kinscapes, Marie Isabel Matthews-Schlinzig
Dreich Slims, 2022 £5.00
Every stone
The first full line of this pamphlet is ‘I arrive, yet every stone in every pavement hugs my steps’. It’s a curious start, in a poem called, intriguingly ‘encountering edina — palingenesis’. It’s that up-closeness I want to focus on — of those stones ‘in every pavement’.
Marie Isabel Matthews-Schlinzig has this way of looking — as though through her microscope, or maybe, sometimes, telescope, or even both at once! ‘Variations on a dreaming sea’ starts:
stars like molecules
mingling, a small galaxy,
the sea: a petri dish
The effect isn’t distancing, for me: there’s real emotional material couched in these poems. ‘It is so common’ I found especially moving:
Our hearts, our hands were ready to protect, we
photographed the test, but did not share the news,
not yet: tread softly, do not scare the little soul away.
‘Tobi’s tales’ is another poem I found tender. And, again, here, there’s that up-closeness (which is perhaps how dogs do experience the world around them? Tobi is a dog):
Each patch of grass, each leaf and stem
hold so much information.
The poem ‘promise’ explores ‘a place where roots and / leaves birth soothing moving shade’. And ‘cherry’ has:
shiny blacks of bird among the
sweet red fruity flesh
This poem also ends, quite daringly, mid-word: ‘quie-’. As though the thing she’s looking at has butted out of the side of her lens.
Similarly, I like the form on the page of ‘underneath’ — and, indeed, the use of lower case throughout this collection. This unpunctuated poem, which therefore starts and ends on a lower-case letter, looks and feels like a fragment caught on a lens, to me. Here’s how it starts, with all its alliteration and assonance holding it together:
scraping of wood words on painted ice
pucks sticks skates and spinning tops
This poem ends, perhaps tellingly, in relation to this poet’s technique and concerns:
fish mumble unafraid yet not secure
soft mouths open wide look up as if
their gaze could meet that of the birds
above who also risk their life to survive