Over the last decade, Emma Simon has quietly but impressively built up a reputation as a gifted exponent of quirky, well-honed poetry, good enough to grace many well-known journals and to win or be placed in several prestigious competitions. Her two pamphlets – Dragonish (The Emma Press, 2017) and The Odds (SmithǀDoorstop, 2020; a winner, chosen by Neil Astley no less, in The Poetry Business’s annual pamphlet competition) – showcased her poems’ qualities. Notably, as well as containing first-class content, a number (but not too many) of the poems have ostentatious titles, e.g. ‘A Pindaric Ode to Robert Smith of The Cure’. Emma has completed both the Poetry Business School Writing School programme and the Poetry School / Newcastle University MA programme and thereby been fortunate to receive the tutelage of some of the UK’s finest poet–teachers.

When Emma announced that Salt would be publishing Shapeshifting for Beginners, available here, I was very glad, and keen to see how she would work across the broader canvas of a whole collection. For me, Emma’s poems, though distinctively her own, remind me of Vicki Feaver in how she draws, often playfully, upon memories, reveries, a wide range of cultural references and a generally wry viewpoint, to consider the place of women and girls in, and the occasional accepting befuddlement at the weirdness of, our contemporary world. Her tone throughout is commanding: the reader follows her train of thought without question. Glyn Maxwell’s blurb says that the ‘poems are shaped by lockdown’, but they are largely far from being about the pandemic, even, it seems, at a subconscious level. It’s a very witty, clever and enjoyable collection.

Emma has kindly given me permission to quote the whole of what is my favourite of the book’s many highlights, a poem first published in Spelt Magazine.

*

White Blancmange Rabbit


A neighbour brought it round
the day after grandma died.
It sat, ears back, on a green plate
faintly quivering

the way a rabbit might
among the grass, crouched low
waiting for the shadow of a cat
or fox to pass.

A kindness of sugar, set milk
and glossy arrowroot. My sister
spooned a mouthful from its flank,
and retched.

After a week where it sat
in the fridge, slowly yellowing.
After the funeral, when it was
slid into the bin

with the uneaten sandwiches
and casseroles. After the plate
was cleaned so you could see
its fancy edging.

After Margaret called round
I watched Mum thank her,
saying how much the girls
enjoyed it,

as though, after all this, she was free
to say anything, anything at all,
was making it up from here
with no-one watching.

*

Who wouldn’t be drawn in by a title like that? The lack of a definite article adds to its intrigue, almost like it’s a what3words location. Two minutes of online research shows that the history of blancmange is much older and more international than I knew. I suspect that almost everyone who grew up in the UK between Victorian times and the 1990s (and maybe later) would have their own recollections of eating blancmange; I certainly do. (There was also an unaccountably successful 1980s British synth-pop band called Blancmange, but that’s by the by.) This poem encapsulates what one might describe as ‘extreme blancmange’. Albeit incidentally, the ‘white rabbit’ aspects might, for some readers, recall Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and even Jefferson Airplane.

The first two lines of the opening stanza plant the reader straight back in time, perhaps to the early 1980s, and reveal a reason for the titular rabbit’s appearance: the compassion of a neighbour who evidently felt that the rabbit would cheer up the family, the girls especially, in their grief. The precise, yet economical description of the rabbit – ‘ears back’ in particular – is splendidly and surprisingly rendered, such that we can see it vividly. (Initially, I envisioned the plate as sage-coloured Beryl Ware, which my family used throughout my childhood, but the poem goes on to dispel that notion.) The lovely ‘faintly quivering’ is cleverly enhanced by its isolation as a short line on its own and then by the stanza-break pause.

The extraordinary extended simile of the second stanza cannot fail to unsettle the reader. Too often, poets use throwaway similes which they, let alone their readers, scarcely believe in, but this one adds a layer of complexity to the poem, underscoring the raw oddity of bereavement. The ear hears the subtle rhymes of ‘might’ and ‘cat’ and the more obvious ‘grass’/‘pass’, plus a smidgen of alliteration; all of which help to animate the simile. The last clause – ‘waiting for the shadow of a cat / or fox to pass’ – is so sinister that the rabbit becomes supra-natural.

That spell is immediately broken by the first of what could easily be, but isn’t, a dry list of ingredients: ‘A kindness of sugar’ is an arresting phrase; like ‘set milk’ it seems to belong to the era of wartime and post-war austerity when sugar was more generally considered to be beneficial. Here, of course, it underlines the kindness of the neighbour in investing the time and effort required to make the wobbly beast. The second syllable of ‘kindness’ links sonically to ‘grass’ and pass’.

The mention of ‘arrowroot’ also provides a throwback. From more cursory online enquiry, I can see that it’s been cultivated for over 7,000 years. The spare and careful deployment of adjectives in this poem is nowhere bettered than with that marvellous ‘glossy’. Then comes another surprise, delivered with excellent observation and brevity, and with natural (dark) comic timing. It could’ve been something less effective like ‘My sister took a mouthful’, but the accuracy of the actual words are just-so, with ‘flank’ being not just pinpoint but also off-rhyming with ‘milk’. The use of ‘retched’, its first syllable foreshadowing the poem’s penultimate one, is so converse to ‘kindness’ that the reader is instinctively amused.

The poem then hits its full stride with the anaphora at the beginning of each of the poem’s final four sentences, the first three of which disconcert through their syntactical ‘wrongness’ until the fourth provides the context. The bold performance of this device here is deftly executed: perfectly paced to condense a period of several weeks, that strange time between the death of a loved one and their funeral. The skill involved in pulling off this trick should not be underestimated.

As for tone, the poet simultaneously revels in and is revolted by what she is describing: ‘slowly yellowing’ is delicious, as is the assonant ‘slid into the bin’, which sounds grammatically incorrect but isn’t. The word ‘casseroles’ needs to be highlighted, even though it plays a small part in the poem – again, it’s a word so evocative of its time. The inclusion of the almost incidental plate-cleaning revealing the ‘fancy edging’ – another excellent adjective use – is inspired.

The shift which follows in the last two stanzas gives the poem another twist and adds to the poignancy. How it treads the delicate line between the comedy, horror and gravity of the events constitutes the poem’s finest achievement. The naming of the neighbour is another nice detail. The emphatic repetition in ‘anything at all’, and how it segues into ‘making it up from here’ is also admirable. The conflicting emotions of the mother, apparently unshackled from a presumably loved but also implicitly domineering mother or mother-in-law, are captured with beautiful restraint. I did briefly wonder whether the last line was necessary, i.e. whether ‘she was free / to say anything’ had sufficiently implied the point, but I concluded that it would’ve been a weaker ending without it, because ‘watching’ has connotations which, despite (and possibly because of) the understatement, emotionally affect the reader even further.

What of the form? The loose quatrains, each with a shorter fourth line, let the story unfold at a gentle, relaxed pace, in line with the comparative slowness of its times. It reminds me of Kathleen Jamie’s many equally loose and brilliant quatrain poems, particularly in The Tree House and The Overhaul.

As a model of what details to include and what to omit in telling a complex tale in a relatively short poem, it ought to be anthologised, used in workshops and widely shared per se.