Khadija Rouf reviews A Coalition of Cheetahs by Doreen Gurrey and Spin by Laurie Bolger, both winners of The Poetry Business 2023 International Book & Pamphlet Competition (Smith|Doorstop, 2024)
Reading these two pamphlets together reveals how they complement each other strikingly in terms of theme and stance, even though each poet has a distinctive voice and style. Let me start by considering them individually.
Doreen Gurrey’s poems are compact, often written in tercets or couplets. They are quiet but powerful in their imagery, and expansive over time. They travel the map and brim with ancestry, love and loss. For example, the opening poem, ‘Post-war Settlement’, has the widowed Mrs Evans trying to continue running the shop after the death of her husband, but sometimes having to shut early “to lie quietly under clean white sheets”.
The themes of longing and belonging are powerfully present in ‘Hiraeth’ (Welsh for the deep longing for home) where the poet’s mother is evocatively described. Weekends weren’t spent baking cakes; her devotion lay elsewhere:
Barley Wine glittering in your glass, Bread of Heaven
lifted straight from the chapel onto the pitch,
and you singing your heart out, praying for Wales to win.
Gurrey’s work often refers to the position of women in society. ‘Vocab.’ reflects on her education, which sounds stultifying and sexist. She counteracts words taught in lessons like “mare”, “vixen” and “bitch” with ripostes such as “tyrant”, “despot” and “martinet”. She writes with wit, showing how she surpassed the limitations of her teachers and learnt to intellectually outmanoeuvre them. The woman’s role is also addressed in pieces about the relationship between the painter Gwen John and her lover, the sculptor Auguste Rodin, which document both the painter’s passionate feelings and her eventual abandonment by Rodin. Betrayal is also the theme of ‘Rival’, a near-sonnet about a woman upset by a sculptor’s preoccupation with his subject matter, a sculpted mermaid who then escapes her plinth. ‘Yarn’ tells of the end of a relationship through the image of endless knitting, and ends: “casting off was easier than casting on”.
She writes with wit, showing how she surpassed the limitations of her teachers and learnt to intellectually outmanoeuvre them
Darker still, Gurrey alludes to the potential for violence and abuse from trusted men. In ‘Wolf’, she retells the Red Riding Hood story with dark humour:
knocking on doors; you give impersonation a go –
first sheep, then old ladies, balancing spectacles
on the end of your nose.
She also references Shakespeare’s Ophelia in ‘There’s rue for you; and there’s some for me’, a disturbing poem, where a priest receives flowers in a different way from how they are intended. My reading of the poem is that he has used these innocent gifts as licence to abuse a child. And ‘Exile’ speaks to women’s forced migration, so resonant of our times. It reflects on the desperation that leads people to flee, when either option – staying or leaving – is as lethal as the other:
[…] think of the women, their babies in bundles,
who step freely into small boats, turning their backs on mud-floored rooms,
obstinate fires, absent landlords, the places their children died – all the ache
and grind that pulled them down as surely as drowning.
However, amidst despair there is hope. ‘Bear’ skilfully heralds the arrival of the next generation, evoking the bond between a mother and her daughter, her ‘cub’, and the child’s readiness for the skirmishes that lie ahead:
So you arrived, my daughter, eyes tight shut,
frowning even as you fed, little fists curled
for a fight.
Her closing poem, ‘Ouse’, weaves in the ancient goddess, running through the modernity of York, threatened by climate change:
Baltic goddess of pine, maple and beech, Usa steps lightly
across her northern river to visit the apartments of Woodsmill Quay
Here, a golden pine cone in the goddess’s hand becomes “a grenade”. Watch out world.
My second poet, Laurie Bolger, stages her collection, Spin, across the backdrop of the urban world – the gym, cafés, diners, pubs. This world is filled with movement and vivid imagery. She foregrounds gender and how women ‘fit in’ or don’t, how they ‘get fit’ or don’t. There’s commentary on our times, the tragi-comic business of love, and everyday scenes of entrapment and limitation. Her work rails against sexism and body shame, and is dedicated to generations of women. The title of the pamphlet plays on the idea of spin cycle classes but also alludes to pedalling hard but not getting anywhere.
In ‘SILVO’ (after Jamaica Kincaid), Bolger lists a set of instructions revealing much about societal messages to women and girls. The lines are lengthy and have gaps; they sit sideways on the page and make the poem purposefully awkward to read: “don’t nag don’t be mutton dressed as lamb don’t show you’re bothered / don’t have a short skirt don’t cry don’t forget to clean the edges of the oven”. ‘Stars’ lifts us into the headiness of love, followed by what feel like pre-destined fractures. The poet maps a relationship from its initial spark to unplanned pregnancy, finishing with powerful images of despair:
She’s throwing full teacups at the wall again /
he hasn’t washed for days /she’s cleaning until her nails fall off /
Bolger’s work also talks of strength and solidarity, and of exercise as an escape and a place for sisterhood and encouragement. ‘Weights’ ends with “I keep going”. In ‘Yoga’ and ‘Boxercise’, powerful women are social glue who “hold up grown men / and hold up whole houses”. In ‘Washing’ she writes of social expectations and female resilience:
I was making the laundry my wedding dress
watching the heavy drip of men leave the pub
watching women who would look after them until the end
Bolger’s work is fully topical. It alludes to the contemporary pressures of the housing market, the cost of living, and social dislocation. With humour and pathos, she vividly evokes everyday scenes of class expectation and entrapment, as in ‘Birds’, when she’s on a hen night and wants to “run with my arms stretched out / To take women’s faces into my hands // shout are you not sick of this shit!?” But here again, there is strength. These women are trapped but they’re also “warriors”. The poem ‘Dandelion’ also highlights resilience. This common flower, usually considered no more than a weed, is strikingly described as a “stubborn little thing” with deep roots that “challenge[s] the concrete”. For me, this beautiful poem is a motif for the whole collection.
Bolger describes everyday scenes of class expectation and entrapment with humour and pathos
Doreen Gurrey and Laurie Bolger cover different landscapes and different expanses of time, but both speak strongly to loss, identity, longing, family connections, disappointments in love, and entrapment. Both write about the position of women in society, and the ‘push and pull’ of trying to break free from societal expectations. Both approach their subject matter with compassion and wit; and both juxtapose the pathos of brokenness and longing with the power of strength and survival. Despite fractured relationships and thwarted dreams, A Coalition of Cheetahs and Spin are filled with strength, determination, resilience and hope.
Reviewing two collections simultaneously has been interesting. These publications have – in my mind – undertaken a conversation with each other, chiming and reverberating together. I think of them as sisters occupying a shared space in my imagination. They hold their own, they are independent, but they also harmonise in their commitment to honour women in relationship with family, men, each other and with the self.
Khadija Rouf is a clinical psychologist and writer, with a growing interest in the arts and mental wellbeing. She has been working in the NHS since 1991. She also has an MA in Poetry from Manchester Metropolitan University. Her poetry has been published in Orbis, Six Seasons Review, Sarasvati and she is honoured to be included in the NHS poetry anthology, These Are The Hands, edited by Katie Amiel and Deborah Alma (2020). Her poem Tacet won joint second prize in the health professional’s category of The Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine, and her pamphlet House Work (Fair Acre Press, 2022) is available here. She is also part of The Whole Kahani writing collective, whose anthology Tongues and Bellies (Linen Press, 2021) won the Eastern Eye ACTA Award for Fiction 2024.
