Across her three Comma Press collections – Dr James Graham’s Celestial Bed (2006), Lifting the Piano with One Hand (2013) and, especially, Where the Road Runs Out (2018) – Gaia Holmes’s poetry has burned with a unique free spirit, content-, form- and sensibility-wise. Her poems are unlike anyone else’s, filled with unlikely, netherworldly events frequently set on the fringes of society but which are real and compelling.
In this collection of 19 stories, Holmes’s first foray into fiction, many of the characters are neurodivergent and/or getting a raw deal out of life: bullying, toxic relationships, domestic violence, bereavement, conception difficulties, loneliness, terrible neighbours and a general sense of passivity which these problems cause or exacerbate. However, many of the stories concern ways in which those characters, through their own willpower or with some magical realist intervention, circumvent their circumstances. In her writing, Holmes is careful to avoid the trap of overtly feeling sorry for her characters and often does so by employing a first-person narrator who just tells it as it is.
The collection begins with the excellent title story, in which a recently-widowed woman, gradually revealing how her husband died, struggles with depression arising from her loss:
Grief and the weight of the secret are whittling me away, sucking the fat and the hope off my bones. Eating is a chore because I have no appetite and since that night I’ve been finding it hard to swallow and can’t cope with anything that crunches. If anyone asks why, I tell them that the trauma weakened my teeth. I live on soup and soft, quiet things: trifle, Shippams pastes on cheap white bread, rice puddings, tubs of prawn cocktail. I avoid potatoes.
For readers acquainted with the poems packed with grief in Where the Road Runs Out, this will be familiar terrain. As with a good few of the stories here though, to say much more plot-wise would be to spoil the reader’s surprise.
‘Shadow Play’ is one of several stories overtly set during the Covid pandemic, and one of a couple featuring power cuts too. It’s a beautiful tale of a grandfather with dementia and how his five-year-old granddaughter’s frustration at his memory failure and lack of engagement is briefly but joyously overcome.
Perhaps the book’s most complex story is ‘Unloved Flowers’, which travels back and forward through the challenges faced by its protagonist Connor, a night-time security guard at a garden centre who encounters and befriends, or is befriended by, a resident of a small tent city. In a memory of his ‘Granny Amy’, her affection for dandelions is revealed:
She explained to him that though roses were beautiful, fragrant, well-loved flowers, dandelions had so many more tricks, like soft little medicine cabinets. In spring, she drank dandelion tea for her blood and her ‘waterworks’. In winter, she drank dandelion wine for her spirit. In dandelion season, she took him out to gather what she called the ‘food of the gods’ and as they picked, she’d tell him the story of Theseus, the Greek hero who defeated the Minotaur. Before the defeat, in order to build up his strength, the Goddess Hecate fed Theseus dandelion salads for 30 days. Connor used to nibble on the bitter leaves as a teenager, hoping they’d make him stronger and braver, bring his voice back.
This is remarkable, imaginative writing, isn’t it? First of all, the paying of so much attention to a flower usually dismissed as a weed, and then that peculiar and really quite marvellous simile, ‘like soft little medicine cabinets’: the two adjectives work in combination to soften the hard edges of the physical objects and provide metaphorical panaceas as well as those provided by the uses of the dandelions. The narrative turns into Greek Mythology and then back to the contemporary life of Connor, silenced by years of bullying, are equally astonishing.
Another stand-out story, ‘Universal Stain Remover’, relates how a house-sitter goes above and beyond by not only cleaning and disinfecting everywhere – ‘those places that are neglected’ – but also dealing with long-lingering stains, noting how they resemble other things and even studying the science of stains:
I have tried almost every product on the market and created my own concoctions. I have successfully removed oil, sauce, ink, sweat and other bodily secretions. I have learned the timbre and nature of stains, how they spread and set and the direction they needle themselves into fabrics. I myself am made of stains.
It emerges that the stains are a metaphor for the controlling behaviour of an ex-partner. Suffice it to say that the story takes an intriguing turn of events.
In ‘Ratguts and Lola’, Holmes explores the perils of hitchhiking but does so hilariously. The humour in the collection as a whole is droll, occasionally daft and occasionally dark, as it is in real life; and it’s all part and parcel of Holmes’s skill at getting under the skin of modern life in the north of England (and both explicitly and implicitly beyond) after years of Tory Government-inflicted austerity.
‘Until the Batteries Run Out’ brings us Clara, who, bereft by the cot death of her daughter, sits in the dark drinking G&Ts. The ending of the story is beautiful and full of tender hopefulness.
Holmes’s presumably personal, bitter experience of being part of the protest against the infamous felling of many trees in order to build a bypass around Newbury informs ‘198 Methods of NDVA’. The non-violent direct action in the story involves sitting high up in the trees and fending off increasingly-violent bailiffs sent up in cherry-pickers. The protagonist summons up all her strength and that of her female ancestors:
I scream strongly, loudly, apocalyptically. I scream and my scream is the scream of banshees, dryads, sirens. I scream because I’m scared of being felled or falling and I ache. I scream for Stella. I scream for Amrita Devi and her severed head. I scream for the sawn off branches at the bottom of the tree. I scream for the green miles being buried alive.
Within this screaming the reader might intuit all the pain and courage of the other women among the stories in this collection.
Perhaps the saddest of the stories is ‘Surge’, in which lonely 72-year-old Colin Fenwick joins in the clapping for NHS workers on Thursday evenings during lockdown but he does so inside his fourth-floor flat, the windows of which are sealed so nobody can hear him. The café where he usually has his Christmas dinner a few days before the big day is closed due to Covid so instead he buys a ready-meal Christmas dinner: ‘When he takes off the lid and surveys the contents, it looks like toy food: all the carrots peeled and trimmed to the same size, four uniform sprouts, six uniform potatoes, a perfect square of stuffing, two rubbery looking slices of turkey.’ Holmes ups the sadness quotient further, with her rare gift for delineating the unlucky hands which so many individuals are dealt.
The final story, ‘Below the Thunders of the Upper Deep’, is one which I’ve written about before, here, or rather about Holmes’s recording of herself reading it. It describes in detail the dreadful experience of living next door to an antisocial man – ‘the Kraken’ – who gets his comeuppance courtesy of three lively nuns, who, in my head at least, are the same ones who rampaged around the university campus in Andrew Davies’s superb 1980s BBC drama A Very Peculiar Practice.
It’s a suitably weird ending to a collection in which the everyday existences of people, mostly put-upon individuals, are enriched or offered a sense of hope through extraordinary, sometimes magical events. In her use of magical realism, an easy comparison could be made between Holmes and another brilliant Comma Press writer, Sara Maitland; yet Holmes’s imagination and narrative style are very much her own, as full of energy and life as her outstanding poetry. I hope that more stories, and maybe a novel or two, will spring from Holmes’s pen some time soon.
Gaia Holmes, He Used to Do Dangerous Things, Comma Press, 2024, available to buy here.
Review copy kindly provided by Comma Press.
Tag: book-reviews
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Review of Andrew Neilson’s Summers Are Other
My last review of the year, of Andrew Neilson’s fine Rack Press pamphlet, Summers Are Other, has been published today, over at The Friday Poem, here. My thanks, as ever, to Hilary Menos and Andy Brodie.
This week also saw the excellent news that Blue Diode Publishing will be publishing Andrew’s long-overdue first full collection, Little Griefs, in 2026.
I should also mention that I very much enjoyed Andrew’s essay on Seamus Heaney in the latest issue of The Dark Horse, which is available to buy here.
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May and June reading
Due in large part to preparing for my book launch events, my reading became much less systematic in the last two months, which is probably no bad thing.
I read four of Henning Mankell’s Wallander novels back-to-back: The White Lioness, The Man Who Smiled, Sidetracked, The Fifth Woman, respectively the third, fourth, fifth and sixth in the series. Having watched the BBC Kenneth Branagh adaptations several times, over the years and the Swedish one also, it’s very interesting to see how much television omitted, presumably to increase the pace. I prefer the books, with the intricate, methodical unfolding of the plots and the laying bare of Wallander’s desultory lifestyle beyond his policing. Well ahead of his time, Mankell put geopolitical inequalities at the heart of his books. I admire his offbeat, serious wit, too, such as this, from The Fifth Woman:
Linda poured herself some tea and suddenly asked him why it was so difficult to live in Sweden.
“Sometimes I think it’s because we’ve stopped darning our socks,” Wallander said.
She gave him a perplexed look.
I was very late to A Crime in the Neighborhood by Suzanne Berne, first published in the UK by Penguin in 1998 and winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction in 1999. It’s a beautifully written novel written in the voice of Marsha, a nine-year-old girl living with her mother and teenage twin siblings in Washington D.C. at the time of Watergate. Her father has left the home to be with her mother’s youngest sister. Against that backdrop a terrible crime happens, but this isn’t a crime novel, but one which memorably depicts Marsha’s thoughts and actions, and their consequences, and how a family unravels.
I can’t remember the last time I read and enjoyed a book of short stories as much as I did Jonathan Taylor’s Scablands and Other Stories, published a few months ago by Salt and available here. Its 20 stories aren’t long – they range in length from one page to 33 pages – but Taylor is highly adept at squeezing maximum value from his prose. Even in stories which ostensibly entail time-travelling, the tales and characters are believable, as are the varied narrative voices. My favourites were ‘Heat Death’, involving the whereabouts of a lottery ticket, and the title-story, about a bullied pupil and a teacher at the end of his career, but they all earn their place. These are contemporary stories, unafraid to explore the impact of deprivation and other complex social situations. I’m very glad that it won this year’s Arnold Bennett Prize – our household contains more fiction by Bennett than any other writer.
On the poetry front, I’ve been reading a couple of books for reviewing, plus others. I bought – again belatedly – a copy of Julia Copus’s most recent (2019) collection, Girlhood, as I always like her poetry. The first poem ‘The Grievers’, available here, is an absolute belter, which beautifully conveys how grief shape-shifts. I love these lines: ‘We steady our own like an egg in the dip of a spoon, / as far as the dark of the hallway, the closing door.’ This and the other 11 poems – including a trademark specular (the form Copus invented) – which constitute the book’s first section are all excellent, showcasing her knack for choosing surprising, just-so words and for making sharp, but not daft, line-breaks. The book’s second and larger section inventively dramatises the interactions between Jacques Lacan, the psychoanalyst and philosopher, and Marguerite Pantaine, perhaps his most famous case study. It’s a sequence which needs to be read at least twice, I think, to yield its treasures. It hints at the possibility of Copus, having also written a biography of Charlotte Mew, writing a novel. Coincidentally no doubt, the last poem in the sequence, ‘How to Eat an Ortolan’ is remarkably close in tone as well as content to Pascale Petit’s ‘Ortolan’ in Fauverie, her brilliant 2014 Seren collection (my favourite of her first eight collections – I haven’t read the new one yet). Compare:[. . .] He bends to the dish,
hears the juices sizzle and subside,
then picks the bird up whole by its crisp-skinned skull,
burning his fingers, and is stirred for a moment
by its frailty (it is light as a box of matches);
places it into his mouth, but does not chew.
[. . .]
(Copus)[. . .] Eight minutes he waits
while the bunting roasts, then it’s rushed sizzling
to his lips, a white napkin draped over his head
to envelop him in vapours – the whole singer
in his mouth, every hot note. The crispy fat melts,
the bones are crunchy as hazelnuts. When
the bitter organs burst on his tongue in a bouquet
of ambrosia he can taste his entire life [. . .]
(Petit)
Even as a vegan, I can appreciate the extravagant verbal dexterity of both poems.
Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff 