The wide canvases of Shadow Reader and The Strongbox embrace many lives, some sharply realised as individuals, others sketchily included in panoramic views. In this way, both books offer many of the satisfactions of fiction in a concentrated and distilled form. Michelene Wandor’s chapbook Ergo represents a very different poetic. My general sense is that moving from Dugdale’s and Dharker’s books to hers is like turning from oil paintings – crowded, impasto canvases in The Strongbox, more thinly layered ones in Shadow Reader – to an album of delicate, almost transparent, semi-abstract watercolours. Most of her poems are very short and all use minimalist imagistic techniques to hint at emotions, narratives and situations in a way that’s often almost ethereally bare of human presence. Even a poem called ‘Song’, which does invoke images of physical intimacy, does so in a rarefied, discarnate way:

scroll down the side of your face as you leave
remember the eyes’ intrigue, the accidental promise
of a hand’s brush
the shape of lips curved into a smile

leap in, soft, caressing, taste
the warmth of words, the ebb
and swell of an unmeasurable caesura, with
no time for now

in this moment of departure
someone
has taken all your notes

Every idea, every impression here seems to dissolve as it forms. Line 5, the most active and sensuous in the poem, suggests a cat, not a person. Gaps in punctuation visually blur the contours of the syntax, and sometimes create real ambiguities. Even where the syntax seems clear, meaning can be hard to make out with confidence. In the first line, for example, how do you scroll down the side of a face, except if it’s a picture on a computer screen? Is the poem about the end of an affair (various elements seem reminiscent of Eliot’s exquisite ‘La Figlia Che Piange’)? Or is it about writing, or perhaps sculpture or painting, as lines 3 and 4 suggest? I can’t define its subject, which seems to me to hover between possibilities, to slide between different orders of experience, but it creates impressions of beauty, tenderness and regret that are the more haunting for not being fully graspable.

The distinctive beauty of these poems seems to me to depend on two things; the harmonious flow and sensitive patterning of their sounds and the combination of vividness and elusiveness in the imagery. More than pointing out to the surrounding world, they induce a dreamlike state focused on the movement of the mind between the impressions forming and reforming themselves within it. Here’s the first half of ‘Vulture’:

vultures in the distance are dark
butterflies
…………….a moment of delicacy, wheeling into
a flower, a winding road above our heads

Michelene Wandor, Ergo, 48pp, £8.00, Arc

I would like to thank Peter and Ann Sansom and Holly Hopkins for their permission to post this review, which appeared in the North issue 71 in a piece on The Strongbox, Shadow Reader and Ergo itself.