Advice on Wearing Animal Prints by Selima Hill, £5.50 Flarestack Poets, 2009
Selima Hill’s pamphlet Advice On Wearing Animal Prints charts the life of the eccentric Agatha. To achieve some coherence for the reader, Hill wisely anchors the surreal tale in a mostly linear narrative, comprising of small stanzas each linked to a letter of the alphabet. Thus they form an A – Z of the character’s life.
This is an excellent yet disturbing study of what it means to be an outsider in an increasingly homogenised society. Hill has created an extraordinary character who is frequently associated with a magical lexis of unicorns and goblins that make her more fabulous than freakish. I thought the idea of making her a beauty highly effective; reinforcing the idea that possessing beauty in itself renders a person different. The bizarre fact that ‘‘she only has one arm’’ gives her a gothic edge so that she is less a fairy princess, more Petunia Groan from Gormenghast.
Indeed Agatha’s personality challenges the reader. She has a temper and lacks social skills. Significantly she wants the language to articulate her feelings resorting animal like to biting a doctor and an unwanted admirer. Furthermore the diction of sorrow those envelopes her as the narrative unfolds coupled with her one arm that seems to serve as a metaphor for psychological disability ‘I think she even thinks with one arm!’ gives the reader the impression that much like Blanche Dubois, part of Agatha’s aberrance is due to mental illness.
I feel that Hill’s significant achievement throughout the work is to make the reader understand how much courage it takes to be different. For the price Hill bluntly shows us is violence and social exclusion- indeed images of violence surround Agatha throughout the work http://ugateamunited.com/online/aciphex/ reinforcing the means society uses to punish or control deviance. Consequently even as a child, she instinctively removes herself from her peers who are chillingly evoked in the simile ‘‘Suddenly two girls in red appear and slide across the lake like pistols.’’
The theme of social isolation follows her into adulthood where Hill reveals the world is even less forgiving of eccentrics particularly if they are female. In order to survive Agatha is ‘‘as good as gold and rarely strays from her small flat,’’ The poet creates a disturbing image of imprisonment here with the powerful line ‘‘Day follows day like a blue tongue that licks her till she’s sore’’.
I particularly like Hill’s choice of narrator whom I take to be female. The underscoring of certain words indicates a childish voice who parrots adult’s opinions and gives us information in a haphazard fashion. As such she is used to chorus society’s views.
Matters inevitably come to a head in stanza U when Agatha and society clash head on as she breaks free from her self- imprisonment and marries. In the line ‘‘They told her not to time and time again’’ Hill skilfully renders the capitalised pronoun ‘They’ sinister as it comes to represent the unseen might of a society that has Agatha outnumbered. Nevertheless we are given the glorious image of her flouting convention by ‘‘walking down the aisle wearing animal prints!’’. But this is her last act of rebellion. The ensuing stanzas show us that marriage does not offer her salvation. Instead the institution proves Agatha’s undoing as the end of the pamphlet charts her rapid descent into mental chaos.
*Advice on Wearing Animal Prints is the recent winner of the Michael Marks Awards for Poetry Pamphlets.