Locust and Marlin
JL Williams
Shearsman Books
Our position in the
world, and how we reflect on it, is one of the key concerns of this
book. This seemed apt to me as I sat in the sunny March of Holyrood
Park in Edinburgh, my dog panting at my side, Locust and Marlin
getting grubbied by my mud slathered hands. It was a fine setting for
reading this book (surrounded by volcanic hills, the hum of the city
in the background, people walking to work) in which nature, god and
our place in the universe are pondered. There is something quite
transformative about reading a collection of poems in a relevant
space, and the near-miracle of a Scottish sun made it all the
sweeter.
If Williams reads
this review then she may laugh at what I'm about to say, because when
I bought the book at the Scottish Poetry Library I obsessed over
this: the cover feels great. It's a peculiar thing to mention in a
book review but the front and back of Locust and Marlin has a
velvety finish that makes it pleasurable to hold. The cover image –
a sea blue menagerie with hidden images of insects, birds and fish –
also rings of the natural imagery and mythology to be found within
the poems. Shearsman have done a fine job in creating an artefact
worth holding, for sure.
But what of the
poems themselves? There's a refreshing brevity to Williams' work,
splashes of life and colour that aren't afraid to let themselves stop
ahead of schedule. These are glimpses, ruminations, reflections. They
avoid answers, and I admire that in a poem. A quiet confidence
permeates the collection, in which the poet taps us on the shoulder
to ask what we're doing. There are longer pieces too, some of
which were amongst my favourites as they begin to dig up the earth a
little more.
You could dip in
and out of this book and take something from each of the verses. The
opening poem, for example, “Heron”, is a short meditation on the
nature of the imagination, and a fine beginning to a collection that
requires us to fill in the gaps it leaves behind. I would like to
show the poem in full, but it's not the done thing, so here are the
first four lines (of seven):
Imagine a great
silence
whose wings touch
no branches.
Imagine a space
demarcated
by lack of sound.
Cleverly, this
heron is returned to in the final poem, “Revelation”, which is
only three lines long, ending: “the feeling of the fishes brushing
his legs”. The revelation is the acceptance of being, of nescience,
of its position in the world; a revelation which perhaps we share by
the end of the book. There's that biblical reference too, of course,
and this is a frequently visited home in the collection. The
narrators don't always quite know what to do with god, or the notion
of it. In “Like Phaeton (3)” for example, the “He” of the
poem remains ambiguous, its repetition almost mimicking laughter:
He.
He. He.
…
He does not speak
as others do.
Comparatively, in
“Son (3)” Williams writes:
God isn't here to
stake out dry tongues,
to lay claim to
scorched fields of hay.
This difference is
by no means a criticism of the approaches taken to such a demanding
topic, in fact a reduction of god, or an understanding of it, to
absolutes, would be to undermine the complexity of it. As a reader
with an innate aversion to religiousness in poetry, I was paranoid
that this frequent reference would irk or bore me, but that was
thankfully avoided. Williams considers the personal, theological and
psychological aspects of her core concepts to keep them refreshing.
Although they don't all hit the same notes, I was particularly
enamoured by the peculiar, sometimes even grotesque language in poems
like “Son”, in lines such as “The wind is a cow” and “I can
imagine how my lungs smell”. The anatomist in me likes that.
But this isn't to
say that the collection is without flaws. As the cover images imply,
there are a lot of seas, birds, fish and stones in this book. I'd say
the majority of the poems mention them at some point, and whilst
book-long tropes can be impressive, they did blur into one another at
times and I found myself thinking “oh bloody hell not another
stone”. This could have jarred the pleasurable experience of
reading the book as a whole, even though it did at times make chimes
and tinkles between the poems. And whilst the book asks questions, it
asks too many of them, and too overtly. It's full of rhetoric-isms,
and although this does lend itself to the nature of questioning our
spiritual and actual place in the world, the combined effect is to
dampen the concern of each (however well meant or interesting they
might be). The most successful poems present these ideas without
firing them – shotgun like – at us. These large concepts need to
be drawn out of the poem through the reader's interpretation, and in
poems such as “Blinding” (perhaps my favourite of them all) this
is achieved succinctly and powerfully. The closing lines read:
.........................................................women knead the
bread
water unveils
its secret
......................................................... hungry mouths
are fed
one to shine
one to see the
shining
The pleasure of
Locust and Marlin is most profoundly felt on reading it as a
whole. Its tone is inviting, gentle, reassuring in its subliminal
declaration that there are no real answers, and that we must each
find our place amongst the questions. As good poetry ought to, this
book made me leave that sunny park a little different to when I
arrived, and though I washed the mud from my hands when I got home
I've still got some of it under my nails.
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