Review of Feeling Unusual, by Ann Drysdale, pub. Shoestring Press 2022

[sheenaghpugh]

They were the doors out of the ordinary
  (“Mari Lwyd Finds the Forgotten Horses”)

There’s a kind of poem, much beloved of our present Laureate and others, which begins in the real world and then at some point veers off into the realms of fantasy, like Corporal Jones. It is not a mode I recall Ann Drysdale using much in the past, but here the very second poem, “Setting Off”, is one such: at the start the speaker seems to be a perfectly ordinary person, getting on in years, out for a bike ride. Indeed the first lines are achingly realistic about the laboured movements of age:

    I cock my leg stiffly over the saddle
    and settle my behind roughly amidships.

But by the time we go “through the closed gate”  “unseen”,  it is clear that the journey is now taking place elsewhere than in the real world:

  Having no brakes, I fly on through the brambles
  where nature’s creatures go about their business.
  If I had wheels, I’d crash into the wall.

There is an awareness of age throughout the collection, in the crafting of walking sticks, the appalled realisation that one’s neighbours see one as old, the passing of time that blurs memories:

  History happens at the moment when
  Where are they now? becomes Where were they then?

Perhaps the most poignant reference to age comes in “Kiftsgate”, in which a rampant rambling rose (R filipes Kiftsgate, a tough blighter) fights back while being pruned:

  You find unguarded skin above my gloves
  lifting it deftly with your wicked fingers
  so that I flinch and yelp and tweak it free,
  watching it settle slowly back in place
  over my old flesh like a wrinkled stocking.

This is typical of her sharp, unflinching observation of little things; the time it takes aging skin, once pinched, to settle back into place would strike a chord with anyone over a certain age. It is also typical of her irrepressible humour; she knows very well that “wrinkled stocking”, for many, will evoke Nora Batty, and that’s fine. There is humour too in her awareness of covid, but also darkness, because these poems focus on the resulting social isolation, perhaps of someone shielding. “Boat” begins wryly:

  I open my own front door with my elbow;
  in time of plague this is considered best

But by the time metaphor has again taken us partway into the realm of fantasy, the tone has darkened:

  I know where I am now; I’m in a boat.
  The narrow street outside is a towpath
  and all the passers-by, a scant six feet
  from where I watch them through my grubby portholes,
  are either good folk out for exercise
  or rough mechanicals about their business
  and, while aboard, I shall remain in safety
  until they, and the pestilence, have passed.

Another covid-related poem (“Fencing”) evokes the fear of contact in fencing terminology, turning a street conversation into a duel, and in “Sommerreise” the speaker even finds consolation in the fact that her “lost dog and last lover” are “dead and out of danger”.

“Clearing the Decks”, a sequence of two poems about disposing of unwanted stuff, reflects the ecological concern that is more and more evident in contemporary poetry but which, in this collection, also hints at the increased consciousness of transience in those who are themselves getting older. The next poem, “Stones with Sad Faces” belongs to these poems too, in a way, being about things which have been taken as souvenirs from the place where they really belonged.

This, then, is in some ways an elegiac collection, but with a lot of incidental humour and energy. The latter is particularly apparent in the “Mari Lwyd” poems scattered through the collection. Mari, the original Welsh “stick with an ‘orse’s ‘ead ‘andle”, except that the head was a real equine skull, was traditionally carried round the neighbourhood at Christmas seeking hospitality at houses to the accompaniment of song. Here Mari becomes, as the acknowledgements page states, a sort of “imaginary friend”, calling back memories of a young girl’s fascination with horses fictional and real, of overburdened work-horses and the horses of myth. In “Mari Lwyd Will Be Coming Soon”, the theme of letting go, already touched on, returns; a tableful of bone china, inherited and long preserved, is deliberately destroyed in a way that makes it clear what the Mari outside means, at least to this host:

  All her skills
  have hitherto been honed for acquisition [...]
  followed by years of care and conservation.

  It is as she envisaged. One great fall
  Outside there is a new silence. Inside
  there is the crunch of eggshells underfoot
  as she opens the door to the pale horse.