from no continuing city - david morphet
In The Night Trotsky Came to Stay, her first collection and nominated for the 2008 Forward Prize, Allison McVety writes vividly and with warmth about her youth, her family and her native Manchester. But these are not static portraits. Her narratives lead in unexpected directions. Without change of tone, Swimming Lessons takes us from an elementary swimming lesson by her father to the sinking of the Tory Canyon:”how oil smothered kelp beds / and the gills of fish were sealed like blackened fingernails”. In Mapping the World, an account of exotic holidays imagined round the kitchen table ends with “waiting for Dad, the pocket jangle of his loose-change tips, / home from a run to Blackpool or Scarborough or Rhyl”. Pension Day starts off with observation of how a pension book is pushed under the “guillotine trap” and the pensioner watches the clerk stroke each note with the nipples / on his rubber-tipped thumb”. In the next instant, a robber presses a gun to the pensioner’s neck, only to be seen off by a feisty old lady. The poem ends after only twenty short lines with the clerk handing back the pension book “thin with this week’s money”. “Thin” gives a good idea of the quality of Allison McVety’s writing.
Recollections of wartime action and death feature strongly. In Portrait, her father, transmitting behind enemy lines in wartime Yugoslavia, carries a photo of his mother in his coat lining. On the mother’s necklace is a cameo of one of her brothers, killed in World War One. The photo is presented as a symbol of continuity so potent that if it were slipped at random “into someone’s jacket, an open bag” it would allow “our line” to travel on. Living up to Ronald Colman also presents the claim of the past on the present. Here the dead great-uncle’s portrait is on the stairs with “weighing eyes” as the poet tiptoes late back from a dance:
...This man, gassed
and shot, stands his watch for me,
always expects much more than I am.
She writes in a moving but robust way about the death of her father. On a Side Ward tells how he:
...is trying on his death for size.
It’s off-off-the-peg, but even so,
consultants attend to the tailoring,
consider a final tuck.
In The Two Times I Saw your Penis she has herself pretend “that you aren’t peeing your last; life / running from you, quiet and warm”. There is much matter-of-factness in the collection, and it is sometimes grim. In Ship Canal we read of drowned corpses. How you can know a place takes us from innocent childhood games to a bombshell, which can “re-shape the place you know, / shift a shelter three feet north, / so you dig for the man in the tin hat / in the wrong place” and:
...This is how a man drowns
in earth, this is how you know a place.
More matter-of-factness is to be found in Passing for Normal where lovemaking is seen to be compromised by malignant illness: “It will lie / between you, a bolster in your bed, / stinking of sympathy, and the shadow / of it will grow mean with spite.” This is one of many poems where Allison McVety’s shrewdness, powers of sympathy and clarity of expression come together in a way that promises much more for the future.
Published in Magma