{"id":6545,"date":"2014-03-29T09:00:13","date_gmt":"2014-03-29T09:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ink.verticalplus.co.uk\/archive\/?p=6545"},"modified":"2020-12-09T14:35:48","modified_gmt":"2020-12-09T14:35:48","slug":"6545","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/6545\/","title":{"rendered":"Wynn Wheldon reviews Wendy Pratt’s ‘Museum Pieces’"},"content":{"rendered":"

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It is difficult to write about big subjects without recourse to the abstract, and so Wendy Pratt\u2019s first full collection is especially impressive given that its overwhelming interest is death.\u00a0 Pratt eschews abstraction first by rejecting mere ideas or notions as germs for poems, and secondly by refusing to remove \u2013 to abstract \u2013 differing modes of experience from the whole. All is of a piece.\u00a0 The mind, for example \u2013 distinctly abstract \u2013 gives way to the skull, as in \u201cthe skulls of students\u201d (\u2018After the Digging is Done\u2019) being filled with books and lectures about the mesolithic lake people of Starr Car.<\/p>\n

Had I been the editor of this book I may well have insisted on calling it \u2018Bones\u2019, for the bone is a recurring symbol that seems to unite these poems.\u00a0 There are cheek bones, vole skulls, thigh bones, horse bones, vertebrae, deer skulls, bones of trees, little bones, bones of this and bones of that, even a whalebone corset – suggesting linkage, permanence, connection, strength, timelessness.\u00a0 The past inhabits the present in Wendy Pratt\u2019s world – it \u201csmoulders\u201d (\u2018A64\u2019) as peat smoulders.<\/p>\n

The poet populates the quotidian with the mythic, conflates the inside with the outside \u2013there is no Cartesian distinction as between body and mind: they are one.\u00a0 Words too inhabit the same intensely physical world: they \u201ctangle \/ in the strawberries and weeds\u201d (\u2018First Words\u2019).\u00a0 Pratt promotes a kind of modern pantheism, in which everything is connected.\u00a0 In \u2018Jesus of Nazareth Walks on Water\u2019 the god \u201cwalks \/ to the boat, rests a human hand upon the wood\u201d; in \u2018Horse Singing\u2019 \u201ca universe can exist \/ in the dull thump \/ of a hoof\u201d.<\/p>\n

Nor is it only the human that is given personhood: wine \u201cscampered \/ up and down my veins\u201d (\u2018Driving Dangerously\u2019), there is an ode to a polythene bag \u2013 \u201cwe\u2019ve shared \/ our half-truths, bag\u201d (\u2018Bag\u2019), the poet\u2019s mother\u2019s bicycle is \u201cNo longer plagued by the intense futility \/ of age\u201d (\u2018Black Beauty\u2019); the landscape has \u201cvertebrae\u201d (\u2018Over Saddleworth Moor\u2019). It isn\u2019t a one way process: people are given planthood. They \u201cintertwine \/ like tree roots\u201d (\u2018It is Only Lunch\u2019), wrists link like vines (\u2018The First Mrs Rochester\u2019), the poet herself becomes \u201cdriftwood\u201d (\u2018Raven Hall\u2019).<\/p>\n

Wendy Pratt gives life to everything, even as death undoes everything, including the poet\u2019s child.\u00a0 The most moving poems in this collection are in a section entitled \u2018The Unused Room\u2019, and I hesitate to write about them, except to say that sad as they are, Wendy Pratt has succeeded in giving meaning to a life hardly lived. And even in these poems the felt is more important than the thought. In \u2018The Blessing\u2019 the childless mother feels \u201cdespair \/ balling up like a piece of stale bread \/ in my throat\u201d.\u00a0 The mundanity of the image is shocking, but what it achieves is immediate connection.\u00a0 The reader is forced into the scene.\u00a0 I think this is very good poetry.<\/p>\n

Museum Pieces<\/em> is full of ghosts and hauntings (and a witch, the poems about which I have reviewed elsewhere – see Nan Hardwicke <http:\/\/www.wynnwheldon.com\/search\/label\/Wendy%20Pratt<\/a><\/span>> \u00a0), and, as poetry is perhaps haunted to some degree by Ted Hughes, another poet for whom the sacred and the mundane inhabited the same space, for whom the imagination was a tool not a toy.<\/p>\n

Much of contemporary poetry is mere reflection, gobbets of prose in effect.\u00a0 Wendy Pratt does something only proper poetry can do: to make associations and connections across acres of symbol and image and idea, to address the most common of all subjects, death, provoking not only thought but also feeling. Fiction lures us into another world, but Pratt\u2019s poetry invites us to explore our own, not factually, in the way of prose, but by way of the imagination. She is, in this sense, a kind of Coleridgean romantic.\u00a0 These \u2018museum pieces\u2019 are anything but. Death may be Wendy Pratt\u2019s great subject, but her poetry throbs with \u201cthe rhythm of blood\u201d, turning lived experience into vivid art.<\/p>\n

In order for this not to sound like the rantings of a Prattitioner, I would add that I think the collection might have done with a little editing, and I am not sure it needed to be divided into sections (there are seven in all). Two of these sections, namely \u2018A Box of Teeth and Claws\u2019 and \u2018The Cabinet of Hearts\u2019 might have been excised completely, not because their poems are inadequate but because they are not quite so thematically coherent.\u00a0 Having said that, there is one poem, about love and death, which elicited from this reader a gulping sob at its last phrase, and deserves anthologizing by whomsoever compiles the next book of love poems.\u00a0 It is called \u2018Shoe Trap\u2019, and it is loving, as all Wendy Pratt\u2019s poems seem to be, in a very particular, robust and inimitable way.<\/p>\n

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Star Carr
\n<\/strong>
\nFlint arrow heads spilled like lost teeth,
\nfound again, drawn up through the black
\npeat. They surfaced so often against<\/p>\n

the shear side of a spade or beneath
\nthe soft sole of a Wellington boot,
\nthat they became common: a currency<\/p>\n

in the playground; pocketed
\nwith leaf skeletons and vole skulls;
\nour own histories marked out<\/p>\n

along the chipped edges. And later,
\nat the official dig, deer skull hunting-masks
\nrose from the forgotten lake bed.<\/p>\n

Glimpsed through the billow
\nof a white plastic tent they eyed us
\nwith unwitting curiosity, watching<\/p>\n

the new world; their faceless mouths
\nun-stoppered.<\/p>\n

Shoe Trap
\n<\/strong>
\nIn the dark I grope across the bedroom
\nfloor, feel for the shape of the wall, the door
\nand half trip, half step over your work shoes.
\nShoe trap. Your favourite trick, four
\nshoes, haphazardly strewn,
\nyour habit. My<\/em> habit is the stumble, the meeting
\nof floor and face, the standard bruise
\nto the knee. Your shoe trap has held me captive
\nfor thirteen years, swearing in the dark on my way
\nto the bathroom. Your habits and mine; a dance,
\na meeting of selves over and over. The day
\nafter my sister loses her husband to cancer,
\nI trip on your shoes in the dark, holding their scrubby,
\nbattered shape, I\u2019ve never felt so blessed or lucky.<\/p>\n

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Museum Pieces<\/em> by Wendy Pratt is published by Prolebooks, 85pp, \u00a36.50.\u00a0 Order your copy here.<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

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                  It is difficult to write about big subjects without recourse to the abstract, and so Wendy Pratt\u2019s first full collection is especially impressive given that its overwhelming interest is death.\u00a0 Pratt eschews abstraction first by rejecting mere ideas or notions as germs for poems, and secondly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","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-6545","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6545","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=6545"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6545\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23708,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6545\/revisions\/23708"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}