from moments of intensity - rosie bailey
The Night Trotsky Came To Stay is an exciting first collection. Some of the poems are about wartime, but they’re about small private moments set against the background of vast experience; about feelings so powerful they can’t be dealt with unless they’re made tolerable by monotony and habit. There are poems set in the unglamorous every day, behind the scenes of conflict, about bodies being pulled out of the Manchester Ship Canal in the early dawn, about the idle pointlessness of life after demobilisation. Others are childhood memories, alive now with adult understanding of the hurt and mystery of real life. Sometimes these are macabre in their intensity, like ‘Pediscript’ and ‘Needlework’, about the woman chained at home by her husband’s tell-tale chalk marks on the soles of her shoes, and her strategies for escape. But there’s also a gunman fruitlessly trying a hold-up in the pension office; and there’s her spirited mother, waiting till the council painters have left, before she re-paints their front door a more cheerful colour.
The details of life matter to McVety—the chalk on shoes, the knitting patterns imprinted on a cuddled child’s cheek, the delicacy of the couple’s dancing at home when the child was asleep in bed, the handkerchiefs stuffed in the mouths of the men dealing with bodies — and her poems come alive because these details do matter to her. She catches the drama of difficult moments with economy and precision. In ‘On a Side Ward’ her father’s death is approached through clothing
My father is trying his death for size.
it’s off-the-peg, but even so,
consultants attend to the tailoring,
consider a final tuck. Getting the feel of it,
the weight of the cloth, he tells them
it’s heavy across the shoulders...
as is her mother’s. ‘When it’s over’, she writes in ‘Empty’,
You’ll slide open the top drawer of the tall-boy,pull off each finger, slot them beside your nylons,
handkerchiefs, rouge. You’ll lift free your head,
put it in the hat-box, veiled in layers of black,
let it settle with the dust...
Her settings are generally domestic (see her titles—‘Union Street’, Women at their Gates’, Pension Day’, ‘Going back to Charlotte Street’) and her subjects intensely human ones. But these poems illustrate the fact that you don’t need a vast geographical canvas to map the essential qualities of human experience: to echo the old ad for the News of the World, ‘all of human life is here’. An alert sensibility to the everyday can hold in itself eternity: as she says of William Scott’s ‘Still Life’ (the cover painting) ‘what’s not there affects what is’. And this is true of McVety’s poems, carefully put together with the spaces as significant as the words. Her conversational unemphatic tone refuses the clichéd or the commonplace, and yet its syntactical simplicity is fresh, vividly accurate.
The title should warn readers that irony is likely; and there’s often a quiet comedy too; unlike many poets she doesn’t take herself too seriously. Unusually, I wanted to re-read many of these poems, after I’d finished the book. I hope we’ll see more of Allison McVety’s work.
Published in Envoi