The Elephant, Selima Hill
Fair Acre Press, 2022 £7.50
Facts (in brackets)
Although the poems in The Elephant present as ‘Facts’ — about everything from nostrils to sofas – they could be more accurately described as thoughts.
Selima Hill is always subverting and questioning things with her surprising juxtapositions, but here she seems to go one step further. The recurrent use of parentheses in these poems (over half feature them) creates a kind of running commentary — often playful, ironic — that makes me question our very understanding of the term fact.
Overall, the parentheses add a deceptively casual and colloquial tone, most noticeable in ‘Facts About Short Skirts’:
Those who wear short skirts can feel chairs
sticking to their thighs. (It feels horrible.)
This apparently unnecessary aside creates a narrative persona who can’t be ignored. Sometimes, she even undercuts her own authoritative assertions: ‘Facts About Autistic People’ opens with ‘Autistic people may adore Bedlingtons. / (On the other hand, they may not.)’ And in ‘Facts About Azaleas’ the speaker sounds far from confident: ‘And something else (I can’t explain why): / azaleas are rather depressing.’
But in ‘Facts about Pyjamas’, the apparent afterthought seems no less relevant or bizarre than any other confidently-asserted fact we’ve already encountered:
(Some smart rhinoceroses
even wear galoshes with theirs,
shiny ones in very large sizes.)
By contrast, in ‘Facts about my Aunt’, the first aside reads as reliable fact:
The anorexics didn’t have aunts
(what they called The Curse I called my Aunt)
And yet the second aside — surely tongue-in-cheek if not mimicry — changes the tone again: The Aunt, we’re told, was for girls ‘who weren’t pregnant (Praise the Lord!)’.
While, in ‘Facts about Stowaways’, the use of parenthesis seems to render the final line even more coruscatingly ironic:
don’t forget your Bible and your Fanta.
(It’s nice not to be thirsty when you die!)
Given all this, I can’t help noticing when parentheses aren’t used, even when they might be: ‘Facts About the Thin’ begins with ‘Being thin is tiring. It’s so tiring!’ Every word of this poem reads straight from the heart. This, for me, is Selima Hill at her best.