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. 

Contemporary Couplets — Waterman & Wilkinson

A Suicide 

Away. And for a moment as you tipped,

traversed the awful point of no return

and yelled, stretch-torsoed in the faraway, 

you faced us. Eyes unseeing mirrored mine:

I thought of me; the you in me, in us; 

and all the things you’d given us to say.  

(Rory Waterman, Tonight the Summer's Over, Carcarnet, 2013)

*

The Catch

For you, the catch wasn’t something caught:

not word or contender, attention or fire.

Not the almost-missed train, or the sort

of wave surfers might wait an entire

lifetime for. Not the promise that leaves 

the old man adrift for days, his boat

creaking, miles offshore. Nor what cleaves 

the heart in two, that left your throat

parched and mute for taking pill

after yellow-green pill, the black-blue

taste the price you paid to kill

the two-parts sadness to one-part anger.

No. The catch was what you could never

let go. It’s what you carried, and still do. 

(Ben Wilkinson, For Real, smith|doorstop, 2014.)

*

Waterman juggles pronouns, transposing you over a ‘me’ and an ‘us’, through the suspended slow-time of his first three lines, “I thought of me; the you in me, in us”. He lets language get at itself but simultaneously expresses gratitude for “all the things you’d given us to say,” (my italics) the ironic, the tragic twist being that, as the final “say” rings off of the third line’s “faraway” and the embedded "away" of the first, that eloquence is empty in the face of a disaster like this. 

The voice Wilkinson does sounds like it doesn’t question its own efficacy, plays on its pomp, its power to describe and determine the facts and even the future. As, similarly to Waterman, the full-rhyme of the final line “do” picks up the “black-blue” from several lines before. The open vowel, in both cases, not letting us down gently or offering closure but letting the echoes die. Letting them reverberate. 

Wilkinson, like Waterman, questions language’s capacity to deal with events like these. (Though, strictly speaking isn't it our skill with language?) This sonnet is so packed, so dense that it feels liable to collapse in on itself. Look at this: 

                                        Nor what cleaves 

                the heart in two, that left your throat

                parched and mute for taking pill 

                after yellow-green pill, the black-blue

                taste the price you paid to kill 

                the two-parts sadness to one-part anger. 

“Two,” “blue,” and “you,” the internal riffing is as much a haemorrhaging, a rift appearing. Then again, “pill,” “pill,” and “kill” a similar riff/rift working its way through. This is expression on the edge, risky because if I don’t say this now I’ll never say it; to capture that moment in speech is bloody difficult. 

Both of these poems balance the integrity of expression against what they express, and both employ language as a felt medium. Which is not to say they’d be better off in textiles, but that their encounter with language is genuine. 

*

p.s. My thanks to Mahendra Solanki for the title of this post.
p.p.s. Think this is a load of old cobblers? Be chuffed to know what you think.