The Suitable Girl by Michelle McGrane, Pindrop Press 2010
The Suitable Girl, Michelle Mcgrane’s third collection, is brimming with sumptuous concrete detail and mythology. Running just below the surface of the poems is an undercurrent of threat and violence. This may reflect her background – McGrane was born in Zimbabwe and has lived in South Africa since the age of fourteen. There is an odd sense of displacement in these poems which may also mirror the author’s experience of moving from one country to another – but with this comes a kind of fearlessness – McGrane is not afraid to jump from one location to another, or even one historical era to another. She evokes themes that, although sometimes site-specific, speak to the humanity in all of us. There are poems here set throughout the world and throughout history and written in a variety of forms – although mostly variations of free verse. There is also a series of prose poems that are interspersed throughout the collection and I found myself wondering if these would have been stronger had they been grouped together.
McGrane has an artist’s fascination for food and the subject crops up again and again, sometimes directly in poems like Thirteen Ways With Figs, Frangipani Night, Augusta Fabergé and Bertha Mason Speaks but it also comes into play in her descriptions – for example “guillochéd, strawberry red carapace” (Augusta Fabergé) or “The grape-sized sores on her legs” (4 a.m.). Food is also notable for its absence in poems like Skin Offerings. Even in her poem about science (The Discovery Shed) food rears its head; “for lunch a baguette, a wedge of Gruyére”. And the food in McGrane’s poems is not ordinary food; it is imbued with richness, exoticism and mysticism. The beautifully seductive Thirteen Ways with Figs will leave you salivating and heading for the kitchen. In this poem McGrane has elevated food to new heights giving it almost mythical qualities – and the poem is somehow oddly reminiscent of Charles Simic or the Games sequence by Vasko Popa:
Bind three, white Cilento figs
with a crimson ribbon for dreams of love.
Place the fruit under your pillow.
In the morning, loop the ribbon around your waist.
Other influences are evident here too – McGrane’s Lunar Postcards sequence put me in mind of Alice Oswald’s space poems in Woods Etc and her love of mythology and fairytale (and even her historical poems have been given a fairytale treatment – think Foucault or Angela Carter rather than Hans Christian Anderson) echoes that of other modern female poets writing in the mythological tradition – Pascale Petit, Helen Ivory, Vicki Feaver or perhaps even Carol Ann Duffy in her World’s Wife era. This is in no way a criticism; it is inevitable when reading poetry that the reader will make comparisons with other writers: one cannot see a bee poem, for instance, without thinking of Plath’s The Bee Meeting.
McGrane has a finely tuned ear and is able to make her descriptions come alive, achieving a kind of beautiful realism through a mixture of concrete detail and abstract imagery. And the poems are carried along by her songlike rhythms and use of both internal and external alliteration:
Outside, on the ivy-clad veranda
a sphinx moth sizzles in the flickering flame.
Fruit bats swoop and glide
Between the bozy baobab’s branches.
(from Frangipani Night)
.…..Reviewed by Julia Webb