This book begins fittingly in the shadows. In the poem that sets off this debut collection—by theatre director, poet, and actor Martin Jago—names and signatures are omitted with a foreboding, stark black strike across the text. “First Contact” presents us with an email from an unknown detective about an elusive case based in England, and sets the tone for the rest of the collection—which hides, leers, hints upon, and occasionally, with stinging, poignant effect, reveals a major part of its grave subject: a sexual abuser of children passing as a choir master, in the south of England, during the late 20th century. We hear the deep, sometimes hidden, sometimes afraid, sometimes ashamed responses, of a victim, only in footnotes, symbolizing the crater of necessary veiling that sufferers of this kind of abuse must—or feel they must—bury under, until, as in the catalyst for this collection, the suffering must be unearthed in order for a form of justice to be done.
This feeling of shadows, hauntings, dark memories, and nightmares carries itself throughout the book. Even in poems that initially obscure the motif, such as in “Reservoir,” we are always pulled back to the “cross- / examination,” of both the trial to come and the abuse still lived, still buried behind the text, the life. Upon the speaker that observes a dog’s instinct, “to outrun / the fear chases it through / the neighborhood,” we are drawn back into the ongoing complexity of the book’s subject: that the running, the will to another life, in another place, can always draw back a victim to the history of what has been.
“His Photo in The News” oks more directly at personal trauma, and cleverly shows us the distance between journalism and the realities of later suffering of victims. In one of the most haunting lines of the collection, the perpetrator, in a Covid N-95 mask is described as appearing as, “anatine.” The metaphor, like the nightmare of memories the book shrouds itself in and also bravely confronts, wings itself out into near farcical comparisons of a “penguin villain... Feathers McGraw,” which, finally, becomes the clearing the speaker needs to find freedom from past abuse through poetic and litigious justice: “dressed as a chicken” the poem ends, as if packing away some final thwamp of succession, “the other way around.” Beginning with an apprehension, this poem marks the beginning of healing, which sets off the last two thirds of the collection, for the speaker to come out the other end triumphant.
The collection also confronts memory, its fallibility, and through this, the nature of the past and whether or not we are even able to willingly remember things. “Boardwalk” begins with a scenic cycle ride at Santa Monica. The speaker can’t recall which way he was cycling—was it towards Malibu or Venice? But what sticks is the radio program he was listening to, in which a professor tells us that where memory is concerned, “there is no such thing as an original.” Our experience only becomes inundated with meaning later on, once we process and personalize what has happened to us. But because of this process, a human one, some of the details might not be accurate. We can’t help but embellish the mnemonic vignettes of our own experience with structure and detail. Though occasionally we are hit with remembrances that, “break the surface and gasp to life with such clarity.” And it is in these moments, despite our nature for stories, that remind us of what really happened. By the time the speaker witnesses a rescue far out at sea, the landscape has become the body, and “something deep inside” is being unearthed.
By the time we get to poems like “Respec!,” we hear the collection take new strides in confidence, a freedom has been found. An embodiment of southern English banterous dialect becomes the catalyst for describing a tough, uncertain, richly fragmented post-war seaside upbringing. It captures the experimentation of growing children through a character featured throughout, Danny, who has, “just started talking like that recently.” The humor of the poem, again, shadows the abuse of the subject: “I mean, there’s always respect for the choirmaster because it’s nineteen-eighty something... He loses his shit. He throws things.” The chaos of the poem also describes the chaos of an upbringing contaminated by abuse: the chaos of the choir’s way of dealing with life, becomes somehow, heart-wrenchingly, a refuge, in comparison to the other, more constant, buried chaos of the abuser that lurks throughout the shadows of the collection like a crow.
The staccato-like grief that runs ragged through “Gift” leaves the reader gasping for air, as we tail the speaker through, “lobbing chunks of broken / paving slab at the vicarage tree.” In a gothic haze of confusion, the theme of fleeing is continued, as we witness, “burning rubber donuts in the snow / through the blizzard of the estate, and slowly / becoming distant galaxies”. This powerful poem, which comes near the end of the collection, seems to embody a willful wishing away from past events of childhood trauma that are comprised in the poems. Perhaps, what is so expressive about this collection, so human, is the constant friction between confrontation of painful subject matter, and also a want to hide away from that subject matter. Ultimately, what we are left with is a paradox we all relate to—or at least most of us—that the most painful, traumatic parts of our lives become things that we carry, that we shed, that we observe, and overshadow. They are the “lifelines from our coats” which, through hardship, confrontation, wrestling and sheer strength, “edge out into blackness.”
Chris Viner is a writer based in New York City. He is the author of Brief Tenancies (J. New Books, 2021) and Lemniscate (Unsolicited Press, 2017)—both of which were nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His work appears in The London Magazine, The Festival Review, and Colorado Review, among others. He holds degrees from Goldsmiths College and the University of Oxford, where he was a recipient of the F. H. Pasby Prize for his writing.