Mat Riches reviews Landsick by Genevieve Carver (Broken Sleep Books, 2023)
The blurb on the back of Landsick tells us that the poetry inside inverts the idea of seasickness: “in this pamphlet it is the lives we lead on land that are unstable, uncertain and often nauseous, while the ocean’s rhythm provides moments of solace, rest or hope”. And this is all indeed true, and is something we will come back to, but there are a couple of other things I want to address before we get to that.
Firstly, there’s a point early on in the poem ‘Whitby Goth Weekend’ where I had to stand up and admire the sheer audacity of the line “God is blaspheming His fucking cock off”. It’s a lovely ten-syllable combination of trochees and amphibrachs. But also the act of blasphemy in itself, coupled with the use of ‘language’, is quite wonderful and stands out for all the right reasons.
This poem also includes an example of the second thing I want to mention, and that’s the motif of rawness that vividly permeates this book. It evokes a sense of the people within the pamphlet missing a layer of skin, or some kind of shield, to protect themselves against the world, either physically or psychologically. In ‘Whitby Goth Weekend’ the character is described as being “gutted and skinned and as raw as the 1940s”. We also see it in lines like “the raw pink mince weeping watercolour blood” in ‘Colour Chart’, or in the “frayed flesh” of someone that has stood on an urchin, in ‘Urchin’. It’s at its most noticeable (or blatant) in ‘The Selkie Searches for Her Skin’ where the selkie is trying to find new ways to protect herself from the world. (As an aside, and this is a question, not a judgement, but have we not now reached Peak Selkie? There are a lot of them about at the moment.)
It’s a lovely ten-syllable combination of trochees and amphibrachs. But also the act of blasphemy in itself, coupled with the use of ‘language’, is quite wonderful
We never find out how or why this selkie has lost her skin, but we do know she last had it at the age of “eleven. No twelve”, and we can also surmise that it has been a while since she last saw it as at one point she finds herself drinking her “lover’s gin”. (We are, of course, assuming that she is of legal drinking age or above, and that a legal drinking age applies to shapeshifters).
In this poem it’s not just the selkie that is stripped of her protective covering. Seals on rocks are “like turkey breasts on stainless worktops”. We don’t know if the turkey breasts have been stripped of their skin, but it’s a safe assumption. This is followed by “the discarded nylon raincoat / of a drowned or disillusioned tourist”. Later, sheets are “peeled off” a bed, eggs are cracked (thus losing their outer layer), letters are opened, and the final line, and pièce de resistance of the poem, is: “but the plastic sack in my hand was empty / as a pelt strewn on the taxidermist’s floor”.
We never find out if the selkie finds her skin or if she remains stuck in her current form, but this poem, like others, seems suggestive of a disappearing act. At the end of ‘Whitby Goth Weekend’ the aforementioned Goth wishes she could:
[…] slip out to sea
through a hairline crack
in the baleen sheet
dissolve
herself
in
salt.
I had to check my copy of the book hadn’t been left in salt water when I got to ‘Confidences’. Ostensibly, the poem is about a set of worry dolls that are used as confidants throughout the life of the poem’s protagonist.
I told them about the names I was called at school
about my irrational fear of the dark
about why I wasn’t actually so sure it was irrational
about dying – yes, even then it was a concern –
However, it covers far more ground than this. The sharing covers everything from the above to information about “the man on our street who shouted fucking Thatcher! / into wheelie bins and wore Tesco carrier bags on his feet” and the global climate emergency. It reaches its apogee in the penultimate stanza where the speaker describes adverts that “make you worry about the lines in your face / and the overspill of your gut when really you should be worrying / about something useful like the housing crisis.” Like a twisted version of Ten Green Bottles, the dolls disappear one by one over time as the poem progresses. At the point above there are just two left. After the last list of worries (perhaps they are considered an overshare too far) the final doll “just stared at me and shrugged”.
The text of the poem slowly fades as the poem progresses, a bit like a printer slowly running out of ink. It’s an interesting stylistic choice
I worried about sea water having somehow got to my copy, or whether I’d left it open and in the sun, as the text of the poem slowly fades as the poem progresses, a bit like a printer slowly running out of ink. It’s an interesting stylistic choice, and I’m not entirely sure why it is there. The dolls only speak twice in the poem so I don’t think it can be their voice lessening. I think it must be either that, as the number of dolls dwindles, so does the potency of their presence, or that as time passes (or perhaps as the memory fades) they lessen somehow.
While the tangible presence of the dolls lessens in the poem above, we see the stylistic opposite in the poem ‘Conch’. The first half of the poem uses contrasts of natural language, eg “eyestalks”, “muscular”, and “gullet” to describe the life of the conch. However, despite being told that “the human hands are wordless / / that pluck you from the shingle”, the language of the poem switches to a more technical or technological kind as mankind interferes. We hear about “mouthpiece”, and “corkscrew”, and in the final stanza we see the opposite of the fading out in ‘Confidences’ as someone blows into the shell:
the three notes
ringing out
at 100 decibels
as loud as a power drill
a snowmobile
a human baby crying
iPhone headphones turned up to the max
Each line of this part of the poem is in a larger font size than the last, perhaps mirroring the loudness of the thing it describes. A case of textual form following semantic content, perhaps? Is this clever, or just a bit obvious? And is the poem commenting on mankind’s interference with nature, or saying that nature is equal to mankind’s creations? I’m not sure, but I like to think the latter.
In the final poem, ‘Playa Zicatela’, we are introduced to “the ocean that swaggers onto shore / the sun that spanks the concrete from the roofs”. These are arresting images of nature doing what it does, but they invite the same ambivalent interpretation as above. The poem, and the book, ends with, “our version of the sea / not quite knowing how to touch the land”. I’m left with the feeling that things tend to go awry when humans stick their oar in, both literally and metaphorically.
By the time I got to the end of the pamphlet the world seemed strange and slightly unrecognisable, as if everything had been picked up and moved to the left by an inch
It’s quite hard to provide evidence for this – it’s a feeling that slowly accumulates throughout the course of reading the book. Now, stick with me, but there’s a plot point in Roald Dahl’s The Twits where Mr Twit slowly makes Mrs Twit’s walking stick longer and longer with a view to making her feel like she’s shrinking. I’m not for one second suggesting this is what Carver is up to, but by the time I got to the end of the pamphlet the world seemed strange and slightly unrecognisable, as if everything had been picked up and moved to the left by an inch. This means I need to look at everything again. I’m fine with that.
Mat Riches is ITV’s unofficial poet-in-residence. His work’s been in a number of journals and magazines, most recently Wild Court, The High Window and Finished Creatures. He co-runs the Rogue Strands poetry evenings, reviews for Sphinx Review, The High Window and London Grip, and has a pamphlet due out from Red Squirrel Press in 2023. Mat Riches’ blog Wear the Fox Hat is here.
