Spark Emma Neale (Steele Roberts, 2008) ISBN 978-1-877448-19-5
Jenny Clay
Emma Neale has written four novels, and Spark is her third book of poetry. She recently edited a collection of poems on parenthood, Swings and Roundabouts, and in her introduction to this she said the biggest adjustments in her life were to her father's death, and to becoming a parent.
Spark consists of two parts. The poems in Part 1, also called ‘Spark', follow Neale's transition into parenthood, the development of her child, and interactions with her son, Abe. The collection starts with ‘Real pregnancy tales' of twenty-four women - "Mary could only eat jet planes jubes and aniseed balls for three whole months", and: "Trudy just had to clean around all the tap rims with sewing needles". It moves on to poems such as ‘Broken nights' and ‘And are you still writing?' where the author is trying to form "small, tight-skinned" poems "in the spaces in between" soothing, feeding, and changing the baby. In the ‘Fourth trimester', the first three being inside the mother, the parents are still "pushing him into the world".
The title of the book comes from Abe's first word, "A-lie-uh-duh", as he points to where the sunlight falls, the spark of an idea and light.
" ‘That's right!' we say, ‘A light, a light.' "When he points to a "hyacinth, door, cat" his parents say "No" until they look again:
"it gathers in thick cones, rods of bee caves
dozens of lilac oboe mouths..."
and they see the shapes of light everywhere as their son does.
Abe has Emma wrap the ordinary, an "egg-cup, snack-stained book" and a "chopping board", in ‘Lucky Dip'. He gives her the package, and is delighted at her "pantomime surprise":
"Wrap it, tape it, ribbon it
Open it. What have we got?
Look at him. A gift."
Neale enters the child's world. In the poem ‘Ogre', the person encountered in the supermarket has a stare that is "black ice", and whose jersey stitches "gape like the broken ribs of a phantom ship". Her son wonders, "Might that really be a pirate?" At the checkout counter Neale looks in his basket and she discovers "Captain Terror" to be an ordinary, isolated man.
Her images are evocative. In ‘Going to Sleep' she compares Abe to a "small, cold, metal dinghy" that needs "someone first to hold it...then to push it firmly off the shingle into the shallows of a lake." In ‘Two' her son clings, licks, and nips his mother:
"Like he's testing her for gold - or tin
or practising to haul her
by the scruff of her skin
to save her from the flood of herself."
There are many poems based around sounds. In ‘Aubade' Abe begins to talk, trying out vowels: "Oh! ooh. Oh", like an oboe practising arpeggios and scales; and in ‘Renewal' he mimics a bird he hears "Be-deep! Be-deep!", singing "the barcode scanner song'". In ‘Mirror' there is the cat purring. The mirror is broken after the door slams:
"silver threads fine as baby hair
that would lacerate the skin like wire"
"Stand back", Emma gasps at her son, as he goes to clasp each "pretty, glistering trinket", when the cat pads in and over "glassy coals", purring "a mantra Om Mani Padmi Hum".
‘Buzz Track', in the second half of the book, is from the recording of a room's sounds, without dialogue, when putting together a film scene. It has the obvious: "the sizzle and crackle of an oil heater"; and less obvious:
"The slow flow of old windows
as the panes sink into themselves."
‘Exposure', the poem which takes the title of the Part 2, shows the gradual building up of resistance by increasing levels of exposure to fears. It begins with spiders, then heights, and finally loss. For spiders the first exposure is to, "Look at a picture of a spider", and the last is, "Allow a spider to remain in the palm of your hand". There is an effective build-up in each, finishing with loss, "Allow the absence to remain in the palms of your hands".
In ‘Open Home' Neale and her husband are looking for a larger house. They are "weekend voyagers" and come to homes where "long incisions" have been made and half the wall of "family portraits" are "dumbly blank". The agent is an undertaker dealing with "a settlement property", a "herd of haunts", and although the house is perfect, "We won't take it".
Part 2 contains several poems about Marc Chagall under "Chagallerie": ‘The early life of Marc Chagall', ‘Yellow Opus', and ‘Night feeds'. Most of the poems in the second part appear less personal than the first, but not all. Neale's husband is a mountain guide, and one of the poems is called ‘Loving a mountaineer', where "your absence a white vista" with "no welcome ledge".
‘Reversal' seems to be going backwards from the knowledge of Neale's father's death. It tells the sequence of events in reverse, ending with:
"as if he knew
of no turning back
our father opened his door."
There are poems in Neale's first book of poetry, Sleevenotes, published in 1999, which also refer to this event: ‘Personal Best' begins: "Every Sunday our father trained", and finishes with "grief sees him outpace and leave us once again".
Emma Neale's poems in Spark are generally are very accessible, putting her personal experience into poetic form, particularly around the journey into parenthood with her young son.
