Sue Wootton

There are three main obsessions running through the book. Fifteen out of the sixty-one poems in Magnetic South make reference to cold – snow, fridges, frozen lakes, sub-zero Montreal, chunks of ice on the Neva river. Another preoccupation is water: more than half of the poems here specifically mention it, many more imply it. Two of the book’s three sequences are specifically about water – frozen in “Black Ice”, and drowning in “Adrift”. The third fixation nestles effectively with the other two. Twenty poems mention bones explicitly – mandible to marrow, shinbones to skull. Bones of the living, bones of the dead.

These key concepts tell us that she is a poet concerned with fundamental things; with the core concerns of existence. They act to tie the book together. In less skilled hands this could become monotonous, but Sue Wootton is a very good poet. Not just technically adept (which she is) or musical (ditto), but also interesting, quirky, and very intelligent. There’s the wonderful “Genesis”, with its Norcliffe-esque exchange between Master and Servitor (‘rag-wretched // and wrung of happenstance, scurrying fast and whiskey-twitching’), and my favourite piece, the wonderful “Motel, Wanaka” (in full):

Stepped onto the balcony. That poem
winking in the moon’s gold smile!

Rested my forearms on the railings.
Like a smoker, like a drinker. Imagined

myself to be, not myself, but (my back
to the sleeping children) untethered.

Inhaled. Squinted. Straightened up. Sober.
October wind blew snow-cold. Moon broke

on the black lake: zygoma, orbital, mandible,
teeth. Drew back the sliding door. Crossed

the aluminium line between poetry and prose.
Sank to the sofa. Waist-deep. Threadbare.

Is it an Ars Poetica? A love poem? A loss poem? An elegy, and apology, a desiderata? An offering to the muse? An echo of Virginia Woolf’s ‘A Room of One’s Own’? All of them.

This really is a good book. The few missteps are more than compensated for by poems with wonderful lines like ‘clouds baggy as old pants’ (“Local knowledge”), ‘the soul’s gills / blossoming as you drop down’ (“Waterways”), ‘when it snows I feel her wrist besieged in mine’ (“Survivor”), and ‘cobblestones / are fists tucked / into Riga’s streets’ (“Cobblestones”). Tough poems, beautiful poems, menacing poems, witty poems. This is a fine book, full of strong, ambitious, interesting, passionate, musical poetry, worthy of a Burns Fellow.

(The full review can be read here.)… (mehr)