The Horse And The Girl (originally published by Lapwing) is the first book in of what will be a trilogy, The Crossing Places Series. Maiden Mother Crone is the second publication in the series. Both collections speak to the tradition of the quest narrative, as the female speaker draws on nature and spiritual histories to navigate 21st century problems.
Both books use intertextual echoes to create a web of allusiveness, including to male authors. ‘Too long have we tarried’ (‘The Girl on the Horse’ from The Horse And The Girl) directly cites ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’. In Maiden Mother Crone ‘The Faun In The Wardrobe’ responds to C. S. Lewis, while the haunting rhythm is suggestive of Walter de la Mare’s ‘The Listeners’ in its ‘pulling at the deeply-notched door / wondering aloud to my sister whether anyone’d been in before.’ Notwithstanding these aural echoes, both collections focus specifically on the female experience to ask searching questions. In ‘People’ (from The Horse And The Girl) the horse asks, ‘But what if you’re fixing the things that don’t matter /and breaking the things that do?’
The three sections of Maiden, Mother, Crone frame women’s experience of the world through a series of surreal encounters with both historic and mythical figures. There are moments of social irony. In ‘Teeth’ a child intervenes in a heated exchange between her mother and her teacher, ‘I did bite, but I did stop.’ In ‘The Telephone Consultation’ the speaker explains that ‘both roundabouts and swings are vying for my attention.’ But observation of contemporary mores is embedded in a wider mythology, apparently governed by the figure of the Valkyrie in ‘‘ruffled black feathers and biker leathers’ (Valkyrie).
The narrative explores the experience of both trauma and love through the unsteady rhythms of water. In ‘The Summoning’ the invitation to:
Come, come
I am here, hear me.
Come, come
I am here, don’t fear me.
shifts unexpectedly to a warning, ‘Steady! Mind that root.’ A spiky trochaic metre further destabilises the mood, with a ‘rotting branch lancing itself at you.’
In ‘A Prayer to Mother Shipton’, the speaker appeals to the historic soothsayer Ursula Southeil:
You know what I’ve lost and the cost.
So I’m here, allowing the tip tapping, lime trapping,
petrifying power of dripping water to shape the hour
In ‘Three Pieces of Glass’ water transmutes into alcohol on the daily commute, ‘blurred coloured flashes, / in waves, dots and dashes…’ become ‘the genie in the bubbles’. Here too:
A glint catches the corner of my eye. They’re there, shining.
The feathers, the leathers and the copper hair
The speaker is finally reconciled with her own body after finding herself ‘face-to-face with a plastic-legged torso / encased in purple leather’ (‘Shop Windows’).
Christianity is initially viewed with suspicion. In ‘Angels’ the speaker is troubled by voices, but depends on them to:
…protect me from the angels,
those terrible angels and the noise and the pain
and God.
‘The Beginning of Things’ takes on the question of sacrifice through blood, as the speaker attends a church service and meets doctrine with the unflinching comment that women ‘bleed with the moon and the seasons’. Further meditation is prompted by a ‘lead and glass angel’ reflected onto the altar, as light filters through a stained glass window. It is the movement of a small child in the congregation that reifies the image of Christ:
A golden boy struggles in her arms.
Over the head of the dutiful flock our gaze locks.
The poem creates a space for the final negotiation of a feminine theology in ‘Spellsong’, as:
He’s in this place, but so is She,
there’s femininity in the Trinity.
By the end of the narrative, ‘The Flight of the Crone’ envisages the Valkyrie as harbinger of death being transformed into an emblem of hope:
I’ll weave pixels into promises and shared words into prayers of
hope,
and so transform this world of men to somewhere crones can fly
again.
I am not calling this collection ‘honest’, because – like ‘brave’ – that would suggest there was a reason not to say the things it does. But these poems ask difficult questions about the human experience, and encourage readers to do the same.
Both volumes are available through the publisher https://www.seacrowpress.com/
Carolyn Oulton is Professor of Victorian Literature, teaches on the Creative and Professional Writing BA at Canterbury Christ Church University and is Co-Lead for https://kent-maps.online/ in collaboration with JSTOR Labs. Her most recent poetry collection is Accidental Fruit (Worple). @writing_at_CCCU