I’ve been taking time with the poems in this collection for a couple of months. This is such a short book, but I often find I need to be in the right headspace to really hear what a poet is saying. Since I read so much fiction I find it difficult not to read a narrative into a collection of poems. Not that there’s anything wrong with doing this, but it feels to me like the primary aim of poetry isn’t to tell a story that can be easily summarized. It’s more like an artistic arrangement of language that should wash over you. Nevertheless, if I had to describe an overarching theme to the moving poems in this collection I’d say it’s about dealing with a mother’s death. The collection is prefaced by a quote from Freud: “The loss of a mother must be something very strange.” The poems frequently delve into the complex psychology of trying to understand this sometimes embattled relationship, especially after death. A cluster of the poems at the centre of the book give nods to Freud. Just how or why the mother died isn’t entirely clear although there are indications of self-harm or suicide: “People you love can be removed from the world (They can remove themselves).” But the overarching impression of these poems is of someone dealing with that grief, reflecting on the condition of loss and the way she still carries the presence of this lost mother.
Part of the reason these poems feel so painfully personal is the way the daughter narrating can sometimes lambast herself for not being self sufficient and for needing a mother that she can’t have. There’s also a frustration at not being able to accurately translate into language all the riotous emotion which accompany this state of being as in the poem ‘Drunken Bellarmine’: “I cannot make manifest this collection of feelings, but look at me: I want to be loved for the wrong reasons. I mean I want to be hated for the right reasons. I have been lonely.” There’s the anguish of being left alone even though she intellectually understands death and accepts this, but it can never be fully accepted. This causes her to perceive the mother as both a care-giver and a tormenter. She imagines the mother sneering down at her “We all have to die sometime, Your Majesty”
This creates a dialogic within the narrator where she understands the departed mother’s point of view, but she can’t reconcile the reality of it. This creates within her a split sense which prompts Berry to write some of her more technically ambitious poems. Some take the form of scripted plays where there is a conversation between Me One and Me Two. It also inspires a lot of imagery looking at water or reflective surfaces where the inner and out life blur into each other. Other poems suggest how she retreats infinitely inward like in the poem ‘Two Rooms’ where she exists “in a room inside a room” and only once within these walls within walls can she feel “safe.”
From a localized story of grief, these poems expand out to meaningfully consider larger issues of love and relationships. The fact that the people we love are capable of surviving without us can feel like a betrayal. Although we’re aware these feelings are entirely selfish it doesn’t detract from the pain of knowing people’s lives can carry on without our being a part of them. In the poem ‘Once’ which narrowly trails down the page she writes: “I sent my loved ones away & kindly they went I imagined them active in my absence & it was like rehearsing my death their capacity for survival was thus proved & mine too insultingly so”. The converse perspective of this is that we are also able to survive without our loved ones if forced to do so and if we can find the strength to carry on. The final poem ‘Canopy’ beautifully encapsulates a possible strategy for doing so.
I really connected with this collection. These are poems worth lingering over.
You can hear Emily Berry read her poem ‘Everything Bad is Permanent’ here: https://soundcloud.com/faberbooks/everything-bad-is-permanent
