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I've never come across Tamara Fulcher's writing
before, though as this intriguing first collection indicates, she's had quite
a few hits in high profile poetry magazines. I had to read these poems
several times before I started to get a 'feel' for them and what I most like
about her poetry in its entirety is its oblique quality Š that and a certain
darkness of subject matter which seems to pervade even the most light or,
dare I say, 'throwaway' pieces.
A typical example of the above is the poem Small Irritations While
Film-Watching, 1, where we get:
A type of beetle,
slim as my eyelash
rears its head
between the corn-ears
of my finger hairs,
spying
a descent. Too late.
I can
make wind from
mouth and shoot him
ass over
carapace
back up my
yellow-pink
and knuckled
mountain, no need
to know whether or
not
he died at the end.
Seen on its own this would probably seem slight and easily forgettable but
Fulcher's focus on the minutia while clearly having another agenda is a
common theme in the construction of her poems which build collectively to
give an overall impression Š but of what exactly?
The opening poem - O - is an (un)emotional picture of the sexual act
but from the viewpoint, supposedly, of a somewhat distanced and analytical
'protagonist'. The imagery is dark and earthy, of the soil and organic and
verging at times, on the abstract: 'It continues. Pale and agape/mouth dry
under our silence/and the watch of the owl who mutters. ....' . The repetition
of 'He wants to root himself in my earth', can feel either comic or vaguely
sinister and there is never any sense of emotional connection until we reach
the final lines:
Air can turn to song
when he is inside
We grow
vines
in one another's
hair.
This ending is a trifle clichˇd, I have to say and the whole poem has a
certain preciousness about it, yet the effect of this is to make you reflect
on the strangeness of the whole business; as many of the poems in this
collection relate to matters sexual there is plenty of material to reflect
on!
Fulcher has clearly been influenced by Plath and Sexton in the way she writes
about relations between men and women (there's a poem entitled Photograph
of Anne Sexton) and often there are no-holds-barred even when her
writing retains what I can only describe as a slightly out-of-focus vision,
but there are poems here which make me feel decidedly uncomfortable. In The
Influx of Poles, for example, we start with: 'When someone says
'Warsaw'/I think of uprising.' -
a neat introduction which condenses a lot of history into two brief
lines. I guess there is also a play on 'pole-dancing', which is supposed to
be daring and dangerous, given the darker historical connotations. Mmmmm!
Then we get a narrative which describes the collection of a parcel but hints
at 'dodgy dealing' via a seedy suggestiveness. The fact that there's a
bracketed sub-narrative going on clouds the narrator's perspective but the
closing lines throw up questions of sexual power/class and wealth and an
apparent snobbishness which gets right up my nose. Fulcher's playing with the
word 'swarthy' here is probably intended as being playfully assertive but
comes across, I think, as being very iffy with its racial overtones and the
suggestion of the narrator's superior mentality:
It's no longer done
to call them
Fucking gypsies
though Swarthy had
those shoulders
that could surely
lift a cart,
and that I think
I'd like to breed with,
if only I didn't
have quite so much money;
and by the river
would have been
quite OK by me,
If only they had
known
how to ask.
Perhaps I'm being politically correct or responding - as intended? - to a
provocation but I have problems with this poem on both aesthetic and
'political' grounds. Perhaps the poem simply isn't good enough to do its job
properly.
This is a feeling I get again and again on re-reading this collection. There
are poems with interesting ideas, well put-together lines and phrases, and
intriguing obliquities but these plusses are so often spoiled by an overall
lack of direction or by throwaway endings which just don't cut the mustard. Game, for
example, which plays with the nursery rhyme and intends (I think) to shock
is simply a weak poem with an ineffective fade-out ending: 'Four little
prostitutes/jumping on the bed/ (and the rest is history)'. Tamara Fulcher
has talent but she hasn't discovered what to do with it yet. Let's hope the
next collection is more focussed and less intent on trying to 'shock'.
© Steve Spence 2008
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