by
Helen Burke
64
pages, Valley Press
Review
by Bill Kirton
Helen
Burke’s poems are full of ambushes. You read along, sharing reminiscences,
savouring the comfortable rhythms, admiring the visual and aural images and
suddenly, unawares, you’re presented with an absurdity or a marriage of things
which don’t belong together or a formulation so perfectly pitched that you want
to stop, read it again and reassess it and the context in which it sits. And
each time it’s a pleasure, reinforcing the impact of what preceded it or taking
it to another level.
It’s
no surprise to read that this collection brings together some of the poems most
frequently requested by audiences around the world. They’re celebrations of
love, of continuity; distillations of the effect of memory as it evokes
distances in time and space and yet, simultaneously, cancels them. Some are
autobiographical and yet they express feelings we can share, feelings with
which we can identify and which stir echoes of moments through which we also
have lived. In fact, the poet hopes, in her introduction, that ‘these poems can
connect with you at a heart level’. In one of them she writes ‘we are the
stories that we tell not with our mouths but with our hearts’ and the notes to
another say ‘the stories we write with our hearts are what matter’.
She
captures perfect moments, fragments of times spent with her father and mother
made of the simplest elements:
‘And we walked home, like two happy dogs
and the sky was duck-egg blue and the grass
was full of four-leaved clovers’
Meanings
shift constantly, life is change and yet its essence can be caught and
concentrated into a memory. Like her Dad’s Lingo, it refuses to settle into
non-negotiable meanings.
Burke’s
imagination is riotous. In a poem like Hospital
Lingo, the ‘procedures’ the patients have to undergo are distorted, become
a parade of hilarious absurdities as she piles gag on gag with meticulous
timing. Yes, even though these are lines lying on a page, their timings are as
immaculate as any delivered by stand-ups. Read The Christmas Letter (the poem which won the Waterstones Poetry
Prize) and see how, line after line, you’re ambushed by gags (aka truths).
‘All the kids have had nose jobs
and the cat’s booked in for a boob job,
but the gardener’s making do with reiki and several
flu jabs.
My cocaine habit’s coming on nicely
and the twins have made a blue movie – so hip.
Daddie's married our nanny – again – and
he'll be off to the Philippines
(once his heart can face the trip).
The dog has got his own Rolex’
And
so on, and so on. It never lets up.
As
well as teeming with punchlines, the poem My
Wild Mother presents us with a vibrant personality we’d love to know. And
we do know her. The poet’s mum and dad live in her verse, they’re so real in
her memory and thinking. It’s a great proof of the persistence of love and for
her it’s a constant currency.
Her
dog, Baxter, is a happy Sisyphus, exuberant about life despite the restraints
which mark it.
There is no cure for being free of mind and will.
Baxter, my friend, my alter ego.
Baxter – I love you.
Go on being. Baxter.
The
seeming artlessness, the wit, the humour belie the fact that Burke is dealing
in profound, existential truths. The instant has multiplicity and
multi-valence, life is a ‘shadow dance’. She conveys the passage of time, the
distance between various ‘thens’ and ‘nows’ and yet manages to experience them
simultaneously. She writes, in The
Serving Girl, of:
‘Your presence in your own absence.
Nothing to be done but bear it.’
In
short, Here's Looking at You Kid is packed full of experiences, conveyed in terms which help
us unlock our own. It’s funny, loving, deep, witty, compassionate,
fundamentally human. It’s a poetry of happy, energetic protest – not of the angry,
proscriptive or restricted political kind but a celebration of living and the
refusal to submit to conventions and restraints.
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