REVIEWS

The Colour of Rain by Susan Utting. £11.99. Two Rivers Press. ISBN: 978-1-915048-15-8. Reviewed by Alex Josephy

How to summarise the effects of a whole collection? The Italian word often used for a poetry collection is ‘raccolto’, a harvest, and I’ve found myself reading The Colour of Rain with that definition in mind. There is so much gathered here.

The lives of girls and woman are a central focus; Utting’s poems are peopled by sisters (including an imaginary one), mothers, daughters, wives, a Sunday School teacher, a suspected witch. And Nature in all her forms is a consoling presence throughout the book, marvellous, resonant and endangered.

Themes and images are interwoven, illuminating each other in much the same way that metaphors do. Painful girlhood memories of boarding school or possibly of life in an institution, and reflections on other women’s difficult but often courageous lives, sit alongside close connections with the natural world, and above all the mind-expanding pleasures of visual and language arts.

The first section is full of trees. The opening poem, ‘You have to be there’, invites us to walk beside the poet:

…to dream yourself out of your
skin into your stride, till you are all
rhythm, a three-four signature…

and into the company of trees:

…the shivering poplars sharing
their secrets, their breath, with yours.

Consciously embodied, and leaning closely into the natural world (‘I want to be a tree right now’, ahe exclaims in ‘Loving Trees’), Utting sets a tone of hope and solace, modified in later sequences by poems that explore pain and isolation. The penultimate poem asserts, of a girl scalded and scarred ‘she was not a tree…she was a small girl of flesh, blood and skin’, but she is a girl undefeated by damage, carrying:

…the shine of a pressed satin sleeve, that marked
her survivor. Her arm with its beautiful scar.

Poem after poem achieves this heart-wrenching clarity, examining life’s cruelties but also attending to small details, moments of beauty and possibility.

Utting slips easily between carefully observed realism and dream or fantasy. When she becomes one of a group of willows, both woman and willows are vividly present:

...so close and sisterly we shared
a hairdo. Our stringy locks were free to dangle,
shiver, dance a fidget to the wind.

I was moved by ‘The Innocence of Trees’, in which pine trees walk ‘all night’, perhaps attempting an escape:

They meant no harm, the pines,
not a twig or sprig of harm among them...

…one foot after another
and side by side, as if there were
no vanishing point.

Utting has the skill of writing from the heart, while paying the most careful attention to craft. Many of the poems are in free verse, with quietly innovative use of form, word music and rhythmic patterns which seem to fall effortlessly into place. She plays with versions of sonnet form, and there are two poems modelled on Chistopher Smart’s iconic ‘My cat Jeoffrey.’ Of these, I especially enjoyed ‘Let Us Give Thanks for Knees’, a delightful meditation on the knees of schoolgirls, with all their itches and scabs and potential sexiness, and the comforts they might afford:

…For when the lights go out

they let us curl up small in bed, like ears,
like shrimps, like winkles in their shells.

In a sequence of ekphrastic poems, Utting is able to approach her themes from fresh angles. My favourite of these is probably ‘Maman’, after Louise Bourgeois’ giant ‘maman-spider’. The tangled emotional impact I remember feeling when I visited this artwork – radiating dread at the same time as a kind of passionate vulnerability – is here in the poem, evoking the way women have so often been silenced (‘I don’t know where to find/ a mouth’):

All I have is an effigy of
maman, marmie, mummy, mother, ma,

an eight-legged effigy of silence,
of something missing; missed.

Artworks allow the poet to empathise with women surviving infirmity, imprisonment, homelessness: in ‘Afaz/Cages’ after Susan Hefuna’s drawings of Egyptian latticework screens, she insists on women’s resilience:

Grids can be beautiful, they let in air…

…Cage walls - remember and believe -
can be unwoven, can be breached.

In an earlier poem, Rousseau’s tiger is imagined surrounded by its cultural references, ‘exoticised, spectacular and jungle fierce’, heading for extinction, to be viewed before ‘I am no more / than rumour, before I’m history.’ A masterly (I wish we could say mistressly?) cascade of rhymes sweeps the reader along from ‘tapestry and marquetry’ through ‘fantasy’, ‘taxidermy’ and ‘greenery’ to ‘history’.

The final section is, I think, mainly concerned with the girl who has appeared briefly earlier, and who endures serious injury and recovery in the final few poems. I take this sequence to be connected and to tell something of her story. In ‘Imagine This:’, she is four years old, and seems abandoned in a cold institutional setting, bitterly unhappy, ’And they tell you that you’re loving every moment of it’. She is depicted as a little prisoner, reciting fairy tales to soothe herself, ‘safe from the beating of wings through the night’. Her story resonates with those of the other women caged in unfree lives in the preceding poems. She is isolated even from other girls around her, ‘marooned on an isle / of herself’. The powerful depiction of her isolation ripples back through the collection, reminding the reader of its other silences.

But Utting’s poems never leave the reader in a place withut light. Her emotional wisdom and delight in writing are always present. Her ‘girl’ is not afraid to resist the darkness and oppression, ‘on detention again, for insubordination’. She is the kind of daydreamer with whom many poets are likely to identify. And joyfully, she knows the value of imagination and where to find sources of inspiration, as Keats did:

…the value of the nothing in
her head:
that painted place that zigzags,
coils and skitters her to other lands, to anywhere she fancies,
where they know the priceless,
fiery possibilities of indolence.

I love the way ‘fiery’ and ‘indolence’ brought so close to one another make just as good an oxymoron as the original one in Keats’s ‘diligent indolence’!

In ‘Ingathering’, the girl hoards and relishes words. Every noun and verb choice in the poem celebrates this pleasure:

Her head’s a tabernacle full of language…
…a scalloped tent

against the wilderness, where she and her
ingatherings may sojourn, flourish, thrive.

Earlier, she ‘doesn’t say it because it hurts her tongue.’ But in these pages, she’s saying it now.

This is Susan Utting’s fifth collection. It is emotionally sure-footed, written with practised ease, and full of fresh, unexpected turns. In my favourite poetry collections there is often at least one poem that teaches me something completely new. In this one, it’s ‘The Resonating Properties of Spiders’ Silk’. Who knew that in Japan, a set of violin strings have been spun out of thousands of strands of spiders’ silk? The final lines say something about poetry, too:

this sweet reverberation,
this joyful, airborne noise.