McNeill and Solanki — Contemporary Couplets

In lieu of forthcoming reviews of Mahendra Solanki's The Lies We Tell and Christine McNeill's First and Last Music, both from Shoestring Press, here is a second post in the series Contemporary Couplets (thanks again to Mahendra for suggesting the name).

Gaps

I walk into your room

after they took you away

looking for anything that’s

still a part of you, imagining

a clip of nail, a wisp

of hair to be yours — trapped

in the gaps in the floor;

nothing to grasp,

nothing to hold on.

(pg. 8, Mahendra Solanki, The Lies We Tell, 

Shoestring Press, 2014)

*

Swan

You love to see me sew.

Is it the neck bending to the task,

like a swan contemplating the concentric motion

of its patch of water?

The needle tests the cloth,

plunges in. I hum a tune;

each stitch

brings up something from the deep.

I knot and cut the thread;

what you see

empties itself

as the quilt comes to rest in my lap. 

(pg. 18, Christine McNeill, First and Last Music, 

Shoestring Press, 2014)

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Dimensions of Mahendra's ‘Gaps' are typical of the compressed lyrics in The Lies We Tell, both in the straightforward sense of how much space it takes up on the page and its syntactical scale, its reliance on a muted, subtle style. Love how the ghost of a final particle ‘to,’ as in ‘nothing to hold on to,’ hovers over the close of this elegantly simple autobiographical poem. Its clipped potential, the absence of the possible internal rhyme of ‘to’ and ‘you,’ feeling suitably brutal. 

On a similar scale, in both senses, Christine McNeill’s ‘Swan’ is also similarly autobiographical. Its combinatory contrast of a direct literal address, “you love to see me sew,” with a rising tone that tracks meaningful abstraction, “the concentric motion / of its patch of water … each stitch / brings up something from the deep,” is something that plays out well in the rest of the book. That contrasting colouring of tones, is something that, in the closing of the poem, is something that has drawn me back repeatedly to this poem and to First and Last Music as a whole. 

Both ‘Gaps’ and ‘Swan’ are understated and disciplined poems. Both represent fine intersections between expression and language, between saying what you want or are compelled to, and coming away with what language has to give.