Learning to be Very Soft, Callan Waldron-Hall 
Smith/Doorstop, 2020 £5.00
Learning about life-saving
There are plenty of poems about water, in all its forms, and about swimming but ... life-saving techniques?
What emerges in these poems is a fuller picture of what’s involved in learning about ‘Chest Compressions’ (title of the first poem) and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. There’s a specific factor that I’d never considered, although it’s obvious: there are two people involved in the exercise.
There’s the active rescuer, the person doing the dramatic life-saving stuff, but for training purposes — i.e. the ‘Practice’ (title of the final poem) — there’s the one whom Waldron-Hall calls the ‘Victim’. That’s an equally necessary but difficult role, requiring someone ‘to fake drowning / when you can swim’, as well as ‘to be as heavy as [they] can’. Although Waldron-Hall has shown this in the opening lines of the collection I’d missed it on first reading —
by the pool again one boy is pretending
he isn’t breathing/ that his heart has stopped
so his friend leans down/ exhales
what he believes is life into
the wet cave of the other’s mouth
then linking his fingers/ simulates
a steady heartbeat/
Too eager, first time round, I’d given all my attention to the heroic rescuer, neglecting the one with the quieter role.
Other poems in the collection explore relationships — a sister (unnamed), other swimmers shyly observed, as well as the poet’s awareness of suppressed suffering and other bodies.
‘The Most Kissed Face of All Time’, a prose poem, shows in unsettling detail how Resusci Anne (the whole-body mannequin used for resuscitation practice) provides memorably vital experience. Despite being ‘kissed’, as instructed, ’The dead girl stayed dead, mouth open, waiting to be cleaned.’
It’s the last line of the final poem that provides the title for the whole collection —
I am practising how I would be Victim
or better practising how I would wait to be saved
it is like learning to be very soft
Double spacing and indentation give a sense of semi-consciousness, as well as that type of submissiveness which is an essential part of the relationship in question. A metaphor? Yes, but also rooted in the practicality of the previous poems. It’s an original and haunting collection.