is crawling all over me<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

The image of crying in front of a mirror is paired with that of language \u2018crawling\u2019 like an insect \u2018all over me\u2019 as a metaphor for the attempt to translate the reality of grief into words using artificial devices. Just as what you see in the mirror isn\u2019t really<\/em> you, grief put into words isn\u2019t really<\/em> grief, which like \u2018the language of trees, […] can\u2019t be transcribed\u2019 (\u2018Canopy\u2019).<\/p>\n

While Dear Boy<\/em> used endless guises and awarded little nuggets of personal information as a reward for the \u2018biographer[s]\u2019 for getting through the fiction, in Stranger, Baby<\/em> the relentless painful revelations are interspersed with comforting distractions where we are carried into the minds of others using translations and ekphrastic poems like \u2018Song (after Luna Miguel)\u2019, \u2018Sleeping (after Paula Rego)\u2019 and \u2018Drunken Bellarmine (after Renee So)\u2019, which ends with what can be seen as either a warning or a perfect advertisement for this book, depending on which way you look at it:<\/p>\n

I am a shitting, leaking, bloody clump of cells,
\nRaw, murky and fluorescent, you couldn\u2019t take it.<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

Annie Muir<\/h5>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Emily Berry, Stranger, Baby (Faber & Faber, \u00a310.99). Emily Berry\u2019s second collection, Stranger, Baby \u2013 published this year by Faber & Faber, is luminous green and hard to put down. Berry\u2019s first book Dear Boy (2013) is, as its title suggests, openly concerned with the nature of address. From the first line of the first […]<\/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":"\nEmily Berry, Stranger, Baby, reviewed by Annie Muir - 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=7452\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Emily Berry, Stranger, Baby, reviewed by Annie Muir - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Emily Berry, Stranger, Baby (Faber & Faber, \u00a310.99). 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