Holy family and other poems review

Northwords Now Issue No 2 Spring 2006

An old and familiar story re-imagined for our time.


Review by Daisy Mackenzie

The poems in this collection deal with miracles, not the kind that call for evidence or proofs, but the kind that celebrate the range of human possibility; what Mary calls ‘the mundane miracle of love.’ The poems are offered in two sequences. In the ‘Holy Family’ sequence (12 poems numbered with Roman numerals, a feature in itself evocative of the historical period) the poet imagines how the three personalities develop; how their relationships change; and how the progression towards the foretold outcome, that they themselves can only half-believe in, affects them.

The poems of the months preceding the birth are held taut together by a sense of waiting. It’s a pregnancy, yes, but something else, felt but not quite understood, is going to happen. Mary worries that ‘her man’ will leave her but ‘he smiles as a lover should, into my eyes’. She has a practical sense of her body preparing itself and, though yet virgin, she has a frank knowing of her own and Joseph’s sexuality, looks forward to making love with him ‘until we lie together weak as leaves’.

Joseph’s love is clear-eyed but tender, patient. ‘I work around her. She is a knot in the timber . . .’ It’s a hard time for him. His male friends tease him, he has his moments of jealousy, at work he ‘cuts his hands like a novice’. With an unexpected prescience he says,

I am making a crib for my Mary;
it is stained with blood.

Perhaps because the story is so familiar, this shadow of foreboding runs through the whole, touched in by the slightest of detail. Mary, pregnant, eats ‘myrrh and shavings’; Joseph smells of  ‘fresh cut cedar and olive wood’; Jesus is ‘always afraid of the dawn, and the dew of  silver’; he feels a weight on him ‘heavy as timber’. 

The drama of the poems progresses through Jesus’ adolescence (every parent will recognise him and so will every boy) and on to the years when he, at last, leaves home. ‘Jesus Sets the Table’ begins the section that moves on towards the known conclusion. He recalls that his father made this table, recalls things they talked about when they worked together, the ‘mundane’ human phrases his father used for finished work, ‘smooth as a woman’s arse’, ‘oiled with sweat’, ‘a good table squares the circle’. Against the surface plainness of its words and images this becomes a poem of exquisite poignancy; an understated climax beyond which what will happen is inevitable,

Tonight she has cooked for my friends
and fears I am in trouble.
Mother knows, she says.

These poems make no demand for creed or conviction in the reader. The emotions can be experienced as entirely human. But nor does proof or evidence discount,

Who cares if the pollens
are wrong in time or place.

The remaining poems of this chapbook continue the contemplative tone with subjects that can relate to any family now, to sights seen on holiday, to moments of everyday epiphany. In ‘Many Mansions’ we come on,

Today, a week after Easter,
I find an egg
the children missed.
I eat it; think of Jesus,

Nothing is waste
to the hunger of the soul.

One poem, ‘Essence’, can be read as a poem about how the essential things of sacrament depend not on liturgy but on the power of response within the human spirit. It is also a tender account of a parent’s discovery in a child of that child’s capacity to marvel. It is also a poem about the growth of love.
  
This collection will give satisfaction to a wide range of readers. The immediate simplicity of language lets you in and then you come to recognise the profound humanity. It is an attractively designed ‘chapbook’ (surely a preferred alternative to ‘pamphlet’ which can carry the implication of polemic); and the Helen Denerley ‘Tree of Life’ sculpture is an intriguing choice of image for the cover.