I Meant To Say ..., Margot Myers
Poet’s House Pamphlets, 2020 £6.00
Lusty poems
‘Bukbuk’ (seven times) makes up the first line of the opening poem, ‘Aubade’. It’s a chant repeated twice more in same piece, the last time with eight ‘buks’ or ‘clucks’. ‘Something has shifted in the firmament […] a cackle a croon a sigh’.
The eggs in their circular container resemble a planet model, so when a single egg rolls across a shelf in the fridge and ‘a feather stirs beneath the light’, the hen responsible comes alive in the reader’s mind. The surreal has all the trappings of the quotidian.
And there’s plenty of surprise in Myers’ fifteen lusty poems. They are focussed mostly on family and, with an observant eye, cover the poet’s life from childhood in London at the end of WW2, and then onwards to marriage, and her relations.
In ‘The Wedding Group’, a photograph reveals the line of mother-in-law’s tights, sawing her ‘in half like a conjuror’s moll’, while her hat might ‘explode in a burst of doves’. Words like ‘sawing’ and ‘explode’, followed by the bride’s ‘strong white teeth’, encourage an almost pantomime-like humour. ‘Sex Lives of Aunts’ is another snappy poem of sharp character sketches. This is a thoroughly entertaining collection.
‘Housewives Choice’, placed opposite ‘The Conquest of Everest 1953’ on the central pages, plants the work firmly in time, whereas the final poem, ‘Mock Orange’, evokes an entire life in five skimpy lines.
The title poem ‘Meringues’, begins and ends with an adolescent girl visiting a doctor with a problem (he suspects) of over-indulgence. In pregnancy, meringues remind her of her Dutch cap, and as she thinks back to childhood, she hears her doctor’s words ‘No shame in that / I meant to say …’ Is he referring to meringues or a Dutch cap?
A dash and a sparkle run through the ekphrastic ‘Philomel’, its form as haunting as the painting by David Inshaw that inspired it. And even ‘Buddleia’ manages to incorporate sex:
it’s floozing
its purple on street corners
tagging the wall
by the bus stop, yodelling
to passers-by.