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India Russell |
Journey to a world
beyond time
Piers Plowright finds grace and charm in poetry that ‘shakes and stirs’ the past, present and future
READING India Russell’s new collection of poems is like walking through a large and rather overgrown garden, full of sudden vistas, hidden surprises and flashes of light.
Sometimes you feel a little pruning might be useful, sometimes the vegetation seems to overpower the stone, but there’s no doubting the ambition and imagination of the gardener.
India Russell was a dancer at The Place in Euston and lived in nearby Tavistock Square. As the title makes clear, Time is her subject and the way past, present and future can be shaken and stirred.
If there’s an overall “journey” – and I think the poet wants you to travel on one with her – it’s the story of a life, moving from childhood memories, through reactions to the natural world, hostile or challenging encounters, emotional and dreamlike experiences – often unsettling, to the mysteries beyond time and geography.
If this sounds heavy, it isn’t. One of the pleasures of this collection is its accessibility. Take these last two stanzas of a poem called “The Guest” – about the poet’s reclusive uncle who’d left the city for a gypsy caravan. Sometimes a man would suddenly appear there and join him at the fireside:
And after a while my Uncle George would stir
And say to him, ‘good evening’,
And the ghost, for ghost it was,
Would not reply but seem relaxed and pleased to be in his dear company.
And when I asked him if he had been afraid
For I was only young, he said,
Surprised, ‘Oh, no!’ He was a friendly soul
Unlike those city spectres I chose to leave.
He was my guest.
There’s a grace and charm about this, a simplicity that implies much more, which really speaks to the reader, and seems quite independent of poetic fashion.
There are no real heroes or villains in the poems, though Russell’s choleric father makes several semi-comic appearances, rushing down stairs, for example, to repel what he thinks is an IRA attack – a bottle of ginger beer had exploded in the cellar – and there’s a much loved great-grandmother who gets the news all dreaded in the 1914-18 War (after a dream that all was well), like this:
When the telegram came,
They read that he had died upon the very instant
She had heard him call to her.
‘He died bravely and with honour’, wrote the field-nurse,
‘And’, she added in soft, under standing pencil,
‘His dying word was, “Mother!”.’
That word “understanding” in the penultimate line is typical of Russell’s power. Romanticism (Hölderlin is a hero), Buddhism, Mysticism, the 17th-century Metaphysicals, mathematics and music, but what a relief, on the other hand, to find a poet who’s prepared to cross culture and time so directly to express her deepest feelings.
When everything comes together, as in a short poem “The Transformation”, near the end of the collection, you feel her particular “music” is perfect:
And as she woke she felt
Long tresses of green tracery
Arching above and round her
A shelter in which to grow
And regain strength. Her body
Pulsed with strange and urgent energy
And she no longer felt afraid of
The peculiar world of humans for
Her thoughts were now transmuted into
Singing feeling and she knew she
Was no longer of their kind. And
As the insubstantial trappings of her
Former life fell back into a mist
She rose up weeping
And was a willow.
There’s a painting of a willow, by the author, on the cover of this absorbing book.
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