Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff

Mary Mulholland has been steadily building up an impressive body of work over the last decade and more: her latest publication, the elimination game, published by Broken Sleep Books and available here, is her second solo pamphlet, following her 2022 Live Canon  debut What the sheep taught me, in addition to her two Nine Pens collaborations with Vasiliki Albedo and Simon Maddrell. Mary is also the founder of the Red Door Poets (details here), of whom I was an original member; I can testify to Mary’s deep poetic intuition and generosity.

With intelligence, humour and carefully contained ire, the elimination game tackles the stereotypes, pitfalls and apparent invisibility of older women in contemporary British society. As a late-middle-aged man in the same society, I can’t, and don’t, pretend to know what it feels like to be an older woman in Britain today, but Mary’s poems provide a good idea.

The content contains a plethora of memorable lines and images, such as the eponymous hero of ‘The General’s Widow’ who, once ‘The funeral’s over’ finds ‘it’s such a relief, / she’ll spend the night making paper planes, / hurl them at his eyes, nose and brains’, and the title-poem in which a litany of misogynist and agist insulting terms for older women are rebuffed in no uncertain terms (‘kindly wait while i /find a bucket to list & puke in’) and then refuted by another, much more positive litany of achievements: ‘last year I swam in the / arctic    trekked the sahara     then / mastered roller-blading    next up / i’m   starting   classes   in   mandarin’.

There are heartfelt poems from the perspective of both motherhood and grandmotherhood (both subjective and objective, and in ‘The Grandmothers, both), celebrating the passing on of the torch of female fearlessness; and of the incredible family memories and history which need to be handed down through the generations before it’s too late (the vivid ‘Fallen Tree’); and, in ‘Reading the Silence’, the quiet, uneasy moments of a later-years (heterosexual) relationship, in which the man’s apparently dominant voice and ‘exploits’ are quietly undercut by the woman’s unsaid response:

Once in Africa, with rain like steel drums
on the tin roof, he said whisky was safer

than water, and the grey parrot, once owned
by a bronchial old man, coughed.

She pauses her knitting, replays her thoughts,
plain, purl, clacketing needles, perhaps time,
to cast off. She glances. He raises an eyebrow,
she half-smiles.

There are poems, too, about the perils of older sexual attraction and perfunctory, unfulfilling sex, surely underexplored topics in contemporary British poetry, and, most poignant of all, a rueful list-poem, ‘The Regretting Room’.

There is a degree of interplay and echoing between the poems, not in a way which duplicates ideas, but, rather, augments them with different facets of the same sub-themes. This helps to make this pamphlet unusually well unified. I, for one, would like to see a full collection from Mary, in which she can bring her skills and life-experience to bear on the larger canvas.

The 25 poems in the pamphlet are varied in form: blocks, 5; bullet-points, 1; columns, 1; couplets, 6; haiku, 1; irregular stanzas, 4; quatrains, 2; sestets, 1; tercets, 4. Such variety remains, I think, an under-rated aspect of collecting poems into a coherent whole. Unless a collection is themed by form (e.g. a collection of sonnets), reading poem after poem in the same or similar forms, whether block poems or in couplets, will never be the most enjoyable experience, however excellent the content maybe.

11 of the poems are in standard upper- and lower-case; the others, though, are in lower-case only – first-person singular, names, other proper nouns and all. I presume the decision as which case to use when was made on an intuitive, poem-by-poem basis, rather than with any preconception. I can’t be the only reader who finds the lower-case-for-everything format to be unnerving to the point of mild irritation, because I can’t quite see the point of it, other than as a needless layer of further variety, but I’m endeavouring to get over myself. (For years, there has been a sizeable minority of English-language haiku poets who have deployed the lower-case for each and every word, and within three lines – or just one – that approach looks a trifle pretentious. Often the ‘i’ instead of ‘I’ was/is used to indicate an absence of ego by Zen-infused poets, but to my mind it has had the opposite, self-defeating effect on the reader, of drawing attention to itself.)  

You may wonder, then, why I’ve chosen the poem below rather than one of those in standard upper- and lower-case. The answer is simply that I like the content very much. So it seems that I’m succeeding in getting over myself, which must be a good thing.

Mary has kindly given me permission to quote the whole of the following poem.

*


Stilling Time

when she turned eighty my aunt refused to go
to bed, because that’s where most people die.

at eighty eleanor of aquitaine rode on horseback
like a man when she went to visit the king of spain.

a woman even older circumnavigated the world,
another ran marathons, one wrote racy books.

when i’m eighty i’m going to retrace my steps
to the grand canyon, breathe again the air

where i first encountered the majesty of creation.
i will touch a black stone ninety million years old

and feel young. i’ll bump into a family elk
at dawn, we will hold each other’s gaze.

I’ll tell them I come in peace, leave my shadow
falling over the canyon edge, sinking into earth.

*

I’ll be straightforward for once and start with the title. A play-on-words on ‘stealing time’ is intentional, I assume; at least, that allusion came immediately to mind. The idea of stilling time is attractive: of enabling a pausing, even a thwarting, of its sly progress. It’s a fine title with which to end the pamphlet, because the passage of time is the underlying stratum of all the poems within it.

Do seven couplets always make a sonnet? Not necessarily, but there’s a definite turn in this one, after the third couplet, so it’s fair to call ‘Stilling Time’ a reversed sonnet, like Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Sonnet’ (the 1979 one).

The opening line contains arguably the pamphlet’s finest line-break: I admire how it leads the reader to think that ‘to go’ indicates that death was imminent for her aunt, and then the second line, showing her resilience, intelligence and wit, reveals that she wasn’t quite near the brink yet. Poets nowadays seem more adept at that kind of double-meaning line-break in which the reader is lulled into one interpretation before being directed elsewhere. Here it is all about how much time the reprieve will provide.

That opening couplet leads very nicely into the second, with the precise age of eighty neatly linking the two verses. Eleanor of Aquitaine lived one of the most remarkable lives of anyone of ‘high’ birth in the early Middle Ages: married three times, including to King Louis VII of France and Henry II of England, with both of whom she ruled jointly, she outlived each of them, and even survived imprisonment by Henry. She also outlived her son Richard the Lionheart, for whom she acted as regent during his almost perpetual absences from England, and enabled the succession of her younger son, John, in face of much baronial and other resistance. I’m scarcely doing justice to her full biography here. Suffice it to say that in the cut and thrust of male-dominated diplomatic shenanigans between England and France, she was a central figure for well over half a century. Eleanor’s journey which this couplet refers to was across the Pyrenees to fetch her granddaughter Blanche of Castile to marry Louis VIII of France and in so doing consolidate John’s shaky hold on the English throne. She was, and is, an example of a hugely successful and important long-lived woman, indomitably defied her advanced years. She’s an excellent example in another way too: being equally at home in England and France, like Mary and her family, as shown in several of the poems.

The third couplet, in almost throwaway style, is less specific in its old-age-resistant examples but is precisely-worded to sound salubrious to the ear.

Although they link and shift like the verses of a renga, each of the first three stanzas is discrete, content-wise. From the fourth couplet onwards, however, they flow into one another, despite the full stops in the fifth and sixth, thereby giving the heart of the poem a lovely impetus after the somewhat stately, though no less well-made, opening trio of couplets.

At this point, the defiantly adventurous tone becomes reminiscent of Jenny Joseph’s very well-known poem ‘Warning’, available to read here, with its much-quoted opening,

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we’ve no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I’m tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick the flowers in other people’s gardens
And learn to spit.

There the comparison ends, though: the ambition in Mary’s poem is much bolder and more outlandish (in a good way). Note that it’s not ‘retrace my steps at the grand canyon’ but ‘to’, as if the poet–persona will take a longer and slower route, like Eleanor of Aquitaine. The segue into the fifth couplet is elegantly managed, with that pause on ‘breathe again that air’. To make the syntax here work to its optimum maybe either a semi-colon is needed after ‘creation’ or ‘touching’ should replace ‘i will touch’, but that’s quibbling. The elk encounter in the sixth couplet is utterly delightful and reminiscent, for me, of the similarly close encounter with elks in Dorianne Laux’s superb poem ‘The Crossing’. The unravelling of the clauses towards the void at the end is beautifully achieved and delivers a delicate and most noteworthy note on which to close the pamphlet.