{"id":2704,"date":"2023-11-24T10:20:41","date_gmt":"2023-11-24T10:20:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2704"},"modified":"2023-11-24T10:24:04","modified_gmt":"2023-11-24T10:24:04","slug":"selima-hill-women-in-comfortable-shoes-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2704","title":{"rendered":"Selima Hill, Women in Comfortable Shoes – review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Selima Hill\u2019s Women in Comfortable Shoes<\/em> is different again [to O’Brien’s Embark<\/a> and Gross’s The Thirteenth Angel<\/a>]. The poems are all short \u2013 many if not most six or fewer lines. They\u2019re grouped into sequences but even within these I think they largely work as separate units. They have the punchiness of epigrams but unlike epigrams what most offer is not pithy reflections on life in general but flashes of extremely subjective response to another person or to the speaker\u2019s immediate circumstances. She appears at different ages, as a child at home or a girl in a boarding school at one end of the book and as an old woman at the other. She comes across as highly intelligent and observant, vividly imaginative, prickly, rebellious and uncompromising, perpetually embattled with others and often conflicted in herself, bewildered by other people\u2019s feelings and behaviour and sometimes almost as much so by her own. In some ways this collection is like Hill\u2019s previous one \u2013 Men Who Feed Pigeons<\/em> \u2013 but I felt that in Men<\/em> the accumulation of impressions emerging between the lines of a given sequence encouraged me to achieve a sense of what the other characters in a relationship were like in themselves<\/em>, independently of the poet-persona\u2019s reactions to them, and to \u2018read\u2019 her and their reactions in that wider context. I feel that much less in this collection.<\/p>\n

Although their economy and clarity suggests the application of deliberate art, in other ways most of the very short poems have the air of immediate releases of thought, lightning flash spontaneity and truth to the impulse of the moment. This gives a sense of honesty and makes us \u2013 or made me \u2013 feel very close to the poet. It goes with a willingness to express unworthy feelings without shame or apparent self-consciousness. And it goes with a willingness to take artistic risks, plunging, for example, into images that may seem surreal but are actually vividly oblique expressions of conscious feeling, as in this portrait of a school prefect:<\/p>\n

What I hated most were the clips
\nthat lived and died in hundreds in her hair,<\/p>\n

cascades of coloured clips with floral legs
\nincapable of understanding anything.<\/p>\n

In a book so full of subversive energy and arresting moments it\u2019s hard to pick out particular examples \u2013 I\u2019d probably go for different ones every time I tried to make a choice \u2013 but I was particularly impressed by \u2018Curd\u2019 from the sequence \u2018Susan and Me\u2019. This describes a vulnerable school friend who apparently suffers mental collapse as an adult:<\/p>\n

When I see her in the threadbare dressing gown
\nsomebody has wrapped her in like curd,<\/p>\n

the gentle face that wishes it was air
\nnow pressed against the wall, I lose my nerve<\/p>\n

and walk away in tears, having witnessed
\nsomething I am not prepared to bear.<\/p>\n

The overwhelming pathos of this is freed from any hint of sentimentality or suggestion that the poet is trying to pressurize the reader both by the deadpan nature of the \u2018like curd\u2019 simile and by the honesty with which Hill admits that in the end the most important thing to her is protecting herself from her own grief.<\/p>\n

Selima Hill<\/strong>, Women in Comfortable Shoes<\/em>, 256pp, Bloodaxe Books, 2023<\/p>\n

I would like to thank Ann and Peter Sansom and Suzannah Evans for permission to post this extract from my review of books by Sean O\u2019Brien<\/a>, Philip Gross<\/a> and Selima Hill in issue 69 of The North.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Selima Hill\u2019s Women in Comfortable Shoes is different again [to O’Brien’s Embark and Gross’s The Thirteenth Angel]. The poems are all short \u2013 many if not most six or fewer lines. They\u2019re grouped into sequences but even within these I think they largely work as separate units. They have the punchiness of epigrams but unlike […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[166],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2704","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-selima-hill"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2704"}],"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=2704"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2704\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2709,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2704\/revisions\/2709"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2704"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2704"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2704"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}