Making Lists for Frances Hodgkins Paula Green (AUP, 2008) ISBN 1869404025

Claire Beynon

Entering this book is a little like entering a hive on the wings of a worker bee. I say this, not because of Paula Green's partnership with painter Michael Hight (whose beehive paintings will be known to many), but because of the industry and purpose this collection expresses. There is evidence throughout of the writer's patient-yet-zealous engagement in the to-and-fro processes of scouting, hovering, gathering, digesting, transforming and offering... and we are very much invited in.

The poems are divided into five sections - I came to think of these as chambers - pertaining ‘inter alia' to the intense and multifarious spaces of the heart, bed, bee-box, artworks (by Frances Hodgkins, Toss Wollaston, Michael Hight, Ann Hamilton and others) and, too, the left- and right-brains' intricate seams of thought...  At times, I found myself wanting to ‘take off my shoes' in order to step thoughtfully in and through the environs of these poems. They are serious poems about serious wonderings. It's not that they aren't streaked with light and colour (they are, very much illuminated), but rather that they also give us a great deal of food for thought; they wrestle, are fearless, attentive and very much concerned with the dynamic exchanges that take place between our inner and outer worlds. It's as though we're being granted temporary access to someone else's private alphabet of thought.

"Hark to the nuance of the anchor.
I will take hold of my family tree
and let it drip stanza by stanza
in oil watercolour gouache and clay
into the hungry mouth of the homespun sea."
                                    (A History of Words)

In ‘Appointment with Sophie Calle', Paula Green places herself alongside the contemporary French artist (b. 1953) and embarks on a marvellously paced, largely unpunctuated autobiographical disclosure. Calle has been accused of employing intrusive, often inappropriate, tactics to get hold of the information she wants about her subjects. Notoriously, she asked her mother to hire a private detective (without him knowing she knew) to trail her as she went about her business, with the hopes that his investigation would provide her with photographic evidence of her existence.

Paula Green, by contrast, takes a decidedly un-neurotic, generous approach when it comes to referencing and documenting her own life. In ‘Appointment with Sophie Calle', while there are allusions to the artistic processes of Sophie Calle, Paula Green comes to this autobiographical piece with a refreshing and quasi-defiant transparency. She presents to us (and to Calle) an observant and unselfconscious document, her words and life alternately open and shielded on the page. She seems intent on having honesty out front, coupled with the sharp observational detachment that somehow allows both writer and reader fuller investment.

"...The Resolution I met him December 1982 in a squat in Willesden Green I had
frozen solid had treacherous breath even melancholy we had looked at each
other once when he was on a roof the snow falling between us nothing was
said of course I was on the edge of writing a track out of the internal ice he
asked me for a ride into the city in my Renault I resolved to write myself
warm with his gigantic paintings and a soft spot for Lautréamont this
man knew how to be with me."

A theme of observation (explored in various ways) makes sense, given that a large part of this collection was written whilst the writer was recuperating from illness and confined to bed. She sounds the occasional very human note of melancholy

"Our garden is on the edge
of falling, plunging away from us
in this moment of departure."
                                   (The Green Urn)

placing it in the sturdy company of love, family, friendships, a certain reliability in her connectedness with the wider world (of cats and food, flowerpots, bees, Ann Kennedy in Hawaii, artists, poets, an outside bath).

I find ‘Four Sonnets (for Ann Hamilton)' particularly satisfying - the second of these, ‘The Space Between Memory', especially so - 

"It may have been on the shape of the stars at night
Or the rhythm of memory or the way words reflect
The vast interior in unaccountable ways, our heads
Moving this way and that to find a different sound..."

This is an authoritative collection, at times a kind of call to order (as if with a wish to drive life and active engagement with it home),

"The illness carries me out of the painting
love the flowers in your milky vase
love the trees in your patchy shadow
love the sky beyond your shorn frame
love my roots on the hallway floor
... love your catalogue on the sheet beside me
love the cry of my child at night
love the word on the tip of my tongue"

at others, a meditation - and it's flawless in terms of pace. (‘Map of the places Where I Lie and Stand on Sunday Afternoon', for example, somehow manages to be both lyrical and staccato, accelerating and slowing down from one line to the next.).

Making Lists for Frances Hodgkins strikes me as being a remarkably dignified, non-ego-driven work. This in itself is a rare treat - there is no jostling and clamouring here, instead an expansive and original collection standing on firm and fertile ground. To borrow (and with best intention, alter) Paula Green's words in ‘Convalescence':

"... the way paint retorts with life"

... these poems retort with life.

 

 

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