Nightcries: Liz Berry’s Motherhood Poems

 

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One of my very first reviews here – in August 2014 – was of Liz Berry’s Black Country. I was so impressed with the ways in which she exerted “pressure to counter the hegemonies of language, gender, locality, even of perception”. Most obviously she was doing this through the use of her own Black Country dialect, but I thought a more profound aspect of this was how “so many poems unfold[ed] as processes of self-transformation”; transgressive energies were being released through language, the erotic, myth-making and the surreal. The earlier book concluded with poems anticipating the birth of a child and – at the time – I felt these were less startlingly good, inclined to fall into ways of saying that the rest of the collection so triumphantly avoided.

tumblr_inline_ozdhmnTB2W1vr6098_1280It’s interesting then – in The Republic of Motherhood (Chatto, 2018) – to read more of Berry’s poems written since then, since the birth of her two sons and after a period of relative creative silence (more of that later). I nominated six stand-out poems from Black Country that I felt would establish her reputation – and the title poem of this pamphlet must be added to that list. It’s the most political of the fifteen poems and is propelled by the tensions located between motherhood as social norm or expectation and the personal/social grain of that particular experience. The paradox of the opening lines is that entering into the republic of motherhood (shades of Seamus Heaney’s 1987 The Haw Lantern, with its ‘From the Republic of Conscience’), the mother also discovers a monarchy, a “queendom, a wild queendom”. Much of the poem lists the realities of early motherhood – the night feeds, the smelly clothes, the exhaustion, the clinics and queues – a great democracy of women taking up a particular role. But there are signs too of an external compulsion, a set of expectations to be lived up to. The mother is expected to play the queen too as she pushes her pram down “the wide boulevards of Motherhood / where poplars ben[d] their branches to stroke my brow”. The public role of motherhood comes with demands: “As required, I stood beneath the flag of Motherhood / and opened my mouth although I did not know the anthem”. As much as any new parent feels woefully inadequate and ignorant of the needs of their young child, the young mother is faced with additional social expectations about instinct, affection, abilities and fulfilment which are quite impossible to realise. And on this point, there remains a conspiracy of silence: “[I] wrote letters of complaint / to the department of Motherhood but received no response”.

D19WzebWoAMAN5cThe mother in the poem also suffers postpartum depression and Berry seems here to allude to experiences of First World war soldiers, wounded, repaired and sent back out to fight again, without fundamental issues being addressed: “when I was well they gave me my pram again / so I could stare at the daffodils in the parks of Motherhood”. She ends up haunting cemeteries, both real and symbolic, and it is here she finds even more tragic victims of motherhood, of birth trauma and of psychosis. The final response of the poem is to pray – though it is a prayer that has scant sense of religion but combines empathy with other women with a great anger expressed in the phrase “the whole wild fucking queendom [of Motherhood]”. The paradoxically inextricable sorrow and beauty of motherhood becomes the subject of the rest of the pamphlet, but this poem ends with the mother echoing a baby’s “nightcry” and erasing her own self, “sunlight pixellating my face”. The poem’s rawness is unresolved. Having crossed the border into motherhood (that decision is never questioned here), the contradictory pulls of Motherhood (capital M) and the stresses of mothering (small m) have a devastating impact. In a recent poem called ‘The Suburbs’ – Berry’s contribution to the National Poetry Competition 40th Anniversary Anthology – she records the effect of mothering even more starkly: “my world miniaturised”. Listen to Liz Berry talk about and read this poem here.

After the tour de force of ‘The Republic of Motherhood’, the pamphlet takes a more chronological track. ‘Connemara’ seems to mark the moment of conception as a moment of self-abandonment (“I threw the skin to the wind, / sweet sack”) which, in the light of the preceding poem, takes on greater ironies of naivety: “Let them come, / I thought, / I am ready.” One of the joys of Berry’s work is her sense of the animal-physicality of the human body (revel in ‘Sow’ from Black Country) and ‘Horse Heart’ figures a ward of expectant mothers as a farmyard stable: “the sodden hay of broken waters, / each of us private and lowing in our stalls”. She captures the high anticipation and potentially brutal arrival of the all-demanding babies as a herd of horses; “the endless running / of the herd, fear of hoof / upon my chest”.  These two poems can be read here.

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Birth itself, in ‘Transition’, is to be feared (“I wanted to crawl into that lake at Kejimakujik”) and gotten through in part by absenting oneself into the past in ‘The Visitation’. The latter is addressed to Eloise, a figure who appeared in a Black Country poem, ‘Christmas Eve’. Here, a schoolgirl memory of a loving encounter with Eloise takes the narrator away from the pains of contractions, “as my body clenched and unfurled”. ‘Sky Birth’ is the one poem that challenges the brilliance of ‘The Republic of Motherhood’. It takes the image of climbing a mountain to evoke the physical pain and endurance required (Berry welcomes all those traditional associations with spiritual climb and progress), yet the poem never loses its sense of the real situation. The breathlessness of the climb suddenly flips back to the mother howling “over the voice of the midwife, the beeping monitors”. It is the figurative climb as much as the literal pain of giving birth that makes her “retch with the heights” and in the final moments, the mountaineer is “knelt on all fours” as most likely was the mother-to-be. The height is reached in a moving conceit:

 

when it came it came fast, a shining crown

through the slap of the storm,

for a second we were alone on that highest place

and love, oh love,

I would have gladly left my body

on that lit ledge for birds to pick clean

for my heart was in yours now

and your small body would be the one to carry us.

 

That final plural personal pronoun reminds me of a comment made by Jonathan Edwards in reviewing this pamphlet. Edwards wonders briefly about the absence of the father figure. Is the ‘us’ here the mother and child? Or is this one of the few references in the pamphlet to both parents?

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I hope this is not just a male reviewer’s concern. It may be an artistic or political decision on Berry’s part. Or a personal one. But given the thrust of much of the work – that mothering is an utterly taxing and even deranging experience – I’m troubled by the father figure’s absence, if only in that it risks representing the idea (the toxic flip-side to the expectations laid on the mother) that fathers need have little part to play. The father does appear in the final poem, ‘The Steps’, though the questioning tone and syntax casts doubt over what of the parents’ relationship will survive the experience of the child’s arrival: “Will we still touch each other’s faces / in the darkness”. I also wonder if the father figure is implied in the image of a boy riding his bike up Beacon Hill in ‘Bobowler’. This is a beautiful poem on the image of a moth (‘bobowler’ is the Black Country word for a moth). The moth is a messenger, coming to all “night birds”. The boy on the bike is one such, his heart “thundering / like a strange summer storm” which perhaps echoes those thundering hooves of the approaching young child. Perhaps there is some recognition here that the father’s world too will be turned upside down. And the message the bobowler brings may also relate to the parental relationship: “I am waiting. / The love that lit the darkness between us / has not been lost”.

41zU1eXgU-LBut such optimism is not a frequent note. Most of the remaining poems deal with the experience of depression in motherhood. ‘Early’ is almost as happy as it gets with mother and child now like “new sweethearts, / awake through the shining hours, close as spoons in the polishing cloth of dawn” (what a glorious image that is). But even here there are demands from the child that will need “forgiving” by the mother. One of these concerns her role as writer, particularly the difficulty of writing in the maelstrom of mothering: “every line I wanted to write for you / seems already written, read / and forgotten”. And this is why Berry chooses to co-opt lines from Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s terrifying story, The Yellow Wallpaper in ‘The Yellow Curtains’. Both texts can be read as studies of postpartum depression, but the despair has as much to do with the women as writers, confined, and – as in Gillman – the husband voices the demands and expectations of convention, of queendom: “He said [. . .] I must / take care of myself. For his sake.”

‘So Tenderly It Wounds Them’ is a more public account of the trials of young motherhood, of women who “are lonely/ though never alone”, women who find themselves “changed / beyond all knowing”, waking each morning only to feel “punched out by love”. The more recent poem ‘The Suburbs’ also contains the same paradox that motherhood is a state of “tenderness and fury”. ‘Marie’ seems to record a debt to a supportive female friend and it is only through the ministering (that seems the apt word) of “women in darkness, / women with babies” in ‘The Spiritualist Church’ that the young mother’s despair has any hope of being redeemed. Redeemed, not solved, of course: what the women argue is that “love can take this shape” and perhaps it Berry’s sense of art, or her personal experience, or a recognition of human resilience, or a final succumbing to a traditional narrative, that makes her place ‘Lullaby’ as the penultimate poem. It ends sweetly though the final poem sends us back to the start of it all – the dash to the hospital. So Berry book-ends this little gem of a collection with time shifts that argue motherhood’s simultaneous complexity of animal and human love as well as its pain and awful boredom and personal diminishment.

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Helen Mort’s ‘Division Street’ wins Aldeburgh First Collection Prize

The winner of the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize 2014 – one of the most long-established poetry awards in the UK – was announced at the opening of the 26th Aldeburgh Poetry Festival on Friday 7th November. The judges were Imtiaz Dharker, Robert Seatter (Chair) and Anthony Wilson. Here, Anthony Wilson assembles the competitors on his own blog: http://anthonywilsonpoetry.com/2014/11/08/the-fenton-aldeburgh-first-collection-prize-2014/

The prize went to Helen Mort, Division Street (Chatto, 2013): http://www.thepoetrytrust.org/news/fenton-aldeburgh-first-collection-prize-2014-ndash-winner-announced/

And here’s the review I did of the book a few months back for Poetry London:

Mort’s first collection has been much anticipated (no-one else has been five-times winner of the Foyle Young Poets Award!) and Chatto have snapped her up but given her a rather ugly cover with its chalk-board script and rotated image of police confronting striking miners in 1984. Michael Symmons Roberts identifies the bedrock of the book as “the north of England” and the semiology of Division Street means the reader anticipates something more politically engaged than the poems deliver: this is not Heaney’s North, a bit more North of Boston. The north is often setting if not subject, but it is a place almost too recognisable where a girl learns “the name / for artificial hills, the bridge / where a man was felled by bricks / in the strike” (‘Twenty-Two Words for Snow’). She might learn to dance, but sniggers at the teacher’s pretentious “parr-durr-shat” (‘Miss Heath’). A man grows old “in the same bungalow for thirty years / and dreams of digging his way out” (‘Fur’). A stage comedian gets a more lively balladic treatment which suggests a more resilient culture amongst the “empty works” and “braziers / that vanished thirty years ago” but the juke box still dates from 1971(‘Stainless Steven’).

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The risk is regional cliché here and I’m not sure this is really Mort’s true subject. The miners’ strike is dealt with via a re-enactment of the battle of Orgreave by conceptual artist, Jeremy Deller, in 2001. Mort’s desire to write about it is important but the sequence of poems is more an exploration of good old class guilt as the narrator leaves the “Calow WMC” to study in Cambridge, a place where she “cannot learn the tune”. The resonating image is of a different “picket line/ . . . crossed” into a “gilded College gate, / a better supermarket” (‘Scab’). This is why Mort’s epigraph is from Stevenson’s doppelganger novel about the “profound duplicity” of life, but both writers are less concerned with political divisions than personal. Much of Division Street is given over to explorations of the self’s development. The finely-tuned sequence, ‘North of Everywhere’, treats location as psychological landscape where the heart can be let “go on ahead of me”, where “silences become the better part of us”. Such questing is transmuted to a mother gazing at a group of deer, “on pound-coin-coloured hooves”. They are something she denies seeing, though the daughter also finds them, “closer / than before [. . .] their eyes, like hers” (‘Deer’). There is a recurring sense that “doors to other worlds exist” (‘Lowedges’). However much a narrator likens herself to her dogs, she is different:

one night I’ll set off past the meadow, down

behind the beck, beyond the blunt profile of Silver Howe

and nobody will call me back.

‘The Dogs’

Mort’s love of landscape is profound and, like Wordsworth, her hills and skies remain a locus, as well as image of, the process of self-exploration. She boldly plays on her own name in ‘The French for Death’, fantasising of a “girl / who takes the worst route home, pauses // at the mouths of alleyways, or kisses / strangers”. But this transgressive trouble-maker is not so prominent elsewhere where a more compromised, tentative identity emerges. ‘The Girl Next Door’ becomes a haunting double who seems to co-opt the narrator’s weakening identity. ‘The Year of the Ostrich’ wittily suggests a new astrological sign for those of us with “unlikely grace, / who hide our heads, or bear the weight / of wings that will not lift us”. Mort is always good at animals and while jogging she sees a fox, supple, slinking, sly, always about to vanish: “And what she sees she cannot tell, / but what she knows of distances, / and doesn’t say, I know as well” (‘Fox Miles’).

We find and define ourselves against others and Mort does this through romantic love, mostly its loss. “I turned to ask you something and you’d gone” (‘Fagan’s’) is a recurring sentiment. The title poem itself refers to the place where “You brought me [. . .] to break it off”, though in this case it is the other whose “head-down walk” we see, passing pubs in whose windows can be seen “nothing but your own reflection”. Pessimistically, ‘End’ suggests that “Death is // the shape / beneath romance” but the hauntings a writer sustains through such poems as these, though they do not revive the love, at least reinvigorate the lover and persuade that such deaths may only be “le petit mort”.

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