Art by Yifei Wu
Simon Alderwick reviews: AGIMAT by Romalyn Ante (Chatto & Windus, Vintage 2024), Small Undetectable Thefts by Yanita Georgieva (Broken Sleep Books 2024) and All the Pretty Lights by Gerry McGrath (Broken Sleep Books 2024)
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In AGIMAT, Romalyn Ante explores folklore and diaspora, conjuring a heroic tale from the hopes and scars of an immigrant nurse as she looks back fondly at an upbringing steeped in magic and myth whilst venturing into a new world with her husband and newborn. A repeat character is Mebuyan, a many-breasted goddess, mother of the underworld; a fitting token for a collection that deals with care, COVID-19 and becoming a mother, one that looks for security in amulets, charms and words.
In the opening poem, "[Evening Walk, Wednesfield]" Ante ‘wonder(s) how far this heart can listen’ as she ‘navigate(s) this light pricked town’. Ante’s poetry explores, to take a line from "Mebuyan and me", the ‘weight to longing’.
AGIMAT sees Ante walking the streets, searching, yearning for a home in both the past and future. As a nurse, with the responsibility, the gift, and ‘the curse of taking care of others’, Ante is confronted with all the shock and kitchen-sink grimness of life. She sees the worst of us, the frailty of our condition.
Throughout the collection, Ante seeks to form an identity through language, to tease out ‘the magic that lives in words’. She explores English, Baybayin (a pre-colonial Filipino script), and Japanese, rearranging words so that breathless becomes heart and bless, while respiratory becomes repair and story. Ante treats her craft with all the care and diligence of a nurse. ‘Some call it duty, some call it love… this is how we work’ she says in "Mebuyan teases Hermes".
In "Mebuyan and the Golden Boat" she states, ‘maybe the mind mistranslates the world / still I want to find what beauty / is left…’
Small Undetectable Thefts is challenging to pin down, dealing as it does with forced evictions; having to move across continents as a young, innocent person, not knowing what you are running from or why you must leave everything you’ve ever known behind. Georgieva’s poems do not stand still. Things are forever being spilled or dropped or bundled into a suitcase, a sheet or a car, stolen away into the night, whilst hands are forever reaching into darkness, striking matches, trying to fix things, just as Georgieva searches her memories to make sense of the journey she has made in life, mourning all she has lost along the way.
In "It is with great sadness" Georgieva writes: ‘in one dream / I am armed / with a matchbox / I burn it all down / and in the burning / find something like truth’.
These lines sum up the theme of the pamphlet quite succinctly — a young person trying to make sense out of chaos.
In "Confession" she writes: ‘I didn’t cry enough’. We often fail to grasp the whole emotion and significance of events. This idea is expressed again in ‘I swear I knew nothing’ with the lines ‘we couldn’t figure out what they’d stolen / but we knew we wanted it back’.
Georgieva knows the best poetry contradicts itself and is not afraid to go against logic and reason, just as our lives do.
In "Same old": ‘the past is a beautiful friend with whom I feel daft and unlikeable’.
This line contradicts earlier poems that allude to her past as something she had to escape and paints friendship as an unequal relationship — her friend is beautiful whilst Georgieva is ‘daft and unlikeable’. How many of our relationships do we feel unworthy of the love or flattery of those we admire and look up to?
In "I am learning to commit", Georgieva writes, ‘I think I know what I want but / I’m waiting […] for one of our friends to try it out first’.
The poet is growing up, moving toward a resolution, but is not 100% comfortable trusting in what appears to be a more stable future — starting a family, dealing with washers that refuse to drain and other first-world problems that must seem a world away from the past she ‘fled in an old Mercedes / its door handles held together with tape’. This coming-of-age process is described as healing, of shedding skin: ‘Tell me. Wouldn’t you do it? / Step out of your body / and run?’
All the Pretty Lights is split into eleven short sections, each one containing between four and six mostly short poems. Each section has a Charles Simic-esque title, such as ‘fat kings, slumbering in wild garlic’ or ‘rivers swim uphill’, which is generally a line from one of the poems in the section.
The collection starts with ‘Belvedere’, written in sparse, narrative prose. This directness brings Hemingway to mind and provides a strong anchor to bring the reader into the work. As the poems keep coming, McGrath moves from the modernist style towards postmodernism and surrealism. There are a lot of beautiful images, such as the snow falling in ‘snow buddha’, as well as conversational poems, stoic sentiments, and epiphanies, meaning the reader is constantly surprised, but the collection lacks a central theme. I would say this is a collection to dip into at random, to spend time with each poem rather than something to get through at pace.
I recently saw a video of the Italian medieval historian and philosopher Umberto Eco hunting for a book in his vast collection. He said a true lover of books will always have something new, something unread, at hand. All the Pretty Lights is a vast bookcase in one book — not something to complete but to keep close and have to hand any time you want to step into McGrath’s world for a few moments. Just don’t ask me for a road map.
McGrath likes to combine contradictory words to create mind-bending phrases, such as in "Found Picture": ‘O and it makes the bones so sore to feel how embarrassed I was / at the very thought of disowning all the downtrodden days that / lay me next to you. The slick perfume of your gaze & the spring tide stealing us both from the toes up. How embarrassed indeed.’
Later in the poem, he states, ‘all the good lines are breakable’. I don’t know how McGrath writes his poems but I can imagine him cutting and pasting different parts together to create montages that sometimes feel like Burroughs-style cut-ups. Occasionally, McGrath leans more heavily into rhyme: ‘The secret’s out / morning’s a bone / the unflanneled face / of a curling stone’. I don’t know what it means, but I could sing it.
In "My brother lived light-heartedly", McGrath tells of his brother leaving home at twelve years old, returning ten years later.
The speaker asks why he came back: ‘I never left I was always here / What are you talking about’ the brother replies. The speaker writes, ‘I could tell from his eyes he was right / I had imagined everything’.
These are poems for a world where we can’t trust our memories, let alone anyone else’s, where, in "Castles": ‘What happened happened / Thunder fell mute / The rain stopped listening’.
Each collection speaks of home, displacement, and coming of age. The poets build worlds that are estranged from reality and steeped in myth but are bridged to our own lives in that they look to a future that we can’t predict. These collections remind the reader that relationships are at the heart of everything, that love is a constant heartbeat in times of change, and that magic exists in words.
SIMON ALDERWICK is the author of 'ways to say we're not alone' (Broken Sleep Books 2024)
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