Mariama Ifode is a secondary school teacher of Modern Foreign Languages, and has just completed a doctorate in Spanish at Cambridge.  The back cover of this, her first collection, describes the work as comprising ‘poems written at disparate times and places, and offer[ing] spaces of encounter with life and death.’  It is exactly that - a wealth of ordinary human experience retold with unsentimental frankness and simplicity.  Moments from life – a suicide on the train tracks, reflections on age and growing children, the death of a much-loved friend – make up the substance of these warm, pithy poems, which often brim, unexpectedly in this genre I feel, with bright optimism and hope:

I no longer recognise that image of the woman                                                                                        staring out to sea                                                                                                                                                    her grief displaced.                                                                                                                                              She has followed her joy                                                                                                                                      she is on the shore. 

Towards the second half of the collection Ifode has tackled some more classical themes, resulting in several beautiful, highly accomplished pieces which retain her sharp humanity.  ‘Lazarus’ Dream,’ which seems to begin the day after the well-known miracle, ends:

The grapes dancing on the edge of the cart                                                                             tumbled and fell.                                                                                                                               When Lazarus rolled away, crushed                                                                                                 they remain                                                                                                                                              at the crossroads                                                                                                                                 where he proclaimed his fame.                                                                                                               The old man picked up the grapes                                                                                                              that survived                                                                                                                                               to begin his journey again.

Richard Montgomery, on the book’s back cover, describes how Ifode’s poetry expresses ‘the universal ‘thisness’ of our humanity that transcends language.’  Again, I think it does exactly that. 

Kate Ashton was born in Scotland and trained as a nurse at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, before joining the editorial staff of Nursing Times.  Later, in Rotterdam, she wrote for Mills &Boon, then published a biography and a monograph in the Frisian language.  She returned to Scotland in 2003, and has had poems published in magazines including Shearsman and THE SHOp.

This is a beautifully constructed, porcelain filigree masterpiece of a sequence.  Ashton is clearly an accomplished poet, and can scale aesthetic heights with seeming ease.  The eleven dense passages making up the twenty page sequence construct a kind of ‘herstory’ of female liminality and disordered identity, heavy with allegory, where ‘All freedom/passes into dread, the place/beyond the portico, unsheltered and unled.’

Ashton makes skilled, musical use of assonantal rhyme, which she layers through the long lines to create a delicious tapestry which begs to be read aloud:

before, behind cantor and scroll, serenity, a flare, vivid                                                                  but innocent of heat and bare, unclothed of all but bliss that lit                                                   silk raiment and consumed the law, a naked sword                                                                passing presage into the blood and pouring precedent                                                            where stone had stood before.

Male experience and sexual encounters enter the fray in sequences like ‘Quasimodo’ and ‘I ask him who he is, he says no.’  These remind me of Hughes’ early ‘Crow’ sequence – distorted, hopeless figures shambling miserably towards each other while their sadistic deity laughs.

Although I think that Ashton occasionally slips too far into ornament (something we are all guilty of), and can find no obvious justification for the line-indentations which recall much older forms, I think this is a fascinating, meaty mouthful of a first collection. 

Originally from Belfast, Johnston worked as a lawyer and journalist in London, and published a novel for young adults and a well-reviewed thriller for adults under her married name of Rosemary Furber.  Her first poetry collection, Sweet Seventeens (Lapwing 2010), contained short poems, all of which were seventeen syllables long, and each verse in this second short collection also has seventeen syllables.

Though the reason for the syllabic dictate is unclear, the odd, sighing, contemplative rhythm it creates in the reading is real and effective.  Moment by still, starry moment, the poem moves through an encounter with ‘Orion’, the new lover.  I am reminded of the penchant for deifying and mythologizing the lover which I constantly come across in women’s poetry of the twenties and thirties, and today in my own work; a bit embarrassing, unless it can be read as a version of the Virgin-Marying (and thereby dehumanising) of women in the poetry of men?  In the case of this particular hero, ‘The Pleiades/shimmer in his breath’ and ‘Lightning in/His touch/Sends heaven through me to earth.’  My idea of reverse-pedestalling is backed up by the earthy sensuality displayed at surprising instances by the very human speaker, who ‘searches [her] lower/Lip for/Vestiges of his flavour.’

Unlike the passive godesses aforementioned this hero has plenty of agency, and is constantly being drawn away by his cosmic hunt, leaving the speaker wearily bereft.   

Though the metaphors get confused at times, there are some really beautiful lines, as when she ‘feel[s]/His absence close’ around her, to be worn ‘Like an undertaker’s coat.’  In the end the blame is left, like a fresh carcass, on the doorstep of ‘the gods’, the most sadistic of whom is Love herself – first by him, and then, bitterly and finally, by her.

www.rosemaryfurber.com