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.
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