On the Edge
Review by Anthony Dickens
www.dickensenterprises.co.uk
On the back cover of this stylish little collection we discover that
Hemmett has ‘a grudge against mankind’. And yet the dominant voice here
is one of yearning and regret, a quiet softness full of need and desire
and disappointment posing in a cloak of bitterness. Read carefully and
layers of humour unravel themselves through an unbearable heaviness of
being.
What is striking in these poems is the proliferation of nouns which
direct us to parts of the body, enabling us to see close-up and with a
rugged physicality the ‘fine spun/ blown thin’ shape of a shadow, an
omnipresent and selfish ‘you’ who haunts the pages. In ‘City’ the shadow
shape, or possibly the city itself, holds ‘the base of my skull’,
supporting and offering up an identity; in ‘Against the Grain’ we read
how ‘tanned slight limbs/ will walk behind me’ in a determined,
confident surge of possibility; in ‘Kitchen Table’ a mother is ‘still
grinding her bones’ and in ‘Salve’ we find ‘that curl of hair at the
base of your throat’ which is twisted ‘around the tip of my tongue to
your annoyance.’ Fingers, throats and heads and bones; wrists and palms
and eyes and tones of flesh are waiting to be kissed or cut.
Hemmett is certainly a skilled poet. In ‘The Ceramicist’ – the best in
the collection – we watch an artist at work, walking with his ‘slim hips
and bare legs/ between twists of foliage.’ Through ‘slit eyes’ and
drawing ‘on a cigarette’ he is observed, until a rare ‘smile’ finds its
way onto the quiet, silent page, revealing envy, possibly desire,
possibly nothing at all. The moment is suspended ‘behind glass and
weeping figs’ and here, Hemmett captures tension - the burning
possibility of another world, another life - before two bodies collide
and ‘he sees I am here’.
And Liana Hemmett is indeed ‘here’. These poems are sometimes startling
and often beautiful; certainly not ‘sunloungepoolsidegripper’ but more ‘chapbookcleancutlaidbaremusings’.
And whilst the scent of eau d’Grudge is certainly present, there is a
hell of a lot more on offer. Recommended.
Anthony Dickens
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