A sort-of-review of Marie Marshall’s T.S.Eliot Prize nominated ‘I am not a fish’
Possibly the most unusual review of one of my poetry books yet.
You’ll never believe me…I was waiting to Skype God. You can imagine the anxiety! I mean…the Almighty, the Alpha & the Omega, Tetragrammaton—YHWH. It was buffering his end, ringing out. There was a lot of eeking & blare. The postman dropped his delivery. I was gripped on what God was going to look like. I suspected a primate for some reason. Nothing ichthyic I thought, nor feline, leonine or arachnid. I was going primate. Still buffering I opened my mail. It was Marie Marshall’s T.S. Eliot Prize nominated I am not a Fish. I forgot all about my natter with God—what had he to do with me, now?
This
book is unlike anything. A mellifluous mash of hilarious, playful poems,
evading the reader whilst prodding with long boney digits of joy. There is
alchemy between word & imagination, infused with hallucinatory &
hypnotic substance, which sounds painful, but actually manifests…
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hen it seemed to her that her face began to be chased with a little age, she took to walks on the broad, long beach, to feel the wind-whipped sand take its tax of her bare legs, thinking that if she stood there forever, for ever, four (because she declared with stubbornness and against the weight of mathematics that eternity must be composed of equal and measureable segments, and even though she had been condemned wrong time after time she never ceased to employ this falsehood as a metaphor) ever, the process by which a grain took away a morsel of her and another clung to her meant that she was becoming less and less a carbon life form and more a silicon, and that a moment would come somewhere before oblivion when she would be totally transformed, would hang between the two, something between a being and a stone, and would have a deep truth if only for that sparking-point of transformation; thus only, it has to be said, until she felt cold, or the tug of obligation, or the shout of an impatient familial, or a dozen other banal discomforts, and went to find the shelter of pines where wind dropped, sand dried on her
he became a slave to the sculpted moon, the pared and crafted face that navigated the rooftops, surveillant of her and her friends (whom she denominated Cossack, Kickapoo…), with whom she cappuccino’d and used the cups and cruet and odd jealous coins in a reimagination of Waterloo, an endless debate on any demonstrable subject, an ad hoc game of chess (“Is that plate a knight or a bishop?”), an exercise in obsessive compulsive symmetry, much to the complete chagrin of the manager of the tea shop; thus, by stages, she dipped into a phoney incarnation doomed to be her quotidian – it had other attendant stuff, issues, matters, a culture that held it – along with her work, in which figures danced to an unheard music, arcane bells and whistles, drumbeats a contra tiempo to her heart and to her taconeo as she walked from the carpark, lickety-spit in kitten heels and skirt, the damnable notes and their dynamics piled up during the hours of her rest and neglect making a cacophony of quarter-notes in a decimal scale from which she had to unpick order and beauty whilst sucking the blunt end of a pen, holding her breath, hunched; meanwhile, outside, the watcher in the sky sat its guard
ut her in an empty piazza, a field, a broad carse or fen, a long beach to the level sea with the sky folding over, and she’ll be content to let the merciful wind reduce her, to tug away at her self until there’s little more than a grain of her left indistinguishable from the whole (though maybe a looker-on would still seem to see her), to be a slight buzz, a trace in a bigger mix; but add others, and keep adding, and that’s when she becomes so aware of herself that she feels the world tip, trying to shake her off, and she has to grip onto the ground to stop a fall, and that grip itself is one of complete pain – once, and maybe once again, she felt steadying arms, a voice, and a breathing in time with hers, it may have been on a day when the air was full of kick-up dust and noise, or it may not, but full it was of whatever, and that embrace, those breaths, the near-coincidence of heartbeats fooled her to think of love, and maybe it was, but it’s gone now, leaving her with only a pale to drive into the ground and to hold on
