HEARING EYE Publications
Jersey Evening Post, 21 June 2005
A suitcase full of secrets
Richard Pedley finds a love of language and a gift for mischief in Linda Rose Parkes' new work, The Usher's Torch
Poetry comes in many different flavours, from linguistic playfulness to the more impenetrable confessional stuff, and this collection has a toe in both camps, the mischievious just barely covering a harsh truth beneath.
The poems are divided into three sections: A Bunch of Wierdos, Child's Play and Of Love. The wierdos are the first ones you come to and the characters vary. There is a rabbit deciding whether or not she would like to swap her ears for the wings of birds, finally deciding against it because she finds the birdsong rather flashy.
There's also an alternative Antigone, who has a clucking nanny who would soothe her pains and feed her 'le bon café, sucre et noir' and perhaps prevent this mythologised heroine from taking her life, and her place in history.
One starts with the kind of ravished suitcase we've all seen on airport carousels, slowly building up a picture of the person who owns it, and the story the suitcase might be telling about them.
The Distant Aunt is the first character we meet. She crashes into a house with no common language and questionable washing habits, borrows jewellery and fusses over visitors. This theme pops up again and again in all three sections - extraordinary women, sometimes exotic and sometimes a little frightening, with whom the narrator has a connection, either from the past or by blood.
Child's Play draws on childhood and motherhood, sometimes stepping back from an event or crisis to remember how both sides of the narrator would have reacted. This develops the idea of feminine duality, as the narrator can be on both sides of the fence at once, both caring for her child and remembering her own rite of passage as a child.
There's a lot of playfulness here as well. The Teacup has her mother drowning the characters painted inside the cup, while the tea drinker tries to 'drain the valley in hurried sips' to save a boy so 'he can race his dog to the bluebell woods'.
Of Love, the final section, is not just a series of verses cataloguing objects of affection. There's the sudden déjà vu caused by a Thames dining boat passing, and she imagines that a former lover and an alternative self are on board, dancing and waving at her. There's a woman who, hanging out her washing, realises that she prefers her ferret to her husband; another who relishes being unwashed and unkempt in the morning, far away from the 'sanitised, malnourished young'.
Certain phrases stick in the memory. Describing the song of a rabbit, she speaks of 'the radar ping of bats' and 'purring neurons'. A man hanging up a woman's underwear marvels that if she is ever 'snared by traffic' she'll be wearing 'panties delicate as cobwebs'.
The pleasure the poet takes in language is obvious and infectious, but often it will take several readings to winkle out the meaning of a poem, or at least to fit a meaning of your own to the images.
Over time, this collection is one that you will return to, and will reward re-reading with hidden gems, and occasionally, teeth.