Bridge by Laura Elliott (Cafe Writers Norfolk Commission) Gatehouse Press Ltd. 2010
ISBN: 978 – 0 – 9562083 – 7 – 8 Hardback: £10 11 black & white photographs: Angus Sinclair 48pp
Poets live between two worlds, what Zbigniew Herbert called the world of Mr Cogito and the world of Imagination. On the one hand, there is the real, the tangible, the transactional, the world of events which compose daily life: on the other, the highly personal world of dream and fantasy. The equilibrium reached by individual poets between these two realities is a complex personal negotiation out of which poems grow and, despite what Adrian Mitchell once said about most people ignoring poetry because most poetry ignores people, it is safe to assume that poets do strive to reach the first world, the real one, the place in which many minds meet. What creates difficulties is their awareness of the second, their understanding that reality is infinitely more layered and various than it seems and that in order to express this insight they must first acknowledge the equivalent duality of their own personalities because, if they do not, there can be no poems. The problem, therefore, is one of balance, proportion, a harmony of parts.
Laura Elliott’s attractively produced first collection was awarded the 2009 Café Writers Norfolk Commission prize and provides an interesting example of a poet working to square this circle. The poems come with a fairly detailed two-page introduction, a superstructure of explanation as to their genesis and intention, the wisdom of which is arguable despite the poet’s claim that she has “tried to avoid being didactic or directive”. They are concerned, we are told, with the connection “between the cities of Norwich and Novi Sad, Serbia” as first symbolized in the poet’s mind by the presence in the English city of Norwich of the Novi Sad friendship bridge. This lengthy clarification works less than well; if anything, as in the following, it belabours points better left to the reader to fathom: “Temporal transition is further emphasised as the reader moves through seasonal changes within the landscape of the text.” Quite.
What is hugely more interesting in Elliott’s poems and a quality which surely helped win her the prize, is the sheer pitch and power of her language as she strives, like Herbert’s Mr Cogito, to understand her experience beyond the obvious, or, as he put it, “to be true / to uncertain clarity”. The collection overflows with examples of this probing intensity of response, from the observed at a distance: Fish floated with bloodshot eyes, / dilated rubies strung in the pools … (Norwich Red); to the intimately close: … the endless amusement / of almost-but-never-quite touching / prickling the skin of my shoulders. (Barbeque), and in reading it, what held my attention and made me think, had less to do with the formally declared and very worthy intention to build “a new kind of bridge between cities” than with the razor-sharp eye and cutting edge of Elliott’s ability to address age-old questions of what it means to be human, to suffer, to have to come to terms with loss and pain: Your stuffed belly is purple stitched / like a cut plum, your womb / the severed stone in a tray. (Fibroids and Wine); He conquers my wordless signals, / his desire a lashed belt strap. (I am His Palimpsest); A wisdom tooth, like a granary seed, / punctures the rubber gum pouch / at the back of my mouth. / I enjoy the pain; exert clenched pressure. (How We are Anchored); We gnaw dried apricot earlobes. (Swailing).
As she says of herself in “Totems”, I am a rag-picker, bunkered below the bridge / with my larder of stinking eels, furred mushrooms / and knotted snails … whistling waste-not back at the wind. That last phrase says it all: no better description of a poet.
April
The river swells with its own winds;
she records its hushed frictions.
It is muscular, the whole stem
of her body shudders with it.
Soft Clods pummel and dissipate,
shucked rocks clatter like hooves.
Waves crowd against the edges
of land, lapse into air.
Resonance envelops the stones.
She collects them, battered and cracked,
or scraped, clawed by water.
They all have one cool, flat cheek;
foundling river eggs
hard in her hands.
* Laura Elliott works as a library assistant. She graduated from the Norwich University College of the Arts in 2009 with a BA (hons) in Creative Writing and is due to begin the MA Creative Writing at UEA in the autumn.