Denise Bennett, Parachute Silk (Overstep Books)Parachute Silk was launched to great effect at the Square Tower, Old Portsmouth on Sunday evening with a reading by Denise and music from The Polite Mechanicals. Denise gave a moving and personal introduction to her poems and the music was a versatile and entertaining mixture of politics and humour enjoyed by many of the great and good of the local poetry community as well as me.
Wilfred Owen said that 'the poetry is in the pity' but if he hadn't then I'm sure Denise Bennett could have. The poems in this book fall into three broad categories- poems about the Foundling Hospital, on themes taken from Portsmouth Dockyard and those about her mother, Ada, who died last year aged 102. All of them depend on deep sympathy, and empathy, that informs a tenderness and humanity but that is built upon a brave, unflinching attitude that firstly chooses the right word and then explains with great clarity. It is never difficult poetry but it is often on difficult subjects. She isn't afraid to look directly and honestly into emotional trauma, undeflected by irony or shifting meanings, but the result is a powerful sense of compassion where there might not always be any prospect of redemption.
That doesn't mean there is no linguistic 'play' going on. In Hovercraft Accident,
the upturned hovercraft caught
in a wall of white water -
the breaking news.
And the delivery of the message of the loss of Ada's husband in the war is presented with immense understatement in a poem about how she would get things back to normal for his return except,
the telegram boy
leaned his bike against the gate.
Both the dockyard poems and those about the Foundling hospital are records of lives long forgotten but discovered in pieces of research. The opening poem, The Foundling Hospital, records how babies left there were identified by scraps of fabric which mothers, if and when able, could reclaim their offspring by matching their part of the fabric to the piece kept in the hospital records,
On leaving her son, one mother
cut his shirt clean in half,
wanted no mistake when retrieving him.
Another deposited one tiny sleeve.
Each left, clutching her grief.
The title poem gains from its quiet control, about wedding dresses made from recycled parachutes,
sensuous as spindrift,
its language as delicate and careful as the luminously graceful story it tells.
But perhaps the most powerful poem is Some Days, an account of Ada's physical and mental disintegration. There is nothing sentimental about the frank, uncompromising account of how such a long life can come to its end. It is plainly recounted in poetry that hardly needs to strive for effect, and doesn't, because telling it as it is does the job better without such distractions.
The whole collection is utterly coherent, consistent and profoundly human. One might ask for some light relief, but that is implied and available in the memories evoked and any sudden outbreak of frivolity would be out of place in a volume that is sombre but quite delicately and sensitively so. It can only add to Denise's already well-established reputation, not only locally but far beyond.
My collection of Signed Poetry Books has not been added to much recently so I'm glad to have this one. It was happily one of those times when the author didn't have to ask who to sign it to.