Conversations, Julia Duke
Dempsey & Windle, 2021 £8.00
Eavesdropping
Poets are listeners, attentive to language and conversations. ‘Heard melodies are sweet but those unheard are sweeter’, and although Keats was writing about the imagined music played by pipers painted on the side of a Grecian urn, the idea applies equally to conversation. Look at a painting in which people are talking and your imagination’s free to give them whatever words you choose.
Julia Duke takes this as a starting point in ‘Neighbourhood gossip’ (after ‘Neighbourhood Gossip’ by Honoré Daumier). The subject matter of the painting’s universal — village women, paused in the daily round of domestic work, chatting together and —
Here is guileless gossip
(we are eavesdropping on
intimate conversation)
that defies boundaries,
makes judgements,
heals wounds,
brings us together.
This is how a community coheres. Duke gives us the ‘colour wash’ of the scene but not the cross-cut of words plotting the minutiae of what’s going on here. Those words are in her head and, somehow, now in ours — suggested, rather than made explicit. Readers are dropped into the middle of a conversation, which will be about a mix of human activities in one small world. It’s not only for the women. Duke tells us there are children, too —
learning how the world revolves,
how the world works
This is an opportunity for readers to go back into their own childhood and remember how they learned how to behave, how families worked (or didn’t), what grown-ups talked about — even how to stand still and be patient when the grown-ups won’t stop talking.
Duke leaves space for readers’ recollections. ‘This is the stuff the world is made of’, she reminds us, and that ‘stuff’ is generally not the large political events and memorable dates of history but rather the human, the everyday. It’s how ‘a community is built’.
Conversation without words can be effective in poems. It allows the reader to complete the story.