{"id":467,"date":"2011-12-14T19:45:04","date_gmt":"2011-12-14T19:45:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ink.verticalplus.co.uk\/archive\/?p=467"},"modified":"2020-12-09T14:38:54","modified_gmt":"2020-12-09T14:38:54","slug":"peter-daniels-reviews-the-kitchen-of-lovely-contraptions-by-jacqueline-saphra","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/peter-daniels-reviews-the-kitchen-of-lovely-contraptions-by-jacqueline-saphra\/","title":{"rendered":"Peter Daniels reviews ‘The Kitchen of Lovely Contraptions’ by Jacqueline Saphra"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jacqueline Saphra, <\/span>The Kitchen of Lovely Contraptions<\/a>, Flipped Eye 2011, \u00a35.99<\/span>

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: \u201cI can\u2019t say I was there precisely\u201d, she tells us, but \u201cthis story was laid down \/ in my bones, because I was waiting, willing to be conjured.\u201d <\/span>

The book is in three sections: childhood and youth; being grown up; and the poet\u2019s own motherhood and the old age of her mother. Not that every poem is about the poet\u2019s 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 \u201cgrunt and gasp\u201d with a lover, telling her daughter in the morning \u201cSex is like oxygen\u201d:<\/span>

there\u2019s no virtue\u00a0 <\/span>

in virginity. Don\u2019t eat that. <\/span>
You have your father\u2019s legs. <\/span>

\u2013 to which the daughter can only respond with anorexia: \u201cI want her to applaud \/ my clavicle, my ribs\u201d. Yet the book is not at all a misery memoir. The misery is in the past, the belief in being ugly \u201conly youth with its tilted longings\u201d, 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.<\/span>

The \u201clovely contraptions\u201d are not sandwich toasters and rice cookers in the poem of that name, but something more human, or at least softer \u2013\u00a0 the underwear in her kitchen \u201chung from a ceiling trap in readiness\u201d for him. But there is joy in mechanical contraptions like the \u201cHot Chip Machine\u201d in childhood where a shilling slips \u201cas if into a secret well \/ of boiling oil\u201d, or \u201cTriumph Triple R\u201d whose eponymous motorbike brings \u201ca new world\u201d of \u201cYou be biker I\u2019ll be biker chick\u201d; but there are plenty more of the less mechanical ones with which people work on each other \u2013 \u201cSo now we know the men, \/ their tricks of love and artifice\u201d ( \u201cKeeping House\u201d); \u201cUse her song to pull the string \/ make your strumpet strut and sing\u201d (\u201cBrother of the Gusset\u201d). Like the gusset (18th century pimps\u2019 slang) and the kitchen underwear, clothing is a major element \u2013 \u201cWhen you have a new dress anything\u2019s possible\u201d, or the stolen red wrap in \u201cLost Property\u201d \u2013 \u201cI have the eye and I have the greed \/ and she has my red wrap and she has caught you inside it.\u201d Food and good housekeeping keep up the kitchen side, as in the rather puzzling \u201cHousehold Tips for the Obliteration of Green\u201d; and just about everything you could do with asparagus (\u201cSo when you said asparagus \/ I took myself to market\u201d). <\/span>

In \u201cThe Goods\u201d these are \u201cnot the gifts you asked for\u201d, and\u201d this clever machine \/ of my own flesh\u201d 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 \u2013 \u201cPenelope\u201d turning Cavafy\u2019s \u201cIthaca\u201d round to a perspective that hardly includes Odysseus at all, and \u201cLambkin\u201d, 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\u2019s exasperation over feeding and sleep in his babyhood \u2013 \u201cStupidly, I thought there could be nothing worse\u201d \u2013\u00a0 and the other parents\u2019 loss of their grown son; meanwhile the sheep give birth and the lambs provide comforting wool, “brazen\u201d<\/span>

in the innocence of nudge and suckle,<\/span>
their stupid-eyed, impatient mothers<\/span>
feeding at the very edge of spring.<\/span>



<\/span><\/p>\n

…reviewed by Peter Daniels<\/a>
\n<\/span><\/div>\n



<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jacqueline Saphra, The Kitchen of Lovely Contraptions, Flipped Eye 2011, \u00a35.99This 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-467","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=467"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23759,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467\/revisions\/23759"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}