Esther Morgan: Grace. Bloodaxe Books. 2011. ISBN: 9781852249182. £8.95.
Esther Morgan’s enigmatically entitled third collection, Grace, was a Poetry Book Society recommendation and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. It also contains her Bridport winning poem ‘This Morning’. It is always gratifying when a fine collection receives its due. However, it is all the more so in these days of the ‘creative writing’ boom when, poetically speaking, it is frequently difficult to see the wood for the trees, that such an unassuming and quietly impressive collection should be so widely recognized. On the simplest of levels ‘grace’ is an appropriate term to evoke the astringent elegance and seeming simplicity of these poems. However, if I remember correctly the Roman Catholic Catechism which I had to learn in my schooldays, ‘grace’ is an unearned gift freely bestowed by God. It is also a conventional prayer of thanksgiving that is offered up for what one is about to eat.
In Morgan’s title poem, which is also the collection’s opening poem, the religious connotations
of the word are allied to a zenlike state of receptivity:
It looks
simple: the glass vase holding
whatever is
offered –
cut flowers,
or the thought of them –
simple, though
not easy
this waiting
without hunger in the near dark
for what you
may be about to receive.
A similar sense of anticipation is evoked in ‘Epiphany’:
I’ve been
doing this ever since I was a girl
stepping into a moment
like an empty
platform
or a summer garden
just before
the dew has lifted –
as if I could dare you to appear.
In this poem, the title of which brings to mind the figure of James Joyce, there is also a nod towards the hushed atmosphere of the opening section of Eliot’s ‘Burnt Norton’. However, Morgan’s way with language is quite her own as shown by the marvellous image which brings this poem to its close: ‘They say not being given / what we pray for / is also an answer: the blue sky at dawn / with its wafer of moon, / the embankment buddleia / burning with admirals.’
In ‘Waiting Places’ she again hints at the possibility of the miraculous entering our workaday lives with another startling image: ‘What if one hazy afternoon, / Greensleeves drifting from across the park, / this Rorshach of spilt paint on the pavement / opened its wings?’ In other poems a sense of the miraculous is mediated via the iconography of the
Annunciation as in ‘Among Women’ where, ironically, a busy housewife has actually just missed the apparition: ‘I sensed the house had been visited – / wings unfurling like ferns in the quiet air’, her sense of loss encapsulated again in the poem’s brilliant final image of ‘sunlight in the guest room climbing its ladder of dust.’ In other poems such as ‘News’ and ‘Blessed Art Thou’ the Gospel story is turned on its head and events are seen from the perspective of the visiting angel. In the former, the visitant struggles to make his
appearance and finds himself in competition with a radio ‘blaring the news’ in the kitchen, while in ‘Blessed Art Thou’ it is the angel who steps back in awe at what for us might seem quite ordinary:
First I watched you kneading the dough,
how you put
your whole body into it,
the surprising
strength of your slim fingers.
Here it is not only the basic trope which is breathtaking, but Morgan’s scrupulously observed images manage to combine the sacramental and the quotidian in a way that is utterly convincing: ‘you chose that moment, at last, to rest, / your skin filmed and shining, / your warmth rising against me like bread.’ Elsewhere the idea of an absence is used to imagine some kind of afterlife as here in ‘Last summer’: ‘I want to come back as sunlight / to steal over everything I own // with the warmth of skin / that isn’t there.’
The composure
of many of Morgan’s poems is deeply satisfying. However, that is by no means the whole story. ‘Shifting’ is an almost mathematically precise description of a woman whose dissatisfaction with her life makes her constantly re-arrange her furniture. The futility of her actions is summed up with a Pascalian cogency: ‘What doesn’t change is the room, or the furniture, / only the permutation she has to work with.’ In ‘Enola Gay’ she presents us with another housewife busy at her tasks, which may seem at first to be more of the same, until we realise that the woman described is the mother of the pilot who dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan. In her award-wining poem ‘This
Morning’ her ability to describe a simple domestic scene is informed by an appreciation of the tragic aspects of life:
I watched the
sun moving round the kitchen,
an early
spring sun that strengthened and weakened,
coming and
going like an old mind.
In Muntjac the poem’s protagonist tries to bring some comfort to a deer struck by a car, but concedes the pointlessness of her gesture: ‘Why didn’t you just leave her ..? // How heavy it is – this brokenness / which couldn’t be helped.’ The underlying tragedy of life is again powerfully expressed in ‘To My Godmother’: I did not know then / how grief works, / how it steeps the clear world / like dye from a red dress / that keeps on running.’ Finally, although many of Morgan’s poems describe brief, deeply felt lyrical moments, she can also write well at greater length. There is the wonderful poem ‘Shifting’, which has already been noted, in which a woman seems almost caged in by a domestic interior as if she were a character from a Beckett novel. In ‘The Wayfarer’, which consists of four seven-lined stanzas, the idea of ‘home’ is viewed from a completely different perspective. Here the protagonist is an outsider, an updated version of the Anglo-Saxon ‘wanderer’, who has found a community where he feels he can finally become a ‘part of the furniture.’
Esther Morgan’s beautifully poised and elliptical poems are a celebration of the essential mystery of human existence. Creating a world which is shot through with brilliant, shimmering images in which a bread knife catches the light ‘like a meaning’ or where we see ‘galaxies of light blazing / in the mirror’s bevelled edge’, her work is also
an induction into the mystery of poetic creation. This is a collection I have found myself returning to again and again. It is poignant, profound, and exquisitely
crafted. It is a collection to read, buy and keep.
….reviewed by David Cooke