I Struggle With Words

My life is in words, not all of them beautiful, not all of them needed. But some of them thread me together like this poem by Sharon Olds:

    I cannot say I did not ask 

    to be born.

Yesterday, I proofread the manuscript for my forthcoming chapbook - GREAT MASTER / small boy (Fair Acre Press). I find this a nerve-wracking process, even though all is yet possible, nothing has been committed to print. I wrote the sequence in 2018-19 after travels to Germany and Austria with my son Jonty in search of Beethoven. "The trouble is," I said to Gabriel, his older brother, on our walk in the rain yesterday after dark, "I want it to be perfect." The book is, in its essence, a gift for Jonty (its publication date is his 21st birthday) - it's an account of that geographical journey, but of so much more too. As Andrew McMillan has written in his back cover endorsement, "...love of music is always a journey ... towards love."

     Before I existed, I asked, with the love of my

    children, to exist ...

This past year I have not been able to write much, or rather, I haven't been able to write much new poetry. I've written here from time to time. (Thank goodness for this blog, and the book that's come from it - so much pleasure there, and the kind reading and sharing of it). And I've written thousands of emails, texts, even posted the odd tweet ...I've written for my job as a university lecturer: thousands and thousands and thousands of words about, well, about how and why we can and must care for and empower each other, about how we try to learn when we cannot be together. That work has been utterly exhausting, though I regret none of it. 

As for the music of poetry? The place from which that comes feels numbed, weary, tuneless. 

    I asked, with everything I did not

    have, to be born. And nowhere in any

    of it was there meaning ...

I woke this morning and after a bit of Sunday morning laying around, talked with myself about first things - about how I came to write poetry in the beginning, how I scribbled lines, hid them and tore them up, then eventually had the courage to join a writing group in my 40s. It was through reading poetry, not writing, that I found what I needed to know. After the reading, the writing - the impetus to express my own longings. I knew, I reminded myself decades later, that it was reading The Wasteland in my 1980s London bedroom that convinced me that I was not alone.

Sharon Olds, in her poem I Cannot Say I Did Not addresses the question of unbidden existence more clearly than anything I've heard or read in any other context: church, family, school, social work text books, The School of Life website ...  This existential conundrum haunted my youth -  none of us asked to be born. Olds takes it head on in this poem, even daring to end on a preposition. It's brilliant, and reading it again this morning (from the Bloodaxe Staying Human anthology) it confirmed to me that if I turn back to reading the poetry that moves me most, poetry which is about this existence of ours - the one that we've been hanging onto for dear life - if I turn back to the well-worn pages of Olds, Rich, Hopkins, Eliot, Collins, McMillan, Clarke, Sprackland, Duffy, Oliver ...  in time, and with gentleness, and quietly, I will find my voice again.

    ... I want to say that love

    is the meaning, but I think that love may be

    the means, what we ask with. 

Sharon Olds - I Cannot Say I Did Not

I Review A Pamphlet - Lucy Rose Cunningham's 'For Mary, Marie, Maria'

For Mary, Marie, Maria

after the nectar, pyre and linden tree

Lucy Rose Cunningham

Broken Sleep Books –

Purchase here:

https://www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page/lucy-rose-cunningham-for-mary-marie-maria

 

Reviewed by Liz Lefroy

 

I read Lucy Rose Cunningham’s recently published sequence sitting on a bench in a country graveyard this afternoon, with memorial stones in the foreground, and the Shropshire hills in the long view. I had a flask of Earl Grey and a bun to keep me company. My bicycle was propped next to me against the wall of the church. I was glad I’d set the context to become acquainted with this beautifully produced pamphlet from Broken Sleep Books. All credit to the publishers for its austere elegance.

I’ve learnt to look after my body as I’ve aged – in Cunningham’s Acknowledgements words – to know what this body really deserves. It’s an important rite of passage, and one to which Mary, Marie and Maria all have something to contribute. Others have illuminated this aspect of Cunningham’s work, so  I won’t repeat what they’ve written (I refer you, for example, to the Cardiff Review https://www.cardiffreview.com/review/a-rich-stirring-debut-for-mary-marie-maria/ )

For my part, I chose this setting for reading because I wanted to listen hard to Cunningham’s voice – not to understand every line (I didn’t) but to loosen up, pay close attention to what I heard and felt. I found much to enjoy, and much to grieve, in doing so.

Cunningham’s work resembles in so many ways what I first came to love in poetry as a very young woman (in Eliot, Hopkins, Keats, et al). It has space, subtlety, depth, originality.  Cunningham creates a soundscape which is both rich and spare, tender and fierce. Her writing is free from clamour, and uses imagery which is both familiar and sits skewed on the page. Behind each phrase, however taut the surface, is a softness which would bruise, were it gripped too hard:

              of simmered tea leaves and wicks,

              candles drunk with butter

              wax waning, as she waited

It is this tenderness, this open-heartedness, which gives the work its youthfulness. Here is a fresh voice which leaves traces on each page of that sense of being at the beginning of things, even though “I’m running out of spoons” (IV – Spoon theory). My reader self is grateful to Cunningham for her uncontrived authenticity which connects me with my young self in ways which took me right back to

[it’s] this aching thought,

the impress of Love of ache of thought

in my bedclothes,

At the end of my reading, I packed up my things and climbed back onto my bike. As I cycled home, I found myself filled with thoughts of my young body, my young self, the voice it didn’t have, the way it dared not speak. Cunningham’s voice speaks for her, in some ways, and that is reason enough to return to that bench, these poems again, one day soon.

Mary, Marie, Maria (with almond croissant)  

© Ellie Milne

         

                                                Lucy Cunningham