Whistle by Martin Figura, Arrowhead Press 2010
When Martin Figura was a ten year old boy, his father Frank murdered his mother June.
In his first full collection, Whistle, Figura explores the trauma, loss and grief of the past. Yet this book is in no way the poetry equivalent of a ‘misery memoir’.
Instead, the poet draws on his training and experience as a photographer to frame and study his broken childhood. In poem after poem we observe the tender meticulous ways in which he remembers, mourns and forgives; the ways in which he tests and builds a future.
Poetry is language that can act as a time machine. Martin Figura travels back to the 50s, to the meeting and courtship of his parents, his own birth and boyhood and the stark dislocation of his boyhood when he and his sister, lose, effectively, both parents.
Figura employs throughout a pared-back and piercing lyricism and thus achieves, without a hint of sentimentality, the wrenching sense of abandonment his younger self experienced after the loss of his mother. At times I am put in mind of these lines by the late Peter Porter, who also lost his mother as a boy:
“…the motherless boy
circuiting his grown up garden”
from 'Ode to an afternoon', Peter Porter.
Figura regards his younger self with a sombre and insightful pity in poems that are distinguished by their quiet restrained diction. This compels attention, drawing the reader into the places of this fearsome narrative. The poems illuminate the darkness of the narrative. In the sequence 'Journey 1965' Figura takes us with him on a journey to his father’s birthplace in Silesia where
The train stops in the middle of nowhere…
And where in the family farmhouse
… on hard benches, we eat and the talk
goes on above my head in Polish. I can hear
and smell the cattle through a slatted wooden door.
The dog’s bowl, a German helmet, clatters
on the stone floor and is licked clean.
In the chilling and vertiginous poem 'The News' the boy’s world is turned upside down when he is told of his mother’s death –
The whole thing tips upside down
at the news. Cups and saucers
spin away – disappear
into the infinite Artex swirl.
I am in the middle of the room,
the centre of a small universe
equidistant, not just from the walls
but the floor and ceiling too.
I begin a slow shadowless rotation
through the silence, heads are planets:
the doctor’s few thin hairs
the rings of Saturn,
Uncle Alan is the ginger sun,
my sister and I small lost moons,
Auntie Margaret’s cloud cover,
Uncle Philip’s oil fields,
Father Lightbound’s black jacket
shouldering its own Milky Way.
The story is traced through the span of years; here in 'Counting' is a description of his father in Broadmoor, where we see him counting obsessively –
Patients through a door, peas on a plate, knives, forks,
spoons, keys on a belt, pills in a plastic cup, minutes
in a day, sixty dormitory beds, heads on pillows, shouts
in the night, the distance from your neighbour, monsters
on the ceiling, therapeutic kicks, privileges, what is lost,
nurses’ jokes, bricks in a wall, the number of steps
round the hard, jigsaw pieces, one small square of sky.
We see Frank’s eventual release and his subsequent unfathomable and subdued mien, his be-numbed way of life.
Shakespeare advises us, in Macbeth, when Malcolm tells MacDuff (on the loss of hisi wife and family to the murderous king), that we must ‘give sorrow words’.
In Whistle sorrow is given profound and moving words. This collection is a record of personal survival and renewal after the very earth of life and love has been scorched and devastated. Figura, keeping his nerve, guides us through a limbo of shifting and shadowed memories, through places where the encroaching Furies rampage, out into the clarity of comprehension and forgiveness, where it is possible for him, and for us , to claim life’s paradoxical riches.
Take my arm
my arm
my arm
seventy verses of wishes
seventy verses of ghosts
let us step through these mirror-ball stars
and dance
and dance
and dance until
we’ve covered the dawn with footprints
left midnight alone in its room
'June’s Birthday Waltz'