Evidence of Love, Marion Tracy
The Frogmore Press, 2021 £5.00
Innocence and experience
This slender collection assembles small details, suggestions, images – like proof that there’s something bigger than them – what can it be? Together the poems invoke that great abstract concept — love — and interrogate its nature. What evidence can be brought to bear of its existence? What evidence can be borne?
Often the poems deal in ideas that are so close to incommunicable that their truth seems to hang just out of reach. In ‘Telling Someone You Love’, we learn that
What’s concealed inside
the mouth is ceremonial,
a last candle
hidden behind the altar
The word ‘ceremonial’ is a wonderful mouth-word: you can feel it with the lips and tongue, something experienced and yet unspoken. The reading is sensuous and mysterious.
In ‘Arborglyph’, where the speaker carves initials of the loved one into the bark of a tree, the act is:
Making a declaration of love
In the absence of my true love
So ‘true’ love does exist, it would appear, but at the same time it is lost or absent. Meanwhile, the tree ‘heals itself / from unwanted wounds’, calling in the idea of damage and repair.
This idea returns in ‘Kintsukuroi’, the Japanese art of reassembling broken china into: ‘A beautiful exhibition of wounds’. So what we seem to be finding is love with damage. Love expressed where it will not be heard or seen. Love that blooms in ‘Kintsukuroi’ despite damage to the planet itself (‘our blue home’).
There’s doubt here, cynicism, questioning and loss; but also there’s possibility and joy.
The concluding poem (‘The Parts of Love’) is an affirmation. It suggests that earlier songs of experience (like ‘Memories of Rain’ and ‘Womb’ and ‘Bride’) don’t rule out new songs of innocence. Uncomplicated love and trust can, it seems, be recovered:
we [ ... ] lie together,
our innocent eyes, like gentle stars,
gazing at each other with no dread.
Helena Nelson
A strong title
I love the name of this pamphlet. It does a lot to get me started, and wanting to read. It’s intriguing and direct, and works as an excellent umbrella for the tender poems I then find inside.
Many of these are quite short; all fit neatly under that umbrella. Like a good poem title, this collection title brings more to my reading of each poem.
So is there a title poem? There is. A ten short-line one setting a vivid scene: the poet studying the aftermath of someone else’s evening in the sand dunes, remnants of a small fire, ‘Sandpiper pecking at / a used condom’.
There are lots of different kinds of ‘love’ gathered as evidence in this pamphlet.
And there is such tentativeness and tenderness about so many of these vulnerable poems. Such delicate drawings hung under her theme. ‘Sometimes it’s not possible / I can’t find / the right word’ starts ‘A Name for It’.
‘Kintsukuroi’, which means the same as ‘kintsugi’ and is defined in Wikipedia as ‘the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery... ’, reads:
It’s the whole world dropped and fractured,
never perfect. Degraded, vulnerable, sick,
our blue home wounded in this darkest midnight,
will still breathe and sing despite the pain
And yes, there’s pain. And intense vulnerability, and tales of near and far misses: a quiet, deep, lifelong study shared it seems to me in these delicate poems.
‘What’s to be done with this unlikely moment?’ is a question posed in the intoxicating ‘Kiss’. Indeed. That could almost be a subheading for the collection.
And so this poet probes the space between people, as she twists and pivots around her theme. ‘The Cliff’ has:
Chalk is the colour of distance, what breathed,
what hung in the air between them.
These poems stand well together. They’re helped and held by their framing. It allows this poet, again and again, to go quickly, deeply into her subject, culminating in the strong concluding poem ‘The Parts of Love’:
In loving, I am my own monster
and also a child.