Allison McVety’s work has the feel of necessity. In all her poems you sense she has worked hard to get to the heart of things. She has a writer’s impatience with cliché and the penetrating attention of the artist who stares hard at the ordinary to find what makes it work. The ordinary is everywhere. Here’s some of the lexis: pavement, hopscotch, fags, flags, kerbs, scullery, sequins, slop bucket, newsprint, smog, pub, canal, docklands, street lamps, prams, tarmac, rum, shilling, stove, tat, corporation, wireless, gabardine. This short list speaks of three things: the commonplace, the north and the past. McVety is brilliant at quickly evoking an era or milieu:
De-mobbed, you skulk
the day away in
an ill-fitting suit.
or
That school gabardine of mine
with its slip-in, slip-out lining
quilted for winter use
She has an acute sense of how identity is built from small details and of the way the past tugs on the present like the reins on a toddler. She conveys the feeling she’s amazed by existence and finds the remarkable in the banal, and the sensibility that shines through this collection is as subtle as Emily Dickinson, as wry as Jane Austen as without illusions as Aphra Behn.
McVety’s style isn’t remote from that of most modern poetry. She isn’t an innovator in that sense. Yet she is startlingly original. Her originality lies in her eclecticism, her ability to make connections between the material and the abstract, the familiar and the remote, and her astonishing care in leading the reader to the delightful little insights the poems deliver. Holub’s toothache is entirely absent from this collection which is remarkable when so much of it is rooted in McVety’s own experience. How does she do it ? How does she take the stock-in-trade of contemporary British verse and quietly make it deliver McVetyism ? My guess is the answer is too complex to be fathomed but one crucial element , I would suggest, is that she has that rare combination of a down-to-earth background, high gifts and fine education. D.H.Lawrence had the same and it permitted him to write about experience denied to middle-class writers. Yet it isn’t merely a question of subject matter, it’s also a mind made in circumstances which allow the elaboration of a perspective and sensibility as surprising as a camel on Deansgate. Most of all though, McVety is beautifully precise with language. I think this is what gives her the edge over many poets. All poets strive for his precision of course, but there’s a Flaubertian quality to McVety’s choice of le mot juste which sets her apart:
Past the nail bar where masked
manicurists, like dentists,
buff, polish, de-scale
the debris of the morning.
The ghost
of coal lingers in the grain as the boat stretches
and shrinks in the clink of its skin.
where we ate cold ham with new potatoes,
waited for Dad, the pocket-jangle of his loose-change tips,
home from a run to Blackpool or Scarborough or Rhyl,
Not many poets can make a line about cold ham and new potatoes interesting without needing to stretch into archness. Mcvety can because of her belief in her artist’s task and her exemplary discipline in its pursuit. There is not a moment’s self-indulgence here, no playing to the gallery, no showing-off, no deliberate attempts to please , just a real writer at work determined to get to the core of things. She succeeds wonderfully. There are forty-five poems here. If McVety didn’t write another word she would have won her place as one of the very best poets of her time. Let’s hope, however, there’s much more. She is a thoroughly excellent writer.
Alan Dent |
