Rather than have lines running over line-endings, Picador have acommodated Colette Bryce's long lines by producing a book wider than usual. What a good idea. It allows the poems to be as written on the page and not unsatisfactorily folded. It makes a book of non-standard dimensions which is also a good thing when formats and lay-outs can become a little bit orthodox.
There is no great renewal of poetics in Colette Bryce. She quietly and impressively gets on with the job, offering the reader her poems rather than expecting them to do the work. One is grateful to see the relatively simple, but never facile, things done well. It is sensible and sensitive rather than highbrow or high-minded. There is a great deal to like about this new collection, as much as there was to like about her previous ones.
The title comes from the thematically central poem, Derry, which is a long autobiographical piece about her childhood in a large Catholic family, in an atmosphere of religion, the evidence of violence and an inevitable feeling of some oppression.
Gerry Adams' mouth
was out of synch in the goldfish bowl
of the TV screen, our dubious link
with the world.
Colette's sisters 'upped and crossed the water' one by one, as she was to do herself, but this poem, as the scene for most of these poems, provides the background to her own and her generation's formative years there,
The proof that Jesus was a Derry man?
Thirty-three, unemployed and living with his mother,
the old joke ran.
In Signature, there is the significant moment in growing up when Colette's handwriting has become so like her mother's that she can write her own absence notes to school,
I had become my mother, the flourish
on that sloping B
was as natural to me as it was to my sister and co-forger
but there is more to it than that in the sister's story, captured in a note left on the door of her flat in that same handwriting. The plain style of Colette's writing gives it a gentle power and memorability.
In Helicopters, the police aircraft are 'high in the night',
where they might resemble
a business of flies
around the head wound of an animal.
There are more of these metaphors than one might at first give the poet credit for, this one in particular packed with associations in a way that makes the calm, down-beat writing extra-ordinary.
In a list of acknowledgements at the end, the book cites a number of poems that echo the opening lines of poems by other poets. It is heart-warming to find August Kleinzahler among them. Mammy Dozes is very much a companion piece to his Portrait of My Mother in January but is aware, in its greater number of lines, of more detail beyond the wind and trees outside and the passive knowledge of 'junk mail, window cleaners, priests' and, perhaps more sinisterly, Deal or No Deal, seems to suggest more potential danger to the vulnerable old lady.
However, the real masterpiece in the book is Your Grandmother's House, a sestina - which is enough of a technical challenge in any circumstances- but here taking Elizabeth Bishop as a model, maintaining a tone of language as it is spoken, achieving a naturalism that disguises the contrivance rather than parades it. There is no other such technical feat, or even attempt, in this book or in countless others. It just turns up and there it is, beautifully and admirably. I imagine it was an exhausting exercise and it is no surprise that nothing similar was essayed in the set. The form itself ensures the internal echoing and, as such, that spreads through the variant uses of the repeated words and the inwardness of a life, a house, in which,
she frisks the shelf
for the spectacles she might have left in the bar
for goodness sake, but no, sure they are here.
It is a paragon example of a demanding form brilliantly realized.
It is an excellent book, at least as good as it was expected to be, confirming Colette Bryce among the essential poets of her generation.
