Uneasy Pieces, Nancy Campbell
Guillemot Press, 2022 £8.00
Variations in prose
The title gives a clue: these prose poems are not tidy or settled. Instead they have a fragmentary quality, suited to the restlessness, sickness and travels explored in the poems — the ‘unease’.
There are twelve numbered poems, plus a prelude and coda. Because each one is fully justified in format, it’s too easy to assume all are presented in the same way. What caught my eye on second reading — first as curiosity and then as closer consideration — was precisely how each poem was presented and how Campbell made subtle variations in punctuation.
The opening poem (‘prelude: Somnus’) uses slash indicators ( / and //) in the three prose paragraphs to show — what, exactly? Pauses for breath? Or would these be line breaks if the poem were given a more conventional layout? [The illustrative quotation below should appear fully justified, but depending on your viewing device, probably won’t.]
I was speeding across Europe I was coming to sit on the
blue chair / as you lay sleeping on the blue bed / lay there
behind a curtain with no freedom to rise / unable to speak
The following poem, ‘i | orchard’, a prose poem in traditional format — i.e. just one conventionally punctuated sentence following another, no gaps — suggests a pattern of alternate styles, and is repeated. This is pleasing. The mind seeks out pattern and order.
Then in ‘¶ Ribbands and Threds’, (an appreciation of Anna Maria van Schurman, a seventeenth-century bibliophile, linguist, and maker of beautiful ribboned bookmarks) there is a further variation. Here the prose is divided by use of a pilcrow (¶). Yet when I look closely these symbols don’t seem to be, quite, where new paragraphs would start.
Now I notice that each of the four ‘pilcrow’ poems also has a pilcrow at the start of the title. These poems fall outside the numbered sequence; is this part of the ‘unease’ of the title? Or do the pilcrows reflect subtle shifts in the poems — voice, perhaps, or aspect — that have eluded me? There is no Contents list, no other clues.
These poems are a compelling web of complex connections. If this is a code that will take me closer to the heart of what is happening in this uncomfortable yet absorbing world, then I hope to decrypt it.