Poetry review: girls etc by Rhian Elizabeth

Tori Chamberlain

Rhian Elizabeth describes herself as “a kid with a notebook” and perhaps it is this humility which flavours her new collection, girls etc. with a sweet tangy peppiness. Like the “washed and tossed” Swedish salad in the deliciously penned, midsummer, these poems are fresh, tasty, and raw, with a cheeky pickled side. They are the unadulterated real deal made all the better when washed down with our own live-in-the-moment enjoyment — the “schnapps” and “deadly shots of vodka with a thump of cumin” drunk “since well before 10am”.

This is Elizabeth’s third collection of poetry. She’s also written a novel, is Writer in Residence at the Coracle International Literary Festival, and a Hay Festival Writer at Work, so she’s no “kid with a notebook”! Nevertheless, there is a kind of child-like glee and an unobtrusiveness to her work that makes one feel like we readers sit alongside her, at her home, or in the pub, or the park, and that we belong in her intimate world — the one between herself and her daughter, and also amongst the other more elusive “girls” who flit in and out of the poems, sometimes with cruelty, sometimes with humour, sometimes with both! In the Wheatsheaf, fitzrovia london, Elizabeth punches the final line:

…so here it is, babe

your cruelty immortalized in my ink

Oh, how all us writers are waiting for just the right moment to do this too!

Welcoming

But despite this entertaining jibe, and other fun examples, there’s no showing-off, no affectation, no bluster. These are poems that are clear, honest, and altogether welcoming. There “is overgrown ivy in my chest” and a rotten fence painted “a rose petal pink”, and dying is like “falling asleep under blankets warmed on the radiator”. This is a strangely reassuring and calm means of looking at life’s last transition, and I thought of this poem early this morning when I was out with the dog. I saw a dying pigeon on a bed of leaves flutter its last breath, like a whisper, and I felt devastated, yet also aware of the equanimity of the moment. It’s different in this poem, unusual, but there’s also a fresh sense of realness here, or authenticity, which is too often lacking in our digitalised world. I always seek out poets and artists who, like Elizabeth, speak with sincerity to their readers, confidentially, and good-naturedly, while continuing to strike a meaningful and soulful chord.

Motherhood

Elizabeth and I became mothers just one month apart. The first poem in this collection is called september 30th, 2005 and my son was born in August of the same year. All these years later, Elizabeth’s narrative voice in this poem tells us she and her daughter are “both still screaming”. I can resonate with this, but our journeys into motherhood across the last nineteen years have been as different as they are similar, and these poems speak to all mothers. Mothering can be a lonely, difficult business — if we dare to say we’d sometimes rather be doing something else (other than mothering) or even to fantasise about living a different life, then we risk not only being shamed by others for our apparent lack of feminine instinct. We also risk seeming to some as though we are shaming ourselves demonstrably to the greater world. Usually, we do this internally in any case, much to our detriment, so Elizabeth’s brevity is appreciated, and she is simply expressing what needs to be expressed — the taboo subjects, the things we have been taught, as women, must remain unspoken, untouched…

I’m glad Elizabeth is outspoken on these matters. On behalf of all tired mothers — and I must add (because I am one too), us single mothers, who so often feel unrecognised and unloved — thank you, Rhian Elizabeth, for penning our fears, our regrets, our guilt. The speaker talks to us about playing at being a mother, “the way you played with your dolls”; and also how

guilt                             is a roundabout

that won’t ever let you get off.

Guilt seeps, even bleeds from these pages, and we readers know it — we feel all of it and there is no mistaking whose voice, whose vulnerability we are listening to.

And girls hurt girls, and this hits hard to the reader, or it did to me, anyway. Elizabeth makes us acutely aware this happens just as abuse happens in all kinds of relationship dynamics:

you could be pretty in moments

and that is why

i stayed

It’s important that the charities, Galop, LGBT+ Domestic Abuse Helpline, and New Pathways are all acknowledged by Elizabeth at the back of the collection and their details are at the end of this review, too. And when she addresses these taboo topics, I am sitting up and listening! It’s not just me with a messy life, going through stuff. Other people do too!

Courageous

This courageous writing is stylish and simple, yet always intriguing. I’m a sucker for this kind of candour. Like many others I am growing tired of seeing our lives played out in shiny ‘reels’ with romcom-esque soundtrack accompaniment. I find this triggering. As a sometimes very-sociable introvert, and a sometimes almost entirely reclusive one, I must frequently disconnect from the clean-cut lives that are presented around me because my life is not of this ilk. It’s not a ‘story’ that can be filtered. So when an artist like Elizabeth chooses to show, in poetic form, what’s going on beneath the glossed exterior, when she goes to the place before the messiness is lifted out, to the gritty reality and exposes the pieces of our lives we are reluctant to face, or show others, the reader has no choice but to become part of this world, and perhaps, uncomfortably, confront their own complicated lives too.

Gentle insistence

This is helped along by the clever little technique Elizabeth uses of writing most of these poems in second person. We must follow down the path of her poems — there is a gentle insistence we do so when she addresses the “you”. We could interpret this as a cop-out though, a projection, like the opposite of The Hoffman Process where whenever you address someone else and want to say “you did this” or “youdid that” we have to change the pronoun to “I”. It’s a way of taking accountability and shifting away from blaming others. Yet what Elizabeth does is different, and it’s different because this is poetry, and Elizabeth is a very fine poet. When she uses the third eye in this way, and steps away, we know she is addressing herself, yet the starkness of the emotion that’s left encourages the reader to take accountability too, and bam, we are right there. Accountability leads to connection, and what a wonderful way to draw the reader into the world of the poem:

you can see that she’s been crying, but you don’t speak

to the sad girl sitting next to you. you never speak to any

of the sad girls sitting next to you.

Accountability

So, with all this honesty, accountability, openness, the reader allows themselves to feel that it doesn’t matter if their lives are not perfect, or they don’t live the way other people expect. We all make mistakes many times over, and this is what it is to be human. Poetry does indeed insist we face up to our emotions and our messiness, and when I’m reading Elizabeth’s poems, I feel like I am side-stepping the networking social media world, the ideals of perfection, and returning to the place we all came from, the place that is hearty and truthful and “apple crumble warm”, and where “mint sauce” drips “like green paint off her spoon”. I just settle in for the quiet read on my bed with my pup at my feet. This is what it’s all about, for me anyway, and Elizabeth is the kind of poet that helps us find meaning in life. I’m always looking for more honesty, more grit, and more healthy, fermented joy; and in these poems all these qualities are “washed and tossed” together like the fresh Swedish salad nestled within this interesting, lively and lovely collection.

girls etc by Rhian Elizabeth is published by Broken Sleep Books and is available from all good bookshops.

Galop www.galop.org.uk

LGBT+ Domestic Abuse Helpline 0800 999 5428

New Pathways 01685 379310