Tori Chamberlain

Rhian Elizabeth describes herself as “a kid with a notebook” and perhaps it is this modesty that gives her new collection, Girls etc., a sweet, tangy zest. Like the “washed and mixed” Swedish salad in the delicious Midsummer, these poems are fresh, tasty and raw, with a cheeky pickled garnish. They are the unadulterated original, tasted even better when washed down with our own living-in-the-moment pleasures – the “booze” and the “deadly vodka shots with a dash of cumin” that are consumed “long before 10am”.

This is Elizabeth’s third collection of poems. She has also written a novel, is Writer in Residence at the Coracle International Literary Festival and Hay Festival Writer at Work, so she is no ‘child with a notebook’! Nevertheless, there is a kind of childlike joy and unobtrusiveness in her work that makes you feel as if we, the readers, are sitting next to her, in her home, in the pub or in the park, and as if we belong to her intimate world – that of her and her daughter, but also of the other, more elusive ‘girls’ who flit in and out of the poems, sometimes cruelly, sometimes humorously, sometimes both! In the Wheatsheaf, Fitzrovia London, Elizabeth sums up the final sentence:

…so here it is, baby

your cruelty immortalized in my ink

Oh, how we all as writers wait for the right moment to do this!

greeting

Yet despite this entertaining jibe and other funny examples, there is no show-off, no affectation, no bluster. These poems are clear, honest, and thoroughly inviting. “Ivy grows in my chest” and a rotting fence is painted “pink like rose petals,” and dying is like “falling asleep under blankets warmed on the radiator.” This is a strangely calming and quiet way to view life’s final transition, and I thought of this poem as I was walking the dog this morning. I saw a dying pigeon on a bed of leaves breathe its last breath, like a whisper, and I felt devastated, but also aware of the serenity of the moment. It’s different in this poem, unusual, but there’s also a fresh sense of realness or authenticity here that’s too often missing in our digitized world. I am always looking for poets and artists who, like Elizabeth, speak to their readers with sincerity, confidence, and good-naturedness, always hitting a meaningful and emotional nerve.

maternity

Elizabeth and I became mothers just a month apart. The first poem in this collection is called 30 September 2005 and my son was born in August of that year. All these years later, Elizabeth’s narrative voice tells us in this poem that she and her daughter “both still scream.” I can relate to that, but our paths to motherhood over the past nineteen years have been as different as they are similar, and these poems speak to all mothers. Motherhood can be a lonely, difficult business – if we dare to say that sometimes we would rather do something else (than motherhood), or even dream of living a different life, then we not only risk being shamed by others for our apparent lack of feminine instinct. We also risk coming across to some as demonstrably shaming ourselves in front of the wider world. We usually do that internally anyway, much to our detriment, so Elizabeth’s brevity is to be appreciated, and she simply expresses what needs to be expressed – the taboo subjects, the things we have been taught as women must remain unspoken, untouched…

I am glad that Elizabeth is speaking out so openly on these issues. On behalf of all tired mothers – and I must add (because I am one too) us single mothers who so often feel unappreciated and unloved – thank you, Rhian Elizabeth, for writing down our fears, our regrets, our guilt. The speaker talks to us about playing motherhood, “the way you played with your dolls”; and also about how

A roundabout is to blame

that will never let you get away.

Guilt seeps, even bleeds, from these pages, and we readers know it – we feel it in its entirety, and there is no doubt whose voice, whose vulnerability we are hearing.

And girls hurt girls, and that hits the reader hard, or at least me. Elizabeth makes it clear to us that this happens just as abuse does in all kinds of relationship dynamics:

You could be beautiful in a few moments

and therefore

I stayed

It’s important that Elizabeth mentions the charities Galop, LGBT+ Domestic Abuse Helpline and New Pathways at the end of the collection and you can find their details at the end of this review too. And when she brings up these taboo subjects, I sit up and listen! I’m not the only one who has a messy life and goes through things. Other people feel the same way too!

Brave

This bold writing style is stylish and simple, but always captivating. I’m a fan of this kind of openness. Like many, I’m tired of seeing our lives in glossy “reels” with a romantic comedy soundtrack. It triggers something in me. As a sometimes very sociable, introverted, and sometimes almost completely reclusive person, I frequently have to disconnect from the clean lives presented around me because my life is not of that kind. It’s not a “story” that can be filtered. So when an artist like Elizabeth chooses to show in poetic form what goes on beneath the glossy surface, when she goes to the place before the chaos comes to light, to the harsh reality, and exposes the parts of our lives that we are reluctant to face or don’t want to show to others, the reader has no choice but to become part of this world and perhaps, however uncomfortably, come to terms with their own complicated life too.

Gentle insistence

This is helped by the clever little technique Elizabeth employs, writing most of these poems in the second person. We have to follow the path of her poems – she gently insists that we do so when she addresses the “you”. However, we might interpret this as a cop-out, a projection, like the opposite of the Hoffman Process, where if we want to address someone and say “You did this” or “You did that”, we have to change the pronoun to “I”. It’s a way of taking responsibility and moving away from blaming others. Yet what Elizabeth does is different, and it’s different because this is poetry and Elizabeth is a very good poet. When she uses the third eye in this way and steps back, we know she’s addressing herself, yet the sparseness of emotion that remains encourages the reader to take responsibility too, and boom, we’re right there. Responsibility leads to connection, and what a wonderful way to draw the reader into the world of the poem:

you see that she has been crying, but you don’t speak

to the sad girl sitting next to you. You never talk to anyone

the sad girls sitting next to you.

accountability

So with all this honesty, accountability, and openness, the reader allows that it doesn’t matter if their life isn’t perfect or they don’t live the way others expect. We all make lots of mistakes, and that’s what it means to be human. Poetry actually insists that we face our emotions and our messiness, and when I read Elizabeth’s poems, I feel like I’m leaving the connected world of social media and ideals of perfection and returning to the place we all came from, the place that is hearty and true and “warm as apple crumble” and where “mint sauce” drips “like green paint from her spoon.” I just settle in on my bed for the quiet reading, with my pup at my feet. That’s what it’s about, at least for me, and Elizabeth is the kind of poet who helps us find meaning in life. I’m always looking for more honesty, more bite, and more wholesome, fermented joy; and in these poems all these qualities are “washed and mixed” together like the fresh Swedish salad embedded in this interesting, lively and beautiful collection.

“Girls etc.” by Rhian Elizabeth is published by Broken Sleep Books and is available in all good bookstores.

Gallop www.galop.org.uk

LGBT+ Domestic Violence Helpline 0800 999 5428

New Ways 01685 379310