Stephen Payne reviews Rope of Sand by Fiona Larkin (Pindrop Press, 2023)
The poems in Rope of Sand, Fiona Larkin’s debut full collection, pleasingly presented by Pindrop Press, are distinctive and consistent in style. The opening poem is illustrative and instructive (and interesting); I read it as a bit of an ars poetica. ‘Beach’ is laid out as prose, but anaphora is its main structuring device: almost every sentence begins “Form it from …” (itself a construct made of shifting elements), or just “From …”, and each describes an aspect of what constitutes a beach. The primary force of the poem is to characterise the concept of Beach, with the syntax encouraging us to see Beach not as object but as process (the cycle of creation and dissolution):
Form it from mica, a runnel of crystal. From shell, from sand.
Form it from loosestrife, form it remorselessly. From salt. Gather
whatever is floating, plastic or rotten, belly-up crab. Form it in
thunder, dash it to pieces in winter derangement.
One might ask to whom all these injunctions are addressed. Nature, perhaps, or God. And perhaps also to the poet, whose poems, like beaches, will be fluid and hard to delineate.
In any case, ‘Beach’ prepares the reader for the collection. These poems all have a wide vocabulary, unafraid of unusual, occasionally technical, words or phrases (“the hood of crustacean, the foil of the eel”), and they exploit some particular poetic forms. Finally, and most importantly, these poems have a surface that is rich with detail and sound patterning, yet they have a meaning, an intention, which is somewhat cerebral and abstract. Indeed, I’d say abstraction itself is an interest of Larkin’s, a suggestion that is supported by ‘The Marine Biologist’s Idea of Order’ which is “In conversation with Wallace Stevens’s ‘The Idea of Order at Key West'”.
These poems have a surface that is rich with detail and sound patterning, yet they have a meaning, an intention, which is somewhat cerebral and abstract
‘Beach’ is one of four prose poems, and three use anaphora. The prose layout means that this device is less visually obvious than in a lineated poem (where the repeated phrase most typically begins each line), which makes the repetition harder to skip, if, like me, you’re tempted. This is intriguing, and nifty.
The fourth prose poem is ‘Transformation Consultant’, which uses a fish-in-a-fishbowl metaphor to describe how a sceptical employee might resist the interventions of a management consultant: “I see myself as a fish called curmudgeon … and hide where I can, near towers of polished pebbles”. Many of us have been there! The poem reveals a secondary, but important feature of Larkin’s work: among the extended metaphors, the surface opulence and the intensity of these poems, there are occasional, winning glimpses of self-effacing charm and playfulness.
Most of the poems are in free verse, but a few utilise unusual forms. ‘Home is Where One Starts From’ is titled with a phrase from Eliot, and comprises seven couplets, which use only letters from the phrase. (A note explains this; I don’t know that I would have noticed the missing more-or-less-half of the alphabet, though I can imagine the constraint posed quite a challenge for the author.) The poem in question begins:
Name me, mother, wet, new, raw
Mother of faith, stain me
Root me, mother, east, west, north
Mother of feathers rear me
All five further couplets repeat this form and syntax, a twin plea. Together they make a moving, lyrical prayer-song.
The series of nine short poems, ‘No Common Measure’, also uses a form with which I was unfamiliar: cadae. This form is based around the decimal expansion of pi. Each poem comprises four stanzas of 3, 1, 4, 1, 5 lines and, furthermore, the number of syllables in these lines is (in sequence) 3, 1, 4, 1, 5, 9, 2, 6, 5, 3, 5, 8, 9, 7. It’s another form that constrains the writer more than it directly affects the reader (except in its effect on the poem’s appearance). I’m not exactly sure why Larkin chose it for a sequence about a love affair. I doubt that the intended implication is that the affair was irrational; more likely it relates somehow to the lover, or the context, and it offers a metaphor for a few of the author’s reflections (roughly, appraising-love = mathematical reasoning) alongside the more elaborated metaphor of love = water-and-weather which is the main driver of the sequence.
Among the extended metaphors, the surface opulence and the intensity of these poems, there are occasional, winning glimpses of self-effacing charm and playfulness
Here, as elsewhere in the collection, it seems to me that the metaphor is so extended as to become the poem’s main subject. This allows the poet to move well beyond the personal, even if autobiography was her prompt. I mean this as a compliment. The strategy does have a risk, however: in this particular case we learn little about the relationship, and some readers might prefer a more direct narrative approach. Here’s how the sequence ends, stanzas 3, 4, 5 of the ninth poem for anyone checking the line / syllable counts:
Imagine I’m salt
to your water, taking in every
ripple
until our fluid shape
turns oceanic,
mirrored glare.
But the mix requires
parity: we share no common
measure. You won’t speak but brush away
grains of me left in the sheets.
It’s fitting, in a collection that celebrates surface language and metaphor and freed interpretations, that the final poem (along with one other) should be based on the work of an abstract artist, Patrick Scott. ‘Beaten Gold’ begins with what could be a reflection on the poet’s experience of writing the collection: “I traced a perfect circle / my hand free of all / but my own free will”. It’s also fitting (to return to the publisher’s good works) that the cover art should itself be a beautiful abstract piece of art (by Jo Hummel), which allows, but doesn’t insist on, a concrete reading.
Stephen Payne is Professor Emeritus at the University of Bath, where until September 2020 he taught and conducted research in Cognitive Science. He lives in Penarth in the Vale of Glamorgan. His first full-length poetry collection, Pattern Beyond Chance, was published by HappenStance Press in 2015 and shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year. His second collection, The Windmill Proof (2021), and a pamphlet The Wax Argument & Other Thought Experiments (2022) were published by the same press.
