Isabelle Thompson reviews The Department of Work and Pensions Assesses a Jade Fish by Nuala Watt (Blue Diode Press, 2024)
A jade fish is a Chinese symbol of abundance and prosperity. Traditionally the combination of fish and jade signifies harmony between the physical and the spiritual. To place such an object in the context of an assessment by the Department of Work and Pensions creates a startling and jarring juxtaposition. From its title onwards, the book draws our attention to ways in which government bodies can fail to understand the worth and value of the people they are supposed to support.
In this debut collection, Nuala Watt creates a poetry of subversion. In accordance with her bio that she “views poetry as a form of activism”, she fashions poems that are sometimes autobiographical but always outward looking, while challenging establishments – social, political and literary – to give a voice to those who are too often silenced.
Perhaps one of the most apparent ways in which this subversion manifests itself is the collection’s attitude towards disability. The shortest poem in the book, ‘the disabled’, reads merely:
as if we could
all occupy
one phrase
Its brevity is bold and effective. Meanwhile, ‘Crip Poetics’ takes a stance against the reclamation of the slur ‘crip’.
Some words can be reworked, but crip? Why drape
ourselves in uselessness?
“Can one word suit a group?” the speaker goes on to demand, then chooses her own word to describe herself and her conditions:
I had squint
made over to mean me, as is my right.
There’s no shared word for this that doesn’t pinch.
Other poems insist that blindness is just as capable of delivering beauty as sightedness. ‘Dialogue on the Dark’ describes the speaker’s partial sight as “eye quietness”, adding: “I wish I could appoint a lawyer for winter”. This is a defence of darkness, an assertion of its loveliness. Throughout the collection, the colour blue is a motif that comes to represent partial sightedness, and ‘Dialogue on the Dark’ ends tenderly:
Let there be an amnesty. Sit. Watch deep blues approach.
Walk. Loiter in low light as though your family were
blackened trees.
The alliterative ‘w’ and ‘l’ sounds here create a slow, lilting, gentle feel that implies blindness can be something which opens a door to a wholly different understanding. Similarly, the poem ‘Sounds’ suggests that blindness allows other senses to become heightened, stronger and more sensitive. “I once heard a river as a car”, says the speaker. “I walk on my ears”.
Watt’s presentation of motherhood and pregnancy as a disabled woman is inextricably linked with the way she subverts stereotypical notions of disability. The prose poem ‘Pregnant and Squint’, for example, describes how being pregnant allows the speaker a break from strangers’ assumptions about her disabled body. The poem ends beautifully. As the “government forced me to list what I couldn’t do […] my oddly capable / body made your kidneys.”
In The Department of Work and Pensions Assesses a Jade Fish, Nuala Watt creates a poetry of subversion
Writing openly about breastfeeding is perhaps subversive in itself, but the poet’s decision to link this topic with the Virgin Mary is more so. In the sestina ‘Mother’, the speaker breastfeeds her baby in a kirk, a chapel with a stained-glass window. “Christ’s mother must be somewhere on the glass”, she says, trying to spot the Virgin. When she finds her, it occurs to her that “the artisans who did this work / had never thoroughly observed a mother”. “His mother winces on the chapel glass” for very human reasons: “God has clamped down on her blue glass nipple.” Repeating words such as “glass”, “blue” and “mother”, the poem takes on a dreamlike quality, a blurred soft focus which nevertheless is razor sharp when it comes to presenting the dichotomy between the vision of motherhood presented by organised religion and the real-life experience of the mother in the poem: “Consider now the figures on the glass. / They change no nappies, neither do they nurse”. It’s deftly done.
Watt also has a poke at the way established religion treats disability in other poems. ‘West Scotland Area Quaker Meeting’, for example, describes how the pandemic changed the way we worship: “When Covid closes the house, we go through a blue hyperlink to God”. Meanwhile, ‘Evangelist’ challenges a request from a street preacher to “let me pray for your feet”. Similarly, in the final poem, ‘A Prayer to Be Released from Prayers’, the speaker rejects typically patronising prayers, and reframes them as the disabling factor, rather than any conditions she personally lives with:
I ask to be healed
of these moments
that cripple the morning.
Many of the poems in The Department of Work and Pensions Assesses a Jade Fish are subtle and implicit, but others are overtly political. The title poem mocks disability benefits assessments; ‘Important Information Enclosed’ is a biting commentary on the cost of living; and ‘Disabled Person’s Travel Card’ imagines a dialogue between the “council” and “Ms Watt”. Modelled on the traditional song ‘O Soldier, Soldier, Won’t You Marry Me’, the poet requests a bus pass, but the demands of the council become ever more extreme:
Council, council, let me on the bus
With my pile of paperwork.
Oh no, Ms Watt, you can’t go on the bus.
We require a note from God.
Poems that turn established artworks into palimpsests are particularly powerful, entering into conversation with them in insurrectionary ways. ‘On Her Partial Blindness’ responds to Milton’s ‘On His Blindness’, recasting loss of sight as a state “neither banned nor blessed / but breathing here”. “I eat, sleep, kiss, swear, get children dressed. / I feel and write. I do not stand and wait.”
These are outspoken and challenging poems that demand freedom of choice in how we love, how we worship, and how we understand the world around us
Other pieces take ancient artefacts as their springboard. ‘Infant Feeding Cup with Painted Turtle’, for example, looks at the history of feeding babies, taking as its starting point a cup from around 1850-1700 BCE. “You can’t cup feed. You’ve not been on a course”, midwives tell the speaker, who counters, “Neither had whoever used this cup.” As with many of the poems, lived experience is interwoven with political statement; the act of motherhood as a disabled woman is revealed as inherently subversive and yet, also, an ordinary act of living for the people involved.
These are outspoken and challenging poems that demand freedom of choice in how we love, how we worship, and how we understand the world around us. They are both political and personal, and insist that these two stances cannot be separated. Yes, these are activist and outspoken poems – but they are also simply poems about a life, about care and tenderness. They portray disabled people leading full and rich lives, sometimes enhanced by what is perceived as disability. This should not be a radical approach but in today’s world it remains so. Like the jade fish, Nuala Watt’s work brings together the spiritual and the material facts of everyday existence. Like the jade fish, its worth should not be underestimated.
Isabelle Thompson holds an MA in creative writing from Bath Spa University. She has been published or has work forthcoming in a range of magazines including The Interpreter’s House, Stand and The New Welsh Review. She was the winner of the 2022 Poets and Players Competition and a runner up in the 2021 Mslexia Poetry Competition. She tweets @IzzyWithTheCats.
