From its outset, Fiona Larkin’s deft and layered debut, Rope Of Sand, explores the nature of instability as well as the instability of nature. In the collection’s opening poem, “Beach,”there is something compelling and alchemical in how the shore disappears and returns, altered yet forever the same. Contradiction lies in the seeming permanence of landscape that reinvents itself with each tide, its sintered core revealed as a composite of parts that holds the living world in place:
Form it from mica, a runnel of crystal. From shell, from sand.
Form it from loosestrife, form it remorselessly. From salt. Gather
whatever is floating, plastic or rotten, belly-up crab. Form it in
thunder, dash it to pieces in winter derangement.
As the poem progresses, its use of repetition cast in a series of imperatives, the elemental forces of “thunder” and “winter,” detritus of its “plastic or rotten,” and later, the evocative force of lines such as “bladderwrack, itching with sandflies, memento mori of cuttlefish / bone’ speak to an ancient world that is also new, always in a state of flux. What emerges from its ‘soupy lagoons” is a kind of secular prayer to the arbitrary miracle of existence, without ever falling into the trap of guessing its meaning, but instead, celebrating the fact of its being, the poem’s closing line an incantation to:
Form it as votary, down on your knees.
That sense of the miraculous and what we as humans do with it, how we shape meaning from its equivocal rope of sand is explored further in the poem “The instinct of prayer,” its title running on into the first line:
The instinct of prayer
in the prayerless
is torn between logic and hope,
where thought becomes breath
and breath demands words
to rise like smoke,
a necessary burnt offering.
The striking central image that conjures language as an offering rising from human breath, along with the poem’s subtle use of rhyme and tight structure are exceedingly well-crafted, Larkin’s assured hand and accomplished verse continuing to probe and search for meaning in the numinous beauty of human existence, asking at its close:
What to do with this impulse?
What to set alight?
Breath lies at the heart of this collection. At times, it is vulnerable, under siege even, the alliterative “whisper from the whistling chest, / a liquefaction of the lung” (from the poem “Phthisis”) captures breath in the grip of tuberculosis (and with unsettling echoes of Covid).
In other poems, such as “Breathalia,” we journey into the organ of human inspiration itself:
inside
your narrowing
stems you sweep me along
pulled in with each gasp discerning
each note
The poem’s conclusion leading us to a place where once again human breath intersects with the sacred:
tiny
blooms transpire held
on pedicels my breath’s
end and beginning a lifespan
your psalm
It is the commonality of breath and by extension the human relationships that form around it that also plays a central role in Larkin’s resonant debut; whether in the familial bond between parent and child, the shifting sands of relationships over time, or how a childhood friendship is formed, as observed in the collection’s titular poem, “Rope of Sand”:
There is a girl next door with a sandpit.
I am a girl. I am next door. I have a sandpit too
and they match at the fence like a butterfly print.
We eye each other through gappy slats.
Sand is used to sculpt “a dolphin or at least a bridge” until its “grit on the tongue, thrown in your eyes / or scrubbed on my skin” erases all trace of what has been built
and in the end we rinsed our hands: each
sandpit drained out, grain by grain.
The literal and literary are both at play here, the poem’s subtle craft employing structural elements that yield exactly what the poem and its poetic voice demands, its clever use of couplets and the mirroring of stanzas capture the binary essence of the poem’s narrative and the equal measure of a friendship forged and a friendship lost.
Among the many fine poems in this collection is the extraordinary sequence “Common Measure.” It consists of nine poems and begins with “Littoral,”its tide rising and falling like human breath. There is renewal and reinvention in “The beach, born again.” At the shoreline, we are at the edge of an unknown, sensed in a primal way that perhaps foreshadows how animal instinct responds to animal stimuli. The “common measure” of the sequence spoke strongly to me of Love, the second poem, “Figurework,”revealing
A new tongue –
keen,
geometric –
calls
on me to translate
arcs of intimacy, to measure
what grows
out of our conjunction.
As the sequence progresses
We circle
each
other like bees,
drawn
to a taste we can’t
forget, a sweet intoxication.
The lines
had we flown
in the upper air
and I, virgin queen, chosen you
to unseal the future (...)
form a devastating conditional of the past, through which we discover that the honey shared is forever locked in time and memory at the poem’s close and
(...) Your amber
gesture to seasons unspent.
In “What Snow Invokes,” the sequence has shifted from sand to contrapuntal snow that falls “as we fell, a brief / and tactile magic.”
Throughout the sequence, each poem adheres to the same cadae structure (a form based on the number pi). Maybe, this is intended as a hint at identity, someone’s work in the field of geometry or mathematics. Or perhaps, the poem and its sequence simply delve further into the exploration at the heart of this collection: a human thirst to seek meaning, find permanence in what is transient, and grasp for stability in what we know to be forever shifting.
Martin Jago is a British-American poet based in Los Angeles. His debut collection, Photofit is published by Pindrop Press (2023). He is the author of four critically-acclaimed nonfiction titles on Shakespeare (Smith & Kraus 2012 – 2018). His writing has appeared in literary magazines like Agenda, Acumen, The Moth, LIT Magazine, Naugatuck River Review, Presence, The Penn Review, The High Window, Artillery Magazine and the poetry podcast Poetry Worth Hearing. He has a Master’s in Creative Writing from the University of Oxford where he was an F.H. Pasby Prize finalist and recipient of an HEFCE scholarship.