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sheenaghpughEverything is river and the river is more than itself
This fascinating concept consists of a pamphlet of two long poems, both circling around the themes of loss and grief and using images of water, particularly flooding. It is set and printed so that you can, literally, begin with either, meaning that the one at the back of the pamphlet is always upside-down in relation to the other, rather as if it were reflecting it in water. Even the numbering goes from each end to the middle, as it were, thus giving no clue as to which, if either, is meant to be read first.
I began with the one on the side where the gatefold cover (or French flap, as I’m assured its technical name is) showed the author photo. The narrative of this is the death (by illness) of a man, and his widow’s attempts to come to terms with it. Meanwhile the town floods, as it has clearly done before, and what with this and her memories, the poem ends with the woman dreaming of swimming in a pool in the basement of a derelict building.
The second poem begins at this point and is indeed far more dreamlike and disjointed, flashing between different memories of water and the lost man. Where the first poem was in third person, more detached and observational for all its emotional charge, this is in first person and veers between sense and dream-sense, the reality of flood and death and the unreality of dream until the two seem to merge – or, perhaps, the eternal reality is glimpsed beneath the transient:
I think I am in the river Cocytus,
or maybe this is just black water
running underneath an urban street.
In the first poem, the build-up of water imagery is both unobtrusive and massive. Individual phrases, like “soaked in pain”, “pooled in his blood”, “seeping away”, could pass unnoticed in themselves, except that they all add up to the “slow drip of loss” at the poem’s heart. Of the two, this is the more centred on the man, the manner of his death:
In just seven weeks he goes
from coffee and wine
to peppermint tea
to tiny fruits
to water
on a spoon
and her reaction in the immediate aftermath, when she is “overwhelmed/by his presence and by the absence of him”. The second poem is both more centred on the woman and more wide-ranging, exploring what water has meant in her life. In both, though, the floods which have in recent years devastated towns and villages in the area figure, both as a reality and a symbolic counterpoint to what has happened in the woman’s life. In the first poem, the description of the flood follows directly on her consciousness of his absence, and the “rage” of the flooding river might be read as an expression either of her feelings or of the destructive force that has taken him:
Everything is river and the river is more than itself,
carrying vehicles on its back, a fallen tree, trying to
drag its feet to calm the rage but it’s too headstrong,
churning silt and gravel, spewing up a pushchair,
plastic shoe, dead jackdaw, bin. Everything is brown
and broken. Everything is wet.
This is bleak, and so too, in the second poem, is the woman’s dream of being in an underground river, so much in the dark that she herself loses colour and the use of her eyes, like a “cave fish”. But the dream ends, as it does in the first poem, with waking: “she wakes” and “I wake” are the last words of each. It isn’t so much upbeat as inevitable: rivers reach the sea, dreams end, life goes on.
The way these twin poems play against each other, picking up references and looking at the same things from different angles, is impressive. There are 24 pages of writing here, but a great deal of reading; like the source of its imagery, this pamphlet is deeper and more various than it looks.
This fascinating concept consists of a pamphlet of two long poems, both circling around the themes of loss and grief and using images of water, particularly flooding. It is set and printed so that you can, literally, begin with either, meaning that the one at the back of the pamphlet is always upside-down in relation to the other, rather as if it were reflecting it in water. Even the numbering goes from each end to the middle, as it were, thus giving no clue as to which, if either, is meant to be read first.
I began with the one on the side where the gatefold cover (or French flap, as I’m assured its technical name is) showed the author photo. The narrative of this is the death (by illness) of a man, and his widow’s attempts to come to terms with it. Meanwhile the town floods, as it has clearly done before, and what with this and her memories, the poem ends with the woman dreaming of swimming in a pool in the basement of a derelict building.
The second poem begins at this point and is indeed far more dreamlike and disjointed, flashing between different memories of water and the lost man. Where the first poem was in third person, more detached and observational for all its emotional charge, this is in first person and veers between sense and dream-sense, the reality of flood and death and the unreality of dream until the two seem to merge – or, perhaps, the eternal reality is glimpsed beneath the transient:
I think I am in the river Cocytus,
or maybe this is just black water
running underneath an urban street.
In the first poem, the build-up of water imagery is both unobtrusive and massive. Individual phrases, like “soaked in pain”, “pooled in his blood”, “seeping away”, could pass unnoticed in themselves, except that they all add up to the “slow drip of loss” at the poem’s heart. Of the two, this is the more centred on the man, the manner of his death:
In just seven weeks he goes
from coffee and wine
to peppermint tea
to tiny fruits
to water
on a spoon
and her reaction in the immediate aftermath, when she is “overwhelmed/by his presence and by the absence of him”. The second poem is both more centred on the woman and more wide-ranging, exploring what water has meant in her life. In both, though, the floods which have in recent years devastated towns and villages in the area figure, both as a reality and a symbolic counterpoint to what has happened in the woman’s life. In the first poem, the description of the flood follows directly on her consciousness of his absence, and the “rage” of the flooding river might be read as an expression either of her feelings or of the destructive force that has taken him:
Everything is river and the river is more than itself,
carrying vehicles on its back, a fallen tree, trying to
drag its feet to calm the rage but it’s too headstrong,
churning silt and gravel, spewing up a pushchair,
plastic shoe, dead jackdaw, bin. Everything is brown
and broken. Everything is wet.
This is bleak, and so too, in the second poem, is the woman’s dream of being in an underground river, so much in the dark that she herself loses colour and the use of her eyes, like a “cave fish”. But the dream ends, as it does in the first poem, with waking: “she wakes” and “I wake” are the last words of each. It isn’t so much upbeat as inevitable: rivers reach the sea, dreams end, life goes on.
The way these twin poems play against each other, picking up references and looking at the same things from different angles, is impressive. There are 24 pages of writing here, but a great deal of reading; like the source of its imagery, this pamphlet is deeper and more various than it looks.
