A Field Guide to Wedding Guests, Helen Reid

Poet’s House Pamphlets, 2021      £7.00

A watcher of wedding guests

This pamphlet is named after a sequence of poems distributed throughout its length. Both the guests themselves and the experience of people-watching are familiar, from the first image in the first poem ‘1: The Sullen Infanta’:

A tiny girl is a central point in the flurry
of shuffling on the church steps.
She stands bleakly in a pearl-studded bodice

I enjoy how we observe so many people at this wedding, but don’t get a self-portrait of our speaker, other than through their value-judgments — as in that ‘bleakly’. They have a definite feminist bent, too, and particular interest in the female guests.

In ‘5: Sister of the Bride, Portrait’, we get another sharp image (that perfectly imperfect chignon!):

The older sister of the bride,
barefoot and alone, chignon undone,
leans against the back wall
[…]
Despite some sort of pap still caked to her dress,
she’s no longer the baby-draped drudge
overlooked by all

In ‘6: Mr Tongue’ we revisit an adolescent memory of the speaker at a depressingly similar function, being sexually harassed by an older man:

we rejoined the grown-ups and there he was,
someone’s uncle in the disco dance, working the room,
and though I was too clever then, all I could do
was make fun of his wife.

All our wedding clichés are here, including the girl in pastels who gets too drunk and sobs her make-up down her face in ‘8: The Extra’:

No one likes to look, but in this otherwise
immaculate production, a young woman in powder blue

who had been hurriedly ushered from the dance
has re-emerged to loom tragically by the buffet

The publication ends with the shortest poem, ‘9: The Great Aunt’, featuring the oldest character (nicely balancing the small girl at the start). The judgement is less clear to me here, and maybe that is the point: that we hold these rituals, we size each other up during these weird enclosed ‘special days’, and yet all the time life keeps staggering on:

She […]
staggers to every table,
on legs like
Twiglets in court shoes.

Ramona Herdman