What love would smell like, by SK Grout
V. Press, 2021 £6.50
In the moment
We are treated by the poems in this pamphlet to a most innovative and particular depiction of the poet’s love for her girlfriend. The sequence deals with the heightened ups and downs as the couple becomes established.
Each poem invents its own form with the result that the poems are very fresh. They jump off the page. SK Grout does a wonderful job with this and what I enjoyed most was her ability to hold us in the moment.
In ’half past nine’ the poet exactly captures what it is like to wait for an adored person. She is on ‘suburbia’s corner, gum-streaked pavement’ and then:
I draw the word f r i e n d into the air
with an index finger. slightly sweaty, no audience
I felt the impact of this small act as if I was there and even more so as this poem ends:
[look, she’s coming]
the shimmer of battle just outside the gaze,
but there, nevertheless.
The word ‘battle’ I take not to mean ‘fight’, more a potent encounter, the lines ring with the thrill of that split second certainty that a rendezvous really will happen.
The poem ‘Two girls peeling apples’ brings to my mind Seamus Heaney’s ‘When all the others were away at Mass’. The scene unfolds gently: it is ‘5.47PM’ and ‘The first of the evening’s / moths welcome-dance against the porch light’. There is a moment between the lovers where little is said but much is experienced:
Who would build heaven, when this space exists?
[…]
You nod at the right places without really listening,
[…]
content in the knowledge
that you will hear it again, receiving my touch,
returning it with promise.
Such moments are fleeting but once captured, of course, can be relived.
The penultimate poem ‘9.51 PM’ takes us back to the meeting outlined in the poem ‘half past nine’ — it is now 21 minutes later. Every minute weighs! It leaves us with an equally vivid impression of a small intimate moment:
I take your hand skate the skin of
your middle finger with my
blunt nail
Anne Bailey
A languid arc of female loving
The poems in this debut collection are filled with love and longing, delivered in a calm, wistful tone. It’s a romantic, gentle publication. The female body is always present, often wrapped in sensuous, languid language communicating tenderness and intimacy.
There’s also an arc in the degree to which love as a space between queer bodies is allowed to come to the fore, as if the whole is a journey of self-revelation or acceptance. In the opening poems, the queer references are oblique — sometimes literally shrouded.
In ‘Transliteration’, for example, the problems of using language to describe personal needs and identity are set out:
what if our fate
was written around the body
[…]
shroud suspended above the skin
[…]
so it would take the right person to unspool us
The reader encounters a range of female characters, each in a context of complex relationships. The figure of Eurydice in ‘Eurydice Waits’, for example, is serving others and doing what is expected of her, whereas the speaker in ‘Trompe-l’oeil’ is concerned with the central question of family and acceptance:
My mother’s cousin says my poetry
is man-hating I wonder why she cannot flip it and name it girl-
loving
In ‘Shadow Symphony’ (near the centre of the pamphlet), we have what appears to be the manifesto (with a small ‘m’) poem, and a clearer picture of a personal journey:
Before you, there were sharp lines
between light and dark — now there’s
mystery
smudges
greyscale
And a few lines later:
Breaking free of the prison of
me before you
After this poem, the references to queer love become stronger, or clearer. But never strident.
For me, the stand-out piece is ‘Two girls peeling apples.’ This is a tender vignette of intimacy and friendship. The atmosphere is relaxed and trusting, an image out of time, as the two girls drop apple-peel into a bucket as they work:
The first of the evening’s
moths welcome-dance against the porch light
and we craft something without words or hands.