Review of “Rock Bird, Butterfly” and “Old Friends”, by Hannah Lowe, pub. Hercules Editions 2022

[sheenaghpugh]

Hercules, of course, specialises in small jewel-like collaborations between poetry and art. Here we have two little books of poems by Hannah Lowe, both dealing with her Chinese heritage. Old Friends explores the present and past of Limehouse and some of the real and fictional Chinese characters associated with it, while Rock, Bird, Butterfly looks at the Western concept of chinoiserie via the medium of Chinese wallpaper, beautifully illustrated in the book, which also contains a very informative foreword by Clare Taylor and an afterword by the poet. Old Friends is illustrated with photographs and paintings and contains a foreword by Anna Chen and a conversation with Richard Scott.

The subject matter of both collections is intrinsically interesting, while the poet’s style is lively and often has an engaging humour.  Rock, Bird, Butterfly is by its nature ekphrastic – each poem is inspired by a different wallpaper - and I don’t think it always avoids the great danger of ekphrastic poetry, namely doing no more than explain what the art has already made clear. Ideally the poem should give one a different slant on the image, and sometimes it does, as when, in “Travel Papers”, she traces the story of an iconic paper through various extremely wealthy Western hands:

 who acquired it from the house of an oilman
 in Palm Beach, Florida, who bought the house
 from Mona von Bismarck, millionaire

 and ‘best dressed woman in America’
 who in Cecil Beaton’s watercolour
 sits with her husband Eddie

 and their dog on a Syrie Maugham sofa

back to its origin:

 and must, the experts think, have been made
 at the same painting workshop,
 somewhere in Guangzhou, three hundred years ago.

Sometimes, though, the combination of the illustration with the scholarly and fascinating foreword risks telling us all we need to know before the actual poem gets started. Nevertheless, the little narratives are full of interest and the illustrations quite ravishing, so much so that for once, it is the images that make most impact on me.

In Old Friends, words and images are more on an equality and indeed more independent of each other. I cannot imagine Rock, Bird, Butterfly without the illustrations. I can see the poems of Old Friends standing alone, which is in no way to imply that the images don’t earn their place and add interest. In the last poem, “Hauntology”, a Blue Funnel Line advertising poster showing a steamship and flying birds (geese, I think but I’m no ornithologist) sparks a poem about the back-story of the narrator’s grandfather and father. The poem begins

 I see my grandfather – he’s sailing
 on a paper ship. He is old but young

and ends

 He taught him how to make a paper bird.
 It flew away, came back, and made these words.

Here, the way the “paper ship” and bird of the poster turn into memories of those the grandfather made and finally into words on paper seems to me a most effective re-imagining of the image. Another interesting poem in this booklet is “The Oral Historians”, focusing wryly on how hard it is to form an accurate picture of the past from the memories of those who lived it (not for nothing do policemen say there’s no one less reliable than an eyewitness).  In another, untitled, poem she again manages to make a very believable link between a present moment and a rich, long-gone past:

 The splosh
 of soup on blue-vine china brings back my father,
 and lets me hear the lapping of the river,
 hauling in its cargo. Porcelain and tea,
 the rolls of Chinese wallpaper, bananas,
 rum, molasses, resin, ivory,
 Persian rugs and spice and ostrich feathers
 filled the old brick warehouses

It will be clear by now that she works a lot in form and handles it deftly.

I have reviewed several Hercules books now, and they have all been immaculately produced. I was surprised, therefore, to find quite a few typos in these two, some in the afterword to Rock, Bird, Butterfly but some, more unfortunately, in the poems, in both booklets. In the first line of “If the Wallpaper Could Speak”, we have “Would anyone listen its tales”, rather than “listen to”; in “The Curator” there are two instances of “bought” for “brought”; in the last two lines of “The Ducks”, it looks as if “ducks waddle,/peddling through your mind” should have been “pedalling”, though I suppose they might have been travelling-salesducks. In poem 5 of Old Friends, “The hang across the ceiling” must, from the context, be meant to be “they hang”; in “The Oral Historians” there seems to be a word (“are”?) missing from the complete sentence “They wonder if these things in her head” and in these lines from “Broken Blossoms”, “the Chinese man who loves her – his battered, plum-mouthed cherubim”, the last word should be “cherub” (cherubim is the plural and it’s clearly the singular we need here). That last might perhaps be the poet’s error rather than a typo, but editing should still have picked it up. Typos are undesirable anywhere, but more so in a production where appearance counts for so much.

I hope this criticism does not sound nit-picking; the poems are worth reading and the images range from interesting to stunning. But Hercules books are such beautiful little artefacts, one doesn’t want anything to detract from them.