stride magazine - meredith andrea
Allison McVety's The Night Trotsky Came to Stay looks to the past rather than the future. This is Gerrie Fellows' window from the other side - the daughter peering into the past to wonder at the magic of her own making, imagining how her parents' first meeting
is sand
through an hourglass, running from her
to him. And I am there too, ghosting the wall,
a smudged image pressed flat on paper,
sifting the grains, watching time and again
the atoms of my own clock forming.
(from 'Going Back to Charlotte Street')
In this collection the past has a physical pull, a drag like the bodies of suicides in 'Ship Canal' which grow 'Bigger than when they went in', feeding the young McVety's dreams of 'gold barges oaring their way to Avalon,/feluccas...or the final blaze of longboats' before they are brought ashore stinking, and rotted to nothing. Her relationship to the past is thus ambivalent. There is something compulsive about it, as if it seduces, and demands too much, and leaves her feeling slightly cheated. 'Bronze Age Skull', which is essentially a descriptive poem, ends with the lines
... And it occurs to me
with others' hands cradling,
cupped against accidental fall,
that her head, hollow, carries
more weight than mine.
McVety has a palpable sense of legacy, of family expectation and social precedent. In 'Women at their Gates' she describes growing up in a neighbourhood of housewives;
padlocked to their kitchen lives who taught us
how to wait and what it meant to go
and in 'Living up to Ronald Coleman' her younger self comes home after midnight and inches self-consciously past the photograph of her father in uniform, who
gassed
and shot, stands his watch for me,
always expects much more than I am.
The poems are full of women knitting or stitching, mending, making the best of things; of pubs and pavements; and heavy mineral substances - chalk, soil, silt, coal. They speak unmistakeably of a particular phase of British history, the baby-boomers growing up, heavy industry gasping its last, the nuclear family still the norm, Manchester emerging from post-war austerity and surviving the blast. Taken as a whole the collection adds up to a more than personal reflection on the persistence of history. The last line of the last poem - 'Still Life - William Scott RA (1913 - 1989)' - speaks of 'the layers of old ground that season the pan'; which sums up the flavour of McVety's own art as well as typifying her gift for a memorable image. The quality of her ear invests commonplace things with resonance, and the intensity of her focus conveys sometimes abject tenderness. This is an admirable collection of well-made poems.
Published in Stride Magazine