Review of "Heart Archives", by Sue Rose, Hercules Publications 2014

[sheenaghpugh]

when I am grit
and grilled bone, a snow of particles
in a ceramic body
("D25072049")

Heart Archives is what you might call a multi-media project. It began with a poem inspired by a work of Christian Boltanski, an exhibition, Personnes, which was staged in Paris and included his collection of recordings of heartbeats, to which visitors could add their own. The collection, Les Archives du Coeur, is permanently archived on the Japanese island of Teshima. Though it is the sound of life, it inevitably resonates with mortality, the "sound of people's absence" as Ben Luke remarks in his afterword to this book.

Rose then decided to create her own archive, concerning her close family and using the imagery of heart and blood that the exhibition had suggested. Like the exhibition it would be multi-media, in that it would contain both sonnets (14, which seems apt) and images connected to her family and photographed on her iPhone – Rose is an accomplished photographer.

Each poem is accompanied by an image, and the titles of the poems are the numbers of the images. This argues a close relationship between poems and images, but it is not in fact as simple as one illustrating the other. Rather, the image opens different possibilities, as becomes clear when you read the key to them at the back. This records the family connection, so, for instance, we discover that the image D25072049 shows the lid of a tin used to hold buttons from long-gone family clothes. In itself, this relates back to the poem, which concerns how people are remembered. But the actual image next to the poem, which we see before reading this key, is the picture on the lid of the tin, and it is a bunch of red roses. So before ever we know about the button tin, we are seeing the archetypal Western symbol of love, in a colour that recalls the blood which is a leitmotif throughout the collection, and, for good measure, the flower bears the poet's family name, Rose. The image, then, is being used to start off a whole husk of symbolic hares, which scatter in various directions with our minds following them. None excludes the others; what these images are best at is underlining the multiplicity of meanings a good poem should contain.

The same versatility and refusal to be pinned down to just one interpretation is found in the poems. When it comes to poems there is, as a colleague of mine once said, ambiguity hurrah and ambiguity boo. The latter leaves you wondering what that was all about, and often occurs when the poet wasn't quite sure either. The former is that quality which enables you to read the poem umpteen times and still see different possibilities. In the poem "T11222014" (this way of titling will never catch on), the narrator is a woman reconciling herself to childlessness, the end of the family line she celebrates. At the close of the poem, a "you" figure appears:

Still, when I comb
my fingers through your hair or do your nails
and see your features so like my own,

our hearts may not have synchronized in time,
but, blood of my blood, you're no less mine.

It isn't immediately clear who "you" is. The penultimate line suggests a husband, and he certainly appears elsewhere in the collection, but "blood of my blood" argues otherwise. It might suggest a relative, and the lines before it have described the kind of personal service one might do for an elderly parent, but that leaves the "hearts" line unexplained. Most of all, it might be the unborn, imagined child who is addressed, and the accompanying image, an X-ray of the woman's pelvis, could support this, but I don't think it excludes other possibilities. In truth, it seems to me that the past, present and future of the family line are all in the poet's thought at that moment, and by not identifying the "you" definitively, she is able to keep them in our minds as well.

As admirers of her debut collection, From the Dark Room (Cinnamon 2011) will know, Rose is skilled at using very personal, intimate material while entirely avoiding sentimentality. She does so here; the simultaneous accuracy and menace in her description of a human heart is typical – "an electric muscle the size of a fist" ("L27011945"). There is a lot of power in this little archive of words and images devoted to people who are either no longer here or will one day not be. Like the artwork which inspired them, the poems have a distinct tick of mortality going on in the background. This does not make them fatalistic or despairing; the very craft that has gone into them testifies to their belief that, in the absence of physical immortality, memory and memorability are worth cultivating. A poem I'd like to quote in full is the verbal, rhythmical tour-de-force "S31082011", in which she uses the metaphor of a heart transplant to speak of personal renewal:

This heart is sick. It's lost the knack
of skip, jump, swell and sing. It limps
back and forth, truckling, a cowed thing
seeking a chamber of stopped clocks,
the black of a full stop. It is crocked,
heavy with sorrows, the long doze
of evening, unaroused by the aromas
of skin, the urge to hunt and stalk.

Cut it out. Only the odd kink
or habit will be lost, an easy exchange-
young for old. Crack open the heart's cage,
implant the new occupant, shocking it
into motion if it doesn't take, then wait
for the build of passion, the soar, the race.