I liked Sue Hubbard's booklet Venetian Blue very much twenty years ago and have looked out for poems by her since but not with all that much success. I obviously haven't been looking in the right places, though, because this is her third full-length collection and, presumably, one of Salt's last books of poems by an individual.
It is in three parts. The first are mainly descriptive poems, accessible and open-ended and dependent on the adjectives that carry them for their effect. For me, it began to become the same effect each time. They are often sensual, placed somewhere that art and nature meet and are enjoyable poems if not particularly remarkable. There is quite a lot of other poetry available like these but that doesn't make it intrinsically bad. In Klein's Blue, we end with Yves Klein in the staged photograph in which he jumped off a building to appear suspended in air,
for at night he dreamt only
of alchemy, of gravity and grace,
of stepping from that high
window to float above the city street
in a void of endless blue.
The best of these poems is perhaps The Ice Ship describing the discovery of the ship Octavius in 1775, adrift 13 years after being trapped in pack ice off Greenland, its crew,
penitent
as glass angels, black lips welded to alabaster tongues,
untold tales frost-bitten in their throats. Alone
at his log, the Captain holds patient vigil,
awaiting a huff of divine breath.
But the second section, Over the Rainbow, is a more specific set of poems based on equally real stories, but all of them on female suicides. Judy Garland, as you might have already guessed, as well as Marilyn Monroe, Eva Braun, Assia Weevil and others. The most immediate is perhaps Dora Carrington, the painter, saved from the gas by her husband but desolate after the death of her lover, Lytton Strachey,
For what use is painting now?
Since Sue is also a writer on art, it comes as no surprise that a number of her poems come from painting and she does it well. Artists and their female models was a theme in Venetian Red, most memorably Rembrandt's then. Whereas some might say this recurrent motif puts a limit on her work, it makes for a different poem each time and I haven't found a poet yet, I don't think, whose every poem is a brand new start.
The final section, The Idea of Islands, is in some ways the most ambitious, with its ready-made notions of separation and seeking for contact in the dark, whether by lighthouse or across the 'untranslatable hieroglyphs on the sea's surface'. There are enough references to visceral nature, the wildness of the elements but I don't think it is 'visceral' poetry, or meant to be. They are reflected upon and considered rather than engaged with and Sue Hubbard's art is at that one remove that her pre-occupation with painting would suggest. And I like it that way.
It's not all paint, though. An early poem is called riverrun and we end on one called ...yes and you can't fault her for not having the right reference points.
I'm glad to have found her very much the same poet that I first read so many years ago, sustaining her sympathetic ideas over the length of a book so effectively.
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