Through her erstwhile directorship of Malika’s Kitchen, staging of the highly successful ‘Stablemates’ series of readings and ever-supportive presence at many poets’ launch events and other readings, Jill Abram, as much as anyone in the UK poetry community, has championed, and continues to champion, its happily increasing diversity of outstanding voices.

As an exceptional poet in her own right, Jill’s poems have been appearing with increasing frequency in high-quality journals in the last few years. It’s therefore excellent news that Jill’s debut publication, Forgetting my Father, has recently appeared from Broken Sleep Books. It’s available here, with an attractive cover designed by Broken Sleep’s owner and principal editor, Aaron Kent. It consists of 23 tremendous poems about family, Jewishness, bereavement, the passage of time and much besides; above all, how memories, and their jewel-like details, still colour the present.

Jill has kindly given me permission to quote the whole of what is possibly my favourite of the pamphlet’s many highlights.

*

Inheritance


A coat, a jacket, five pairs of knickers and Alfred —
my grandmother’s legacy to me; the bronze tortoise
which I still see hiding in the hairs of the hearthrug
at Woodlea, opposite the park on Wythenshawe Road.

My sister has silver grape scissors, an eternity ring
and the canteen of cutlery. There’s a red pyrex bowl
in Mum’s cupboard filled with memories of custard.
My aunt liked the ugly paintings, she got them all.

Grandma didn’t leave a will with lawyers. She left
a locked deed box in her flat and dozens of keys
which didn’t fit. We broke it open. It was stuffed
with letters: My dearest Bessie . . . forever your Sim.

*

Here we have a single, abstract noun as the title, with an etymology derived from Old French and Latin. It’s a heavy word, but it does the job, because it summarises exactly what the poem is about, and no other word would suffice.

The shape of the poem is a traditional one, which is somehow appropriate because the content of the poem harks back to times which were weighed down with more convention than today. Throughout the pamphlet as a whole, the forms are mostly stanzaic and, crucially, organic, in that they are driven by the content, as befits a sequence of poems concerned with family and how it shapes our understanding of our place in the world. ‘Inheritance’ looks orderly on the page, allowing the poet to subvert that neatness. It consists of only three quatrains but, in an implicit mirroring of the clearance following a relative’s death, they are crammed full of objects.

That the first stanza starts with a list of objects which the poet-persona has inherited, rather than with the summarising statement of ‘my grandmother’s legacy to me’ plunges the reader straight into the scene, as if surrounded by the objects. As an opening line, it is estimable both for what it reveals and how it sounds on the ear. Are the coat and jacket too old-fashioned to be unwearable now, or are they stylish enough to transcend the years of fashion? Are they from when the grandmother was young, middle-aged or elderly? Wisely, we’re not told – sometimes the reader doesn’t need to know everything and should be left to fill in the gaps. Neither do we know precisely when the grandmother lived and died.

The ‘five pairs of knickers’ has a surprising and rueful comedy to it; not just innately, but also in the augmenting specificity of ‘five’ and, as the reader soon discovers, in relation to the comparative riches bequeathed to the poet’s sister.

The line ends with another surprise: the very Victorian-sounding forename, maybe named after Lord Tennyson. The dash gives the reader a slight pause, like a comedian would bestow on their audience before a punchline, before the two revelations of the second line.

The fine detail, and spaced alliteration, of the third line flows beautifully from the second into the fourth, where we find more rich detail. ‘Woodlea’ could be the name of a house, perhaps built in the mid- to late-1800s, a Victorian villa in estate-agent parlance; or it could be the name of a block of flats; either way, it was a home, located, it seems, in south-west Manchester. (I’m no expert on the geography of Manchester!)

Reading the stanza out loud brings out its almost iambic rhythm and sound, but also that air of resigned comedy which the word ‘legacy’ conveys, as though the grandmother was having a last laugh.

Maintaining, or upping, the momentum after such a lively and exemplary first stanza would not be easy, but the poem accelerates through the second stanza, in a succession of three sentences (as opposed to the first stanza’s one). Immediately, we find out that the poet’s sister received a rather better legacy, but, again wisely, there is no overt mention of any sibling rivalry which that might have caused. (Incidentally, the pamphlet includes a beautiful, bittersweet elegy called ‘My Sister Is’.)

That the second stanza also starts with a list surely adds to the poem’s unity. I had to look up ‘grape scissors’ to see exactly what they look like. It seems, they were a Victorian invention, in the days when it would’ve been deemed extremely bad form to pluck grapes with one’s fingers in front of guests. The ‘eternity ring’ neatly foreshadows the poem’s ending. That gloriously sonorous phrase ‘canteen of cutlery’, can’t fail, whether intentionally or not, to remind some readers of the prizes on The Generation Game and Sale of the Century.

The next sentence provides more comical pathos, verging on bathos, with that superb ‘filled with memories of custard’. I have no doubt that I’ll be hard-pressed to read a more striking – and chuckle-inducing – phrase than ‘memories of custard’ any time soon. By not attempting to describe the paintings other than by the catch-all ‘ugly’, the poet lets the reader use their imagination. Knowing when, and when not, to employ that technique is a fine art, and in this poem the balance is perfectly stuck.

With its unobtrusive but effective alliteration and its concise story-telling, the last stanza is as taut as the first two, despite its sobering opening. Until the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882, Englishwomen were not allowed to draw up a will without their husband’s permission. Perhaps the lingering misogyny of English society or a distrust of officialdom influenced the grandmother’s decision not to ‘leave a will with lawyers’, or maybe it was simply more pragmatic to leave the ‘locked deed box’. Is the ‘flat’ part of ‘Woodlea’, or a scaled-down dwelling elsewhere following the grandfather’s death some years before? The information that there were ‘dozens of keys / which didn’t fit’ – the enjambment nicely delaying the humorous pathos here – and that the box had to be opened by force afford the poem’s final droll images. The use of ‘we’ is subtle: the plural pronoun provides a female unity: all the inheritors are female and some or all of them are assembled with one purpose, but hitherto they have been referred to as individuals.

And so to the poem’s surprise ending. Like earlier enjambments, the pause on ‘stuffed’ enriches what follows. The opening and closing snippets of what are presumably love-letters are tantalising – the  reader has to fill in the ellipsis in between. The use of the names is just right here, especially that we learn that the grandmother is ‘Bessie’. Presuming that ‘Sim’ is a diminutive of ‘Simeon’, ‘Simon’ or something similar, is he the grandfather, or a pre- or extra-marital paramour? It’s brave and admirable of the poet not to spill the beans; moreover, it’s a poignant ending to a poem which is chock-full of life in the midst of death.

The various clues which are laid out before us in the poem prompt deeper thoughts of other matters: what the grandmother’s relationships with her daughters and granddaughters were like, hinted at – in one direction only – by her bequests; whether or not she was much-mourned; and what she was like as an individual.

‘Inheritance’, like other poems in this magical pamphlet, is a treasure which needs to be widely known and anthologised.