D. A. Prince reviews This is You, Dear Stranger by Paula Jennings (Red Squirrel Press, 2024)
It’s been twenty-two years since the publication of Paula Jennings’ first collection, Singing Lucifer, from Onlywomen Press. Two pamphlets, From the Body of the Green Girl (2008) and Under a Spell Place (2015), both from HappenStance, are proof of continued writing, and also show in part why this second collection has taken so long. These reveal how her day job, whether as a poetry tutor or working on creative communication with people who have dementia, has absorbed her time. Fulfilling work is its own reward but sometimes there isn’t much time left over. Jennings is a poet who listens to and supports others. She is tuned to the connections that make others flourish. Fortunately this work has also fed into her own creative process and at last This is You, Dear Stranger has come together. It’s worth the wait.
The warmth in that title is indicative of the tone of the whole book. Taken from the opening poem (‘The Way Water Shapes a Landscape’), it reaches out to the reader, the “you”, as though recognising us as individuals – and despite being a “stranger”, each of us can be “dear”. Is ‘Dear Stranger‘ a deliberate oxymoron? Yes, but turned and changed within the poem. The “you” also refers to the poet herself. The “landscape” in the piece works as a metaphor for the human body, waking slowly from sleep:
Outside, the sun scratches furrows up the crags,
a blackbird anxiously practises two phrases
and inside you are about to invent a feasible day.
How does the miracle occur?
The world beyond the window, with its light (sun) and sound (blackbird) becomes the space within the room and this miracle: waking and finding oneself. How? By taking a shower, where “you are still no more / than a spinal column topped by / a roundish ball of memories.” But – and this is a huge imaginative leap – “The water taps and taps at you / like a patient sculptor” until:
there now
that’s you in the mirror, behind the steam;
this is you, dear stranger,
tying on your bones, your strung muscles.
Poetry can work this transformation, bringing reader and poet face to face and then into one united being. The poet can be a stranger to herself in the same way that we are strangers to her, but look: we have a “feasible” day to be getting on with. I’ve lingered on this piece not just because I liked it – a lot – but because without waving flags and shouting aloud its purpose, it introduces many of the themes that will weave through the collection. This is very much a book about connections between individuals, and what holds them together, whether it is a shared love of art or music or landscape or of the indefinable spiritual life beyond. Jennings is alert, visually and intellectually, to the world around her and the poems reach out, sharing her passions.
These come together in ‘Dedicating the Merit’. The epigraph tells us that the poem is in memory of Elizabeth Burns, a fine poet who died in 2015. Time is slowed in the longer, meditative lines:
After the last little bell had sounded and the meditation was over
my group would take turns to ‘dedicate the merit’.
Someone would gather all the rich silence, the refreshing emptiness,
and gift it to whoever they wanted to bless
Jennings’ mind moves on to the recipient’s perception, how she might notice “autumn’s first incandescence on the cherry tree”, and how time is blurred by this giving:
Somehow the tall yellow tulips that shone beneath the tree in spring
would be in there too. It’s the mind’s mysterious talent
to connect and hold and to make all present.
Those lines could encapsulate the collection’s unifying sensibility. The idea of what is “mysterious” – the feeling of the unknown beyond this earthly world – sits inside this book. Spiritual life is not fixed but moves between Christianity, the older Celtic deities, Gaelic traditions and the pagan seasons: the pantheism here is another of the connections Jennings recognises. Beltane and Lent are equals in this space.
Spiritual life is not fixed but moves between Christianity, the older Celtic deities, Gaelic traditions and the pagan seasons: the pantheism here is another of the connections Jennings recognises
How does it tie in with the landscapes? ‘The Singing Tree’ pulls together art, music and the numinous via the natural world. It begins with walking past a rhododendron where “The fallen flowers nudged / an edgy memory of happiness”, almost passing a decaying tree stump, until that “edgy memory” delivers something else, a memory of a musical installation with its mix of resonating vases and vessels:
So I leaned into the darkness
of the tunnelled stump
and sang note after note
till I tuned myself to that ghost
of a tree and the sound,
amplified, sang back to me.
It’s a private, personal consolation. It’s made all the more powerful because the poet’s need is unspecified, even though the language points to its being old, deep and universal. In ‘The song’, the third in a sequence of Sami poems, a mother teaches her son to “yoik” (to sing in the Sami tradition) and “how to sing the wind”:
When the singer stops, the song remains,
uncontained as shifting silences of winter
in the naked tundra, raucous as birds
returning in the Arctic spring.
Poems in a collection have their own dialogue. This emptied landscape, filled with unheard melody, is followed by the sturdily down-to-earth in ‘Music at the Drop-in Centre’:
They are all singing, some in tune
and some out. There are at least three
different kinds of timing,
depending on respective medications.
Are they so far apart? There’s yet more music in ‘Ice Concert’, exploring the how Norwegian percussionist-composer, Terje Isungset, makes instruments from ice: “Sliced from glacier ice, / instruments have been / chiselled, / sculpted / to an orchestra of dreams.” It sounds like a fantasy world but it’s not: each instrument has its own tone and “some sound the way caves might sing, / some ring like wine glasses.” There’s a lot of ice, variously, in this collection, whether as part of the Scottish upland landscapes or the visually delicate ‘Earrings Knitted from Frost’ in which short lines mirror the fine strands of frosted cobwebs. It’s even a metaphor for uncertainty at the start of the Covid pandemic (‘That Time’):
As though someone stood on fragile ice
and the cracks shot out,
running like animals in every direction.
This is a poem of Covid-era snapshots. Jennings lets her line length and language respond to what the poem requires. Where ‘Dedicating the Merit’ had let the lines expand, reflecting the slow process of spiritual connection, here the short lines echo the nervy, fearful uncertainty of 2020:
My front door key,
my car key,
my Co-op loyalty card,
my cash card:
a small pile of contagion
on the hall floor.
When she writes about writing poetry, acknowledging that “Some people hate poems about writing poetry” (‘Crafting the Work’), she does it with humour and lightness, aware she’s describing the intangible. In ‘Makar’ she describes how:
patterns of light become images that are making
a kind of story or dream
that you hold very lightly as it settles and unsettles,
and all this time
you are careful not to crowd it, you look at it sidelong
but attentively,
you are in the dream’s orbit, and also outside it;
you are in two minds — right where you want to be.
Jennings is alive to not only the artistic world but the context, what defines our time and makes headline news. ‘What matters’ moves from once-important village romances, now rendered irrelevant by war, to the stuff of surviving the present moment.
Now it matters that the third soldier might be
the last to tear into her,
it matters that she has not lost too much blood
or too much sanity
[…]
And it matters that the old truck is still there,
the key hidden under the seat
and that the roads leading to the border
are not completely foreign.
In ‘The Mórrígan’ she borrows the shape-shifting goddess from Irish mythology, the triple goddess of war, destiny and fertility, to bear witness to the battlegrounds and slaughter familiar from our televisions. No need to name the killing fields; the dead are the same, wherever the battle, and whatever side they were on.
But it’s her own life of friendship and well-lived lives that stands out. Jennings is good at evoking these, as in ‘Together, Lit Up’ (i.m. Celia Monico), with its joyous opening quatrain:
After she died she came back
to me, walking with a bouncy step,
waving a bottle of Cava, ready
to celebrate even my anguish.
Again, here are the “two minds” she acknowledged in the craft of writing. There’s the “anguish” of loss, and then there’s its counterweight, the vivid picture of the bottle-waving friend, returning in imagination at the Winter Solstice, for the ritual night climb they used to make in order to celebrate the return of light. So it seems appropriate to end on a line repeated twice in the final poem, ‘Looking across the Firth from Cellardyke’: “nothing is separate”. A poem beginning in landscape and seascape, blurred and hazy and sharing their colours, then shifts effortlessly into something much more numinous: the delicate and beautiful connection between people:
nothing is separate
you the sea the mist me
our boundaries illusory
our light each other’s
No full stop; this poem doesn’t close but continues, out beyond the final page of the collection, into the future and the space shared with readers. This is a collection to listen to, for its joy, vibrant colour and rich apprehension of both the natural and spiritual worlds in all their variousness.
Paula Jennings died peacefully on 7th June 2024. Helena Nelson, her friend and the publisher of her two pamphlets, said: “For Paula, poems frequently began life as an image or phrase rather than an idea. Even the sounds of poems in unfamiliar languages were used as vehicles to surprising destinations”. Critics have commented on the assured and innovative way she handled language, her fine musical ear and willingness to take risks, and her poetry’s otherworldly delicacy.
D. A. Prince lives in Leicestershire and London. Her second collection, Common Ground (HappenStance, 2014), won the East Midlands Book Award 2015. Her most recent collection, The Bigger Picture (also from HappenStance) was published in 2022.
