This latest collection by Susie Wild is substantial, touching, entertaining and very fresh; it is also a handsome production. Susie Wild is known for her live readings and the poems have an immediacy and accessibility which suggest this.
The collection is in two parts: ‘The Carnivore Boyfriends’ and ‘Windfalls’. While the title poem of the first section is generally humorous, the last line suggests a history of bad experiences which is certainly born out in some of the later poems. Some are tender remembrances of early days, like ‘Brockley Cross’ or Wild’s hymn to her childhood bicycles, but ‘This Is Why We Can’t’ and ‘Traumatic Language’ evoke a seriously over-controlling partner, and ‘Newly Single’ the threat of rape or worse. The indirect language of this poem captures the small steps, doubts and excuses which end with ‘[p]erhaps you should / have pressed charges. Spoken to someone. / But you didn’t.’
There are some brilliant portraits here of men, like ‘Burton’s Boy’ (‘a fucked fairy tale ... You Vogue in drainpipes, / Slide down them at dawn.’) or the lover in ‘He didn’t bring me flowers’, who brought exotic vegetables instead (‘an aubergine ... the exact shade / of my changing hair’), but who then ‘came spilling sunflowers ... seeded promises to break.’ The more tentative lover of ‘Eye Contact’ suggests a better future.
In the later poems we are given more of the story. ‘Heavyweight’ links the period of the controlling partner with a later group on boxing and testifies to the support of ‘local’ friends when she is ‘sheltering from an emptied life’. In ‘Mr and Mrs Smith’, the new couple encounter her ‘ex’ and ‘[a] limp girl shrank into his shadow. Familiar / as a puddle.’ But Mrs Smith feels at once the huge ‘tectonic’ shift between them and ‘of finally stepping away’. The power and precision of this poem is typical of Wild’s ability to express deep significance through details of the mundane.
‘Windfalls’, the longer section, has plenty more reflections on love and marriage, including the very topical ‘The Cancelled Honeymoon’ and ‘The Key Worker’s Wife’. The ‘Windfalls’ title poem gives a picture of abundance and waste, tinged with humour and unease. The later poem, ‘All I have’, recalls the windfalls, still rotting; the garden is overgrown but ‘crows visit us like / an ark’ and the poet stands ‘and take[s] in all I have – despite everything.’ It is a very recognisable state but also one which runs through many of the earlier poems – of endurance, wry humour and appreciation of life as it is. The epigraph of the section reminds us that ‘windfall’ may refer to fallen fruit or ‘an unexpected, unearned or sudden gain’. The poems certainly chart both senses as love and life fall and decay but also one finds strange, unexpected gifts.
Caroline Clark
A review from www.gwales.com, with the permission of the Books Council of Wales.
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