Myrtle
by Ruth Wiggins
The Emma Press, £6.50, 26pp
9781910139059
Reviewed by Wynn Wheldon
I thought I was going to have trouble with this, what with
the first poem being all right justified and containing words with spaces
between their letters for no very obvious reason. But then I decided that since
it was called ‘Against Perspective’ I’d chuckle instead.
My fear was dispelled by and the chuckle grew broader with
the next poem, called ‘I’ve Been Crumbling Anti-Histamines Into Your Food All
Week’, in which a new home is turned into a bower: “the whole thing seeds
itself up the street. Early outbreaks / of lovage, sweet briar, vetch”. Here we are on the floral side of Myrtle. But the poet is a classicist, and in the Rome
of Ovid and his fellows the Latin word myrtus (myrtle) was a non-vulgar euphemism
for the female pudenda. Myrtle was considered aphrodisiac, and is associated
with Aphrodite in Greek myth and Venus in Roman. So having given us the floral, the poet now
introduces us to the clitoral, or at least the aphrodisiacal, in ‘Borrowed
Time’: “This afternoon you fucked me, right out / of my pyjamas and into yours”
Thenceforth the poems hover back and forth, between the intimate and the
public, with diversions into the quotidian here and there.
There’s plenty of tenderness, of a robust kind: “Come the
apocalypse” there’ll be “usurping girls / …I’ll just / have to learn to kill”. In a rather macabre love poem, ‘On Fear of
Your Flying’ her lover’s sperm “startle // into memento mori”. His having not died, I can’t believe her
partner would not want to be identified as the “gorgeous boy” of the final
poem, a play on a deliciously euphemistic Horace ode: “Be mine, right here
beneath / this cheerful old vine”.
Horace is not the only classical poet Wiggins borrows
from. She does a wonderful job with a
Propertius elegy. ‘Only the Lover’
begins “Silly mortals, always second-guessing / the hour of your death…”
You type your vital stats into
deathclock.com
but from the Circle Line to Tora
Bora,
all exit points are hidden.
The language, the forms, the prosody in all these poems is
unabashed, unafraid and enjoyably energetic.
Best of all, each poem is a surprise. Wiggins has a distinctive voice,
characterised not by sameness but by unexpectedness. ‘Crawk’ is a poem about
birds. I thought at first the reference was to crows, but the subject of the
poem has a “quarrel of sisters”, which suggests sparrows; then again, towards
the poem’s end she “Grouts her gizzard and gargles with rocks”. Who knows what bird this is (it follows a
poem, ‘Leda’ that features not one but several swans, not to mention eagles) –
but it doesn’t really matter. The poem
draws the reader in, for it is full of activity, having begun with the
teasingly abstract “She’s the opposite of mirrors”, from where we have no idea
where the poem will lead us.
Yes, unexpectedness: there’s a poem describing the poet’s
battle with a spider; a poem about the herb rosemary; a poem that bounces from
side to side of the page, about the coming of spring, “cracking a courtyard
laugh”; there are poems inspired by paintings; there’s a nanny goat and there’s
a fox.
Myrtle is a
thoroughly assured collection informed by classical learning and tempered with
an erotic hum that underlies several of the poems. It delights in hoisting the
ideas and images that prose cannot without preparation. It is thorough poetry, and surprisingly a
debut. There’ll be more.
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