Circling the Core
Myra Schneider
Enitharmon £9.95
There are a number of poems here about gardens,
and accordingly a sense of luxuriance about the book – like
wandering in a richly colourful, slightly wild Eden. There are
lines or stanzas that at
times I itched to prune, but the writer’s intoxication with
language persuaded me to wander pleasurably in its byways, admiring
the natural and the rococo, all of it circling pleasurably and none
of it far from the core.
Schneider is a celebratory poet: this underpins everything. In ‘Milk
Bottle’, for example, she recreates the ‘winking lacery’ of
soap bubbles inside a rinsed bottle, expertly framing the visual
detail in a shaped stanza form. It’s completely vivid. Left
to myself I would have ended with the ‘bottle in the sink,
a sill with a cracked tile, / darkening windows’, but that’s
my dark side. Schneider goes for the affirmative imperative, her
hallmark:
Don’t
weep because you can’t re-create this weightless now.
Enter and exult in it
Entering and exulting is a good way to approach the collection,
and despite the
fact that some lengthy poems didn’t draw me in (‘Hotel’ and ‘Eurydice’,
in particular), there was much I did like – and a few I liked very much
indeed. The surreal qualities of ‘Fox’, ‘The Oyster Shell’ and ‘This
Rose’ lift unexpectedly into a mystery and that, too, is affirmative. ‘Goulash’ will,
I am sure, be widely anthologised: its ‘ring of words will carry’ into
many nights.
But it is ‘The Red Dress’ that will draw me back.
It doesn’t
seem complicated at first. The poet is attracted to a sexy little number, ‘a
scarlet sheath’ and it seems like an emblem for life. But it’s
not. She tries it on. Once ‘zipped in’ she can’t breathe.
Yes: we are there with her. Then the poem moves securely towards the sort of
dress the
poet really wants, ‘a dress easy / as a plump plum oozing / juice, as
a warm afternoon / in late October’. And this is the emblem of life – not
the sexual compulsion, but something deeper, older, more timeless and alive,
the dress you can wear with one breast or two, with or without a waist. It’s
a dress that willingly
unbuttons and whispers in the ear:
be alive every minute of your life.
Helena Nelson
This review is taken from issue 196
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