{"id":2649,"date":"2023-01-23T09:52:11","date_gmt":"2023-01-23T09:52:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2649"},"modified":"2023-01-23T09:52:11","modified_gmt":"2023-01-23T09:52:11","slug":"hannah-lowe-the-kids-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2649","title":{"rendered":"Hannah Lowe, The Kids – review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hannah Lowe\u2019s The Kids<\/em> and Gerard Woodward\u2019s The Vulture<\/em> represent strikingly different approaches to poetry and offer complementary pleasures. Their very titles hint at the way in which in one the world is a fundamentally familiar place, felt as such by both poet and reader, and in the other it becomes rather frighteningly and chillingly strange.<\/p>\n

The Kids<\/em> focuses on what are presented as the poet\u2019s own experiences as a teacher in an inner London sixth form college, as a schoolgirl, as a bereaved daughter and as a mother. Addressing us intimately and confidingly, with apparent trust in our ability to read between the lines of what she says, Lowe invites us to reflect on the situations she meets and the emotions she feels. The poems are almost all sonnets, which helps give a neatly framed appearance to the experiences and reflections they present. Adept at narrative, Lowe crafts them with an elegance that is a source of pleasure in itself. They often involve small but significant adjustments of the speaker\u2019s and our own perception of this familiar world. However, few of these poems actually startled<\/em> me, either by what they said or how they said it. I didn\u2019t find many phrases or rhythms sticking in my mind, let alone haunting me with a sense of suggestiveness beyond my immediate grasp. Their great strengths are their narrative economy, and the sensitivity, humour and refreshing candour with which Lowe presents her interactions with other people. Even when describing situations in which she got things wrong or felt disoriented and out of her depth at the time, she tells the story in a way that implies that she understands it now, and that her readers will understand it in the same way. We see this in the first of her \u2018teacher\u2019 poems, narrating her first day on the job:<\/p>\n

That first September, I climbed the blue stone steps
\npast Shakespeare\u2019s doubtful face, an old mosaic
\nof Jamaica, and the ruby blot of lips
\nwhere last year\u2019s girls had kissed the schoolhouse brick.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe ruby blot of lips\u201d is excellent. Altogether, lines 3 and 4 seem to me to have a layered and equivocal suggestiveness that\u2019s unusual in this book, though without quite achieving the startling or haunting quality that would break through a slightly cosy sense of complicity between poet and reader. And delightful though they are, I don\u2019t think the poems about the poet\u2019s young son in the final section quite do this either.<\/p>\n

Where I did find touches of haunting power was in a longer poem called \u2018The Stroke\u2019. Here, Lowe seems almost stunned, barely able to process the event and her own feelings as she\u2019s confronted with her mother\u2019s physical and her father\u2019s emotional helplessness after her mother\u2019s stroke. Such a crisis naturally drags to the surface unresolved tensions and issues in the daughter\u2019s relation to both parents. What\u2019s involved resists the neat packaging of the sonnet poems in its intensity, rawness and life-transforming scale. Shakespeare might have dealt with such material successfully in a sonnet sequence but Lowe has wisely avoided the attempt. Though she\u2019s set this poem out in a way that keeps some visual consistency with the sonnets \u2013 pairing seven line stanzas to form fourteen line blocks \u2013 it\u2019s actually a single 70 line poem in rhyme royal (a 7 line stanza form rhyming ABABBCC) and its sense flows continuously from stanza to stanza. Here\u2019s the first stanza:<\/p>\n

For days after the stroke, she lay bed-bound,
\nmisdiagnosed \u2013 the Doctor said \u2018Bell\u2019s palsy\u2019
\nof her weeping eye and tilted frown, her hand
\ncold-numb below the eiderdown. The telly
\nin the corner spun blue-light, an anarchy
\nof voices. My father, dying himself and lost,
\nbrought trays of tea and plates of buttered toast.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s an awkwardness about the movement that seems to me appropriate and moving. The reference to the father \u2013 \u201cdying himself and lost\u201d \u2013 is almost overwhelming in its apparent randomness, as if the daughter can barely focus on him at this point.\u00a0 But of course the randomness is skilfully contrived \u2013 BECAUSE it\u2019s said as an aside, leaving us to register the point for ourselves, \u201cdying himself\u201d takes on enormous power. The lost \/ toast rhyme and the reminiscence of the last lines of Eliot\u2019s \u2018Sweeney Erect\u2019 bring out the helplessness of his action in face of such catastrophe (as against Doris\u2019s practicality in Eliot\u2019s poem). I think I feel a flash of irritation mingling with the daughter\u2019s pity, and that seems to me an example of this poem\u2019s strength in presenting contradictory feelings in a raw and unassimilated way.<\/p>\n

The Kids<\/em> by Hannah Lowe. Bloodaxe Books. 80pp., \u00a310.99<\/p>\n

I would like to thank Danielle Hope, the editor of Acumen, for permission to post this review, which appeared in Acumen 104<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hannah Lowe\u2019s The Kids and Gerard Woodward\u2019s The Vulture represent strikingly different approaches to poetry and offer complementary pleasures. Their very titles hint at the way in which in one the world is a fundamentally familiar place, felt as such by both poet and reader, and in the other it becomes rather frighteningly and chillingly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[197],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2649","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hannah-lowe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2649"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2649"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2649\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2652,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2649\/revisions\/2652"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}