{"id":4848,"date":"2013-07-18T09:00:20","date_gmt":"2013-07-18T09:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ink.verticalplus.co.uk\/archive\/?p=4848"},"modified":"2020-12-09T14:36:18","modified_gmt":"2020-12-09T14:36:18","slug":"david-cook-reviews-hilda-sheehans-the-night-my-sister-went-to-hollywood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/david-cook-reviews-hilda-sheehans-the-night-my-sister-went-to-hollywood\/","title":{"rendered":"David Cooke reviews Hilda Sheehan’s ‘The Night My Sister Went to Hollywood.’"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The Night My Sister Went to Hollywood<\/em> is a debut collection from Hilda Sheehan, a mother of five who is the editor of Domestic Cherry<\/em> magazine and works for Swindon Artswords. To judge from this collection, she is also an accomplished and idiosyncratic poet. Bristling with the stuff of everyday life, her poems are shot through with dark humour and surreal insights. The collection is divided into two sections. In the first she defines and explores her territory, a world in which, like the young mums in Larkin’s \u2018Afternoons’, ‘something is pushing\u2019 her protagonists \u2018to the side of their own lives.\u2019 Although this is an area which has frequently been visited by others, Sheehan brings to it her own slant, exploring various dichotomies: the banal and the miraculous, the mundane and the seemingly glamorous, the explicable and the disconcertingly surreal. In the second section the same polarities are at play, but her eye is focused more particularly on the conflict between romantic love and the pressures we all find ourselves under in coping with the business of life. In her title poem Sheehan explores quotidian reality against the backdrop of the movies:<\/p>\n

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she left a stare on the bathroom window<\/p>\n

and rubber gloves slumped over taps<\/p>\n

like yellow dresses waiting for a clean.<\/p>\n

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However, there is more than a hint that our longing to escape may also be a form of posturing and self-indulgence:<\/p>\n

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Hollywood made a film with most of the crying<\/p>\n

included, ending with the hope of highlights,<\/p>\n

Botox, bigger lips and no one seemed to care<\/p>\n

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if her bed was made, if her bed was unmade.<\/p>\n

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In \u2018Not in the Stars\u2019 she exploits again the image of Hollywood in a brilliantly concentrated narrative:<\/p>\n

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I was never a Vivien Leigh<\/p>\n

but we rode the same streetcar once:<\/p>\n

her on her way to torment,<\/p>\n

me on the way back.<\/p>\n

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In this wittily textured poem Sheehan draws an effective contrast between Vivien Leigh in her portrayal of the self-dramatizing Blanche DuBois and a second more down to earth protagonist who seems nonetheless exhilarated at the spectacle of another\u2019s life in meltdown: \u2018\u2026 she got off, bright as a naked light bulb, \/ left me in the empty streetcar \/ to throb with exciting life.\u2019 In \u2018Don\u2019t Tell Louise\u2019 the poet again plays brilliantly with dramatic voicings. Hitching a lift with a man who claims to be Jesus, Louise is unimpressed and sceptical: \u2018he\u2019s fake: no one can walk on water, \/ no one can rise from the dead.\u2019 However, the second unnamed protagonist seems more open to the possibility of miracles: \u2018But I\u2019m not so sure, Jesus is perfectly nice, \/\/ he offers us eternal life.\u2019<\/p>\n

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In \u2018Tragedy from a Bathtub\u2019 Sheehan moves away from the glitzy fables of Hollywood and deploys some of the characters of Shakespearean tragedy to evoke the breakdown of a dysfunctional family:<\/p>\n

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When mother awoke<\/p>\n

she tackled the washing up<\/p>\n

but found life too dull without Romeo<\/p>\n

and left, through a door<\/p>\n

I could never find in the cellar.<\/p>\n

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Elsewhere, as in \u2018Oh Asda!\u2019, she widens her net and moves from the narrow locus of the bathtub and kitchen sink to a broader consideration of social mores and the world we are creating for our children: \u2018We feed our young expired values, \/ left cold in the fridge for days \u2013 \/ \u00a0look closer: see the vulgar stamps \/ on eggs, our toxic guilty plastics.\u2019<\/p>\n

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Like any good poet, Sheehan explores a reality she knows. In \u2018Kitchen Drama\u2019 she convincingly evokes the domestic drudgery experienced by many working mothers:\u00a0 \u2018So many women in one kitchen: \/ cleaning the sides, scrubbing the oven.\u2019 However, in \u2018The Golden Lampstand\u2019 she explores her aspirations as a woman and a writer in more explicitly feminist terms. Inspired, perhaps, by the playlets of Kenneth Koch, a writer whom she clearly admires, the poem is written as a dramatic fragment in which a woman is visited by a group of men who lay claim, on behalf of God, to the eponymous lampstand. The woman\u2019s reply is defiant: \u2018God will have to wait. \/ I am writing a poem and I need the light \/ of that particular lamp.\u2019 I suspect, however, that Sheehan is too talented a writer and too wise to let herself become over- programmatic or to see things too clearly in black and white.<\/p>\n

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In the second half of the book she focuses her attention on the relations between the sexes. \u2018Stuffing\u2019 is a poignant evocation of teenage love: \u2018\u2026 whispering goodnight \/ to a slammed door, then kicking \/ pebbles home, singing Love Action<\/em>, \/ wishing we were older.\u2019 In \u2018The Long Walk Home\u2019 the idea of glamorous escape is debunked by a catalogue of names that are much nearer home than Hollywood: \u2018He wanted to take me away to Leicester, \/ Grimsby, Preston; take my pick, decide later\u2026 \/\/ Instead, I got off home, did the kids\u2019 tea;\u2019 while \u00a0in \u2018Your Eyes Are Nearly Your Best Feature\u2019 her deadpan humour creates something like a parody of a poem by Donne:<\/p>\n

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\u2026 your belly is like East Anglia;<\/p>\n

I can see all the way down long legs out to sea.<\/p>\n

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Your breasts: the Pennines, or should I say Peaks?<\/p>\n

Papplewick Pump Station!<\/p>\n

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However, amongst these brilliantly ironic love poems \u2018Various Things\u2019 would perhaps be my personal favourite:<\/p>\n

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I love you, I do. It\u2019s just that,<\/p>\n

time is running out, it\u2019s Sunday. Asda will shut soon\u2026<\/p>\n

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Remember Holborn? When you kissed me,<\/p>\n

a train stopped and let more people on<\/p>\n

I love the red bits in your hair.<\/p>\n

Shall we dust?<\/p>\n

If you move next door, we could pretend to be lovers.<\/p>\n

When you get back, we could put up a shelf.\u2019<\/p>\n

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The Night My Sister Went to Hollywood<\/em> is a fully achieved debut in which the poet subverts the details of routine reality to create a world that is uniquely her own. It is a place where a seal can mysteriously appear in your bathtub, where a woman in despair becomes addicted to ice and starts hallucinating, or two lovers share a bath and try to converse in a mixture of English and Serbian. Many of Sheehan\u2019s poems have an immediate comic appeal but manage also to articulate stoicism, frustration, tragedy and longing. They have much to tell us about who we are and the times we live in.<\/p>\n

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Order your cop of Hilda Sheehan’s The Night My Sister Went to Hollywood <\/em>from Cultured Llama Press, 2013 here<\/a><\/p>\n

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

  The Night My Sister Went to Hollywood is a debut collection from Hilda Sheehan, a mother of five who is the editor of Domestic Cherry magazine and works for Swindon Artswords. To judge from this collection, she is also an accomplished and idiosyncratic poet. Bristling with the stuff of everyday life, her poems are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"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-4848","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4848","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\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4848"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4848\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23720,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4848\/revisions\/23720"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4848"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4848"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4848"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}