Jacqueline Saphra, The Kitchen of Lovely Contraptions, Flipped Eye 2011, £5.99
This is an exceptionally good collection of poems that have both energy and weight, as they sparkle while they settle into your consciousness. These qualities come from a strongly individual voice, and a sense of self which is not self-obsession but an enquiring about who the self is, how this person came to be there, and the way she is. It starts with conception, in “An Unofficial History”, where the unlikeliness of sex between parents is compounded by their evident mismatch as a couple: “I can’t say I was there precisely”, she tells us, but “this story was laid down / in my bones, because I was waiting, willing to be conjured.”
The book is in three sections: childhood and youth; being grown up; and the poet’s own motherhood and the old age of her mother. Not that every poem is about the poet’s own life, but this is where the book is grounded, and her steady ability to look hard at embarrassing and painful experience perhaps has something to do with the kind of conversation you get from a mother (I assume not entirely made up) whose night has been spent in “grunt and gasp” with a lover, telling her daughter in the morning “Sex is like oxygen”:
there’s no virtue
in virginity. Don’t eat that.
You have your father’s legs.
– to which the daughter can only respond with anorexia: “I want her to applaud / my clavicle, my ribs”. Yet the book is not at all a misery memoir. The misery is in the past, the belief in being ugly “only youth with its tilted longings”, and the clearsighted poet can find the right way to put the experience into words without self-pity, in fact to show the pain but allow its endearing and funny qualities to touch us.
The “lovely contraptions” are not sandwich toasters and rice cookers in the poem of that name, but something more human, or at least softer – the underwear in her kitchen “hung from a ceiling trap in readiness” for him. But there is joy in mechanical contraptions like the “Hot Chip Machine” in childhood where a shilling slips “as if into a secret well / of boiling oil”, or “Triumph Triple R” whose eponymous motorbike brings “a new world” of “You be biker I’ll be biker chick”; but there are plenty more of the less mechanical ones with which people work on each other – “So now we know the men, / their tricks of love and artifice” ( “Keeping House”); “Use her song to pull the string / make your strumpet strut and sing” (“Brother of the Gusset”). Like the gusset (18th century pimps’ slang) and the kitchen underwear, clothing is a major element – “When you have a new dress anything’s possible”, or the stolen red wrap in “Lost Property” – “I have the eye and I have the greed / and she has my red wrap and she has caught you inside it.” Food and good housekeeping keep up the kitchen side, as in the rather puzzling “Household Tips for the Obliteration of Green”; and just about everything you could do with asparagus (“So when you said asparagus / I took myself to market”).
In “The Goods” these are “not the gifts you asked for”, and” this clever machine / of my own flesh” is only partly sexual. The ambivalence of loss and longing in this poem is achieved through the kind of lovely contraption that all these poems are, finely tuned and outstanding in performance, some of them real classics – “Penelope” turning Cavafy’s “Ithaca” round to a perspective that hardly includes Odysseus at all, and “Lambkin”, a worthy winner of the Ledbury competition, which is both deft and deeply felt, the parallels of a son and his friend born the same day, the mother’s exasperation over feeding and sleep in his babyhood – “Stupidly, I thought there could be nothing worse” – and the other parents’ loss of their grown son; meanwhile the sheep give birth and the lambs provide comforting wool, “brazen”
in the innocence of nudge and suckle,
their stupid-eyed, impatient mothers
feeding at the very edge of spring.
…reviewed by Peter Daniels