Gravity Archives by Andrew Motion; Rabbitbox by Wayne Holloway-Smith; Strange Architectures by JL Williams; I Do Know Some Things by Richard Siken
Gravity Archives
by Andrew Motion (Faber, £12.99)
From his 1978 debut through his laureate elegies for Princess Diana and the Queen Mother, death remains a major preoccupation for Motion. And for good reason: his mother’s accidental fall from a horse and subsequent premature death catalysed an unshakeable elegiac pattern, the poet as chronicler of loss – and, by extension, love. But something has subtly shifted in this latest gravitational turn. No longer the bewildered and ambivalent Englishman, who in his previous book, Randomly Moving Particles, emigrates to the US, here we see a more rooted and resolute eye surveying the mortality of others as well as his own. An opening sequence of eight roughly sonnet-like poems mourning the Baltimore poet Joseph Harrison contrasts the American’s dying courage with the poet’s English reticence. “You talk. I will – but warn you, Joe, / talk is not first nature. I blame Dad, / his silence fathomless. I tried.” An awkwardness relegates grief back to its private place, giving way to alternatives sometimes hopeful or outright hilarious. In Autumn Light a sequence for familial dead begins “Andrew Motion has also died … He was a fool in his own opinion”, mixing pathos and bathos. In English Elegies John Berryman appears as a “staggeringly drunk” spirit guide, advising against the melancholic pull of home. “
That place was done for, England
, and so on, / John said.” Wisely, Motion resolves, “High time / it is that I, like everyone, set out to die alone.”
Rabbitbox by Wayne Holloway-Smith (Scribner, £
12.99)
The “toxic grammar” of home mediates a different form of filial elegy in Rabbitbox, where male violence terrorises the boy, or “boy-rabbit”. Here we mourn not the dead but those prevented from living: a young mother and her child besieged by a shadowy husband and father. “The mother one time locked herself unable / behind the door of the downstairs toilet / to elude the rage that thumped against it / and the mind recalls the dinner cold upon the table”. In nine unnumbered sections, we understand that for Holloway-Smith the mind recalling is a dismembered remembering by “a narrator who doesn’t want to look / his story too directly in the eye”. Inspired partly by Joseph Pintauro’s 1970s mystical children’s book, The Rabbit Box, the boy-as-rabbit is a kind of trickster looking for safety and love. He is also a shadow puppet projected on to a wall, a two-dimensional illusion of hands. Hiding in a wardrobe, the boy’s only escape is via a broken fairytale, his mother’s painful song “that had known him all its life”. Devastating, sharp with skilfully wrought language, this book is an ambitious leap into a lyricism that dissembles.
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