To Raise Your Blood Pressure…

• simply take a few news items from around the world
• read the ‘witty’ and ‘informed’ comments below the said news items
• scroll down through a Twitter storm
• realise how lucky you are that you no longer look at Facebook (because the comments there are even uglier)
• feel the hairs on the back of your neck rising when you recognise that people and countries that you thought were politically mature and sophisticated seem to be sleepwalking into situations you were desperate to leave behind once upon a time
• breathe in, breathe out, tell yourself you are over-reacting
• have far more deadlines and projects going on than one person with normal capabilities and normal working hours can accomplish
• have tricky conversations all day at work
• get stuck in rush hour delays
• come home to lazy teenagers who ask ‘What’s for supper?’ but haven’t thought at all about clearing the table or buying milk
• do not allow yourself be provoked by emails from your ex (i.e. do learn to swallow down all the clever retorts that he might then forward to his solicitor to use against you in court)
• go out to buy tonic water to make yourself a G&T
• realise it’s the third time this week you’ve been buying tonic water at the corner shop
• worry about the amount of alcohol you are consuming
• wonder if you could drink gin without the tonic
• agree with your mother on the phone about what a failure your life has been and will be, how she told you so years ago if only you’d listened, and how much better the sons and daughters of her acquaintances are doing
• oh, don’t forget to hmm-hmm and not answer back when she says about how much children of divorce suffer and how they are irretrievably damaged, she knows of approximately three such examples herself and can remind you of them repeatedly
• feel guilty for making faces at the phone when you hold it a distance to escape the monotony
• worry about your father’s health and whether you will have to care for your mother in her undoubtedly difficult old age, full of health problems and loneliness, for ‘age will not wither her… complaints’
• accept that your children will probably not care for you in old age, although you’ve been a much kinder, more understanding and less demanding mother to them than yours has been to you
• compose yet another letter for your French pension provider to try and figure out if you will have any pension rights there at all after Brexit
• try to find an affordable smaller (but not too small) house in your area in case you have to sell the current one – although you have lost the will to move or even to decorate or do any home improvements, knowing that it will just be a stop-gap solution for 4-5 years and a total waste of money
• make a list of To Do lists and watch the money go down, down, down in your account as you buy all the ‘back to school’ necessities
• find out the cost of a barrister and watch your account being emptied even more
• buy a book reviewed by a blogger friend to make you feel better
• feel guilty about spending £9 on a book or £15 on a film or play, although saving that amount won’t actually help with the legal costs
• drown your guilt in cake
• wonder until what time the corner shop is open and if you can still nip over there for another cake and a tonic water

That’s just an average day: anything I’ve missed out?

Poetry Review: Jacqueline Saphra – The Kitchen of Lovely Contraptions

Jacqueline Saphra packs a lot into this slender debut collection of poetry (published in 2011). Deceptively domestic and personal, the poems take on a life of their own, dance with absurdity and shimmering wit, and leave an aftertaste of profound inquietude.There are three strands to the work, and they are neatly divided into Parts I, II and III in the volume.

The first describes a fairly typical British childhood in the late 1960s – early 1970s, with plenty of humorous detail: memories of the moon landing, watching news clips about the Vietnam War, half-forgotten family history from the East European shtetls, giggly gossip about sunbathing in the nude with a classmate, struggling to come to grips with the decimal system.

The precocious observations of a child are tinged with a grown-up’s wry remembrance of childhood fears and mistakes. Some are poignant (Target Practice), some nearly surreal and full of wistfulness (about her incompatible parents), while others are just funny and fiery.

The Art of Diplomacy

At three I learned to listen, not to chat.

At eight I counselled friends and sorted spats.

By twelve I was a bloody diplomat.

 

At forty I began to smell a rat

at last. I said to hell with that.

Hand me that baseball bat.

The second strand is about love and lust, the battle of the sexes and the pang of breaking up. The start of a relationship and these poems are sensuous, sexy, drunk on love, beguiling and ready to be fooled again:

so come on, loosen me

with daquiris, your mouth

 

against my ear and tell me again

that you and I are composed

 

of the same elements, that

there’s a sea inside me,

 

and you, too, are salt and water.

I’ll make up the rest.

But most of the poems in this section are about disappointment and animosity betwen the sexes. Small acts of daily warfare in a couple, as well as more dramatic acts of betrayal. In ‘Penelope’ (a poem inspired by Cavafy’s wonderful poem ‘Ithaka’),  Odysseus’ wife hurls the loom against the wall in an act of rebellion and leaves Ithaka to search for her errant husband but realises, upon finding him, that he is no longer her destiny. The poetic imagination hits the wall of prosaic negligence in ‘After a Long Sleep’. Women’s subservience and desire to please are mocked and ultimately undermined in ‘Last Harvest’. This is a poet unafraid to voice righteous anger, confusion, pain – in a way which is all too often described as ‘feminine’, but is in fact universal. A jilted lover muses about her successor:

If she had the eye she would touch my mind, she would read

my scrawls, she would balk at my famished word, circling.

But she doesn’t have the eye. I have the eye and I have the greed

and she has my red wrap and she has caught you inside it.

jacqueline.saphra.net

The third part is about death and making peace with one’s loved ones. I suspect this is at least partly autobiographical, as the poet describes a mother who was once thin and glamorous, fun, but was abandoned for a newer, more demanding sylph-like model and never quite recovered from the shock. Over the years she seeks refuge in a string of boyfriends, which the now grown poet is disposed to think of more kindly at several decades’ removal.

I met these men sometimes. They weren’t unkind.

We’d nod, then part like co-conspirators

in some veiled plot to save her from the truth.

Now a mother herself, the poet shifts between the past and the present, the joys of breastfeeding, the almost overnight transformation from baby to adolescent, the anxiety about one’s child obtaining the driving licence. Her own experience of motherhood has both strengthened and softened her, has made her more understanding and forgiving of her mother. The poem about her mother’s last moments ‘Last Call’ is incredibly poignant: full of tenderness and the guilt of not being there.

The last you knew, you heard her swear

she loved you more than I: who knows?

Perhaps that’s fair enough: it was Death,

not I, who said a prayer,

who dropped the final silence in your ear,

your dark head cradled in her lap, not mine,

her bloodied fingers in your hair.

This is poetry of the interstices – simple, clear words, with so much breathing space between them that the readers can fill in with their own experiences, emotions, unformed words. If this is the poetry of ‘domestic preoccupations’ and ‘everyday life’, then give me more of it, for it touches us all!

 

 

 

Managing Time and Swallowing Frogs

Overplanning Activities

There are days when I fall prey to my own consultancy speak. There are days when I believe that change is a finite process which can be managed, that time is a resource which can be planned down to the last details, that all that is required to make me a writer is more discipline.

So I scrabble and scramble, over-schedule, try to fit it all in and end up feeling very foolish and guilty, no matter how much I accomplish.

On Monday I had ten items on my To Do list. I only managed to complete 3 of them. I was very downhearted, of course, on Monday evening and resolved to do better. On Tuesday I had crossed off 9 out of the 10 items (plus a few minor ones that had cropped up in the meantime). Did I feel triumphant? Did I celebrate? No, I just started worrying about the next batch of ‘Must Dos’, about all the unformed unpronounceables threatening me with their ghostly presence.

One thing that is becoming obvious to me is that there are two categories of ‘difficult’, even though the fear of them may start out in a very similar fashion. Darkness in the morning, reluctance to get up, odd little procrastinating rituals to get started (reading your blogs with a cup of coffee in my hand is the main highlight of my day!). But then…

Category 1 Difficult (as in Writing is hard…)

Once the muscles are flexed, once the first half hour has passed, the love of words and ideas takes over. I pace about, mutter, write some more, get a bit distracted with research, get into the flow… and I am the happiest person on earth when I go to bed, no matter how much I have written. Such a privilege to spend the whole day thinking about writing!

Category 2 Difficult (as in I’d rather be writing…)

To use a bit more consultancy speak – it really is like swallowing frogs. I keep on dreading it, putting it off, doing it sloppily or half-heartedly until the deadlines are looming. And after a day of work? I am just tired and dissatisfied. What is worse, I don’t know what would make me feel I’d accomplished something in this field.

So, have you ever felt like that: Dissatisfaction, no matter how many results and rewards you get… and complete bliss when doing something else, without having very much to show for it?