Ferryboats
by Martina Thomson
Hearing Eye Publications, 2008, Pamphlet Series No. 54 www.torriano.org
ISBN: 978-1-905082-36-0, £3.00, 32pp
Reviewed by Ken Head
The publication reading for this volume of twenty-nine poems took place at the Torriano Meeting House in London on 9th March and until then I had never heard of Martina Thomson. Not unusual with poets, given how little exposure they receive in the mainstream media and on the shelves of the major bookshop chains. Without the lifeline of small presses, open mic events and, increasingly, online publication, even the best of the new would probably either never achieve publication at all or simply pass us by unnoticed, which is why series such as Hearing Eye’s pamphlets, published at a good price and an impressive level of quality, are so valuable.
Martina Thomson was born in Berlin, of Austrian parents, came to England as a child and is now a potter living and working in London’s Camden Town. Ferryboats is her first published volume of poetry, although a prose work, On Art And Therapy, was published by Virago in 1997 (See www.fabooks.com for more.)
The collection begins with Glaze Test, a short poem, fourteen lines written in couplets, about the response to “glaze and flame” of “The contours of three brushstrokes / on my test piece”, before moving to draw a parallel between the lines of her brush on clay and those “ever-shifting versions” which she finds in nature, in “the line a hill draws / in the sky … ever-shifting versions / as I walk towards it – ”. “So many goes”, she adds, “at touch / and demarcation”, the thoughtful conclusion of an artist and a poet for whom representing reality is an infinitely varied and complex task.
Meditative concentration on the relationship between the concrete and the imagined is a quality found throughout the collection and is used skilfully in a variety of ways. In Silver Spoon, for example, “the small silver spoon / in the palm of my hand / my fingers across it / my thumb in its hollow –” leads to a dream of yesterday, the memory of her mother serving coffee “in the blue room / among her friends” and asking, “Ein Mokka?”. It is difficult not to grasp what this suggests about what was lost in the family migration from Germany all those years ago.
“Yesterday dreaming” is perhaps a useful shorthand for a number of the poems in this collection. Tristanstrasse, for example, remembers her first home, the milk-cart rattling over cobblestones, “the high, clear sound of Hübner’s bell”, but recalls at the same time a more sinister reality, which doesn’t need explaining, of “black boots … in the street / … the dog … poisoned”.
In the moving Elegy for C. L. R., which is placed among the concluding poems, we read of “His fingers … / like the strings of an instrument, / when he raises them / the air makes music. / His words are agile creatures / that ferret out distinctions, … / that span distances.” and remember Shakespeare’s Prospero, his power to transform, undoubtedly this poet’s gift also.
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