It is infuriatingly difficult to find much scholarly stuff
about witch-hares on the net, but those of you who are Jstor subscribers will
find something useful here: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1260796
It
isn’t by any means essential to know any of this stuff, but it is impossible,
having read these poems, not to go in search of Nan Hardwicke and her fellow
witch-hares. I found this on a site
called Encyclopedia Mythica. I have
absolutely no idea how reliable it is, but there must at least be a smidgin of
truth:
Hares were strongly associated with witches. The hare is quiet and goes about its business in secret. They are usually solitary, but occasionally they gather in large groups and act very strangely, much like a group of people having a conference. A hare can stand on its hind legs like a person; in distress, it utters a strange, almost human cry which is very disconcerting to the listener.
Watching such behavior, people claimed that a witch could change her form at night and become a hare. In this shape she stole milk or food, or destroyed crops. Others insisted that hares were only witches' familiars.
These associations caused many people to believe hares were bad luck, and best avoided. A hare crossing one's path, particularly when the person was riding a horse, caused much distress. Still, the exact opposite superstition claimed that carrying a rabbit's or hare's foot brought good luck. There is no logic to be found in superstitions.
So
there we have it. Of the fourteen poems
in this pamphlet, five are ‘Nan Hardwicke’ poems. They are written in the first person. Nan is the poet’s alter-ego. The overwhelming sense is
that Nan provides both a way out of the poet’s tragic real world (dominated by
the still-birth of her daughter) and a persona with which to reflect on difficult
or associated feelings of disappointed motherhood.
There
is a mother in the first line of the first poem, ‘How to Find Spaces to Lose
Things In’. There is a garden too, and a
handbag. The themes of the book are set
out: nature in both its beastliness and its beauty, the mundanity of ‘real
life’, and mothering or motherhood. The
poem itself is a kind of fugue, playing on a series of images: straps, pearls,
brokenness, dresses, the sky. It demands
reading and re-reading, and has an almost gyroscopic effect. It ends in a kind of hope that feels brave
rather than true.
This
is followed by the first Nan poem, dedicated to the poet's daughter, which works almost as a flashback, Nan
entering the hare and “Pushing her bones / to one side to make room for my
shape / so I could settle myself like a child within her”. The poem describes what an embryonic poet
(literally) might make of being inside her mother.
So
the poet is already inhabited, and a pregnancy test follows, in ‘In the
Bathroom’. It shows first negative, to
the father’s despair, and then positive,, “a faint pink line, too slow / in my
palm”. It turns out that this, sadly,
is an omen.
The
poet takes on another persona in the next poem, that of the Duchess of
Devonshire giving away her bastard. We
can see the “black maw” as an equivalent to death; as she gives the baby away
she is left with “milk / in my breasts”
and not knowing “how to hold my arms now”.
These physical details are enormously touching, and make everything,
however distant – Nan or Duchess – extremely present and real.
Nan
is now hunted as a hare and manages just to escape. There is in this the suggestion of fear, of having
always to be very careful, of being on the edge of catastrophe: “I still had a
hare’s foot / tucked beneath the hoop of my skirt”. Lucky.
There
follows an extended exercise in pathetic fallacy, the subject being not a
handbag but a supermarket plastic bag dancing about the yard. Bags, like hares, like mothers – is this too
fanciful? – contain things , are receptacles – oranges, bottles, shopping,
testicles. The bag’s “belly hung
low”. Always there are echoes.
At
the start there is lust and then comes conception, and ‘Behind the Velvet Rope’
manages the extraordinary trick of rendering as genitalia the bed in a room on
a guided tour of a country house. The
poet “becomes a voyeur to the ghost / of someone else’s love”. Love, lust, death.
The
next poem describes the statue of a Roman boy who died young, and ends with
this marvellous verse:
…a mother curled, like a dead wasp,around a red clay urn. Her grief a tidethat washes up my back, across the years;shaerd loss, the same.
The
dead wasp is wonderfully acute, and oo the tears of grief turned into a tide,
somehow evoking distantly Matthew Arnold, and washing up her back, and thereby
knocking all possible cliché for six, because why her back, except that, yes,
it isn’t the heart or the head or the gut that grief sweeps up…
Pregnancy
is announced with sickness, but it is Nan’s cat that is sick in ‘Nan
Hardwicke’s Familiar’, and both cat and
witch are old, now short of breath, waiting for each other’s demise. “She is more a part of me than I am” writes
Nan, and again the reader cannot help but be reminded of all the withinnesses
that have preceded this poem, which heralds death.
The
two poems that follow - 'A Week on Friday' and 'Funeral' - are poems that follow death.
They are intimate, personal, straightforward, brave because the mother
has transformed herself, magically, Nan-like, into the poet in order to witness, somehow
dispassionately, the funeral day. And of
course all this dispassion, in touching paradox, speaks of great pain.
In
‘Scrying’, the long poem at the heart of the pamphlet, Wendy Pratt becomes Nan
Hardwicke again in order to describe how the devil has visited her and “carried
off the contents / of my head” and left her “mad”. I think it is appropriate to see in this an
analogy – indeed it is strongly implied - with bringing forth “a bairn that was
as still as earth”. The poem ends, I
think, with a kind of triumph, the devil defeated, burned, seen off.
And
after all this – this “tempest” - the final poem, which brought tears to my
eyes, records a moment of loving tenderness between the two parents who find
themselves not parents, but who have nevertheless survived grief. There is no sense of sorrow banished, but rather of
love affirmed, gently, and “the thrum of life” acknowledged.
This
is a terribly moving series of poems and deserves all the exposure it can get.
Wynn Wheldon
Nan Hardwicke Turns
into a Hare
by Wendy Pratt
(Preface by Alison Brackenbury)
Prolebooks, £4.50, 28pp
ISBN 9780956946935
Available from Prolebooks
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