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Steve Whitaker
Literary Editor
@stevewh16944270
6:18 PM 13th October 2017
arts

Time To Soar: Maria Stephenson - Poetry For The Newly Single 40 Something

 
Maria Stephenson
Maria Stephenson
The novelist Barry Hines identified a cultural phenomenon during and after the Miners' Strike in 1984. In his novel, The Heart of it, Hines refocused his dramatic lens on some of the unanticipated consequences of the struggle, not least of which was the enfranchisement of women through the medium of politicisation.

That some of these women were miners' wives served to sharpen an irony: precisely as their husbands appeared to be buckling under the combined weight of the establishment and public opinion, the women were relinquishing the chains of a rigid, culturally entrenched patriarchy in solidly working class mining districts.

Still others amongst these women broke several historical taboos at once by using their new status as a springboard for acquiring a university education.

Hines' fictional examination of the phenomenon imagined the resulting domestic disharmony, and I can confirm the diagnostic accuracy of his observations.

Liberation might be one way of putting it.

Alongside degrees in modern politics, the unrest of 1984 yielded, for some women, a new sense of self-worth and direction.

In as much as her new volume of poems is painfully autobiographical, Maria Stephenson would recognise this feeling of emerging from the shadows. If the title of her book - Poetry for the Newly Single 40 Something - errs on the side of heavy-handedly literal, it would be churlish to deny the authenticity of her approach.

The emotional intensity of marital breakdown acts to underwrite her sincerity, as though she felt compelled to refract the litany of tensions through the clarifying prism of verse; to put the ghosts of the past to bed in order to move on. Poems are the re-building blocks, and their creation is inexorable - 'no jostles or shoves / could prevent this outpouring of words' (from 'Her Mind Will Set Her Free').

Here, in Seamus Heaney's sense in 'Digging', the development of self-recognition is an occupation, and that occupation is seeking freedom from mental incarceration.

Conceived as a form of literary triptych, the three sections of the book nevertheless retain a narrative unity whose points of separation are indistinct because they are suggestive of emotional continuity; the transition from drudgery, to grief, to catharsis and re-emergence, is organic to the degree that it is embodied in one imaginative experience.

Ms Stephenson's use of a serviceable metaphor to delineate her own sense of 'becoming' imputes a seamless quality to the process: the transformation from 'Caterpillar' to 'Chrysalis' to 'Butterfly' - to paraphrase her own section headings - is a study in subtle revelation, a drip-feeding of emergent meaning as time-lapse pupation.

discarded
like spent knickers beside
a yellow trail from misaiming at
the toilet beside a residual stain
of spewed liquor

from 'Lined Up Empties'
Metamorphosis in the form of pupation also suggests vulnerability as narrator/writer is exposed through confession. And that pain, whether rendered in neatly acerbic similes or backward glances, is visceral.

The recall of shocking moments is a visitation like remembered toothache; there is little to dissociate mental from physical symptoms because the protagonist, like Sylvia Plath, with whom Stephenson shares undoubted commerce, feels the memory with the brutality of an in-turned knife.

Detail is indicative of emotional fragmentation; the need to face the past with open eyes, existential.

The detritus of domestic tension is found in remembered stains, foul breath and the witless, self-regarding, one-dimensionality of drunkenness - the figure of the husband, becomes, instead, a figure for his own excess.

The poet's capacity for self-vindication through condemnation seems infinite at first reading - her regenerative urge conditional upon the failures and weaknesses of her antagonist.

But a deeper examination disinters uncertainties, contingencies and tendencies to abstract speculation which indicate a greater parity.

I fell
without decision.
Too frightened
to admire scenery
but afraid
I might miss it.
Fast floating.
with faith
I'd land
softly.

from 'Leap of Faith'
The terrible pain which most resembles a relentless sinking ache is counter-weighted by the need for a held hand ('White Horses'), enduring tokens of imagined inseparability ('Your Brown Shoes'), and deep love.

Ms Stephenson's loose use of a kind of retrospective present tense sharpens the immediacy of her narrator's protean mood flow, and gives currency to what, in passages, resembles a stream of consciousness.

The deft transition between poetic and stanzaic forms - she moves effortlessly between the conventional and the concrete, the quatrain and the tercet, rhyme and assonance - is evidence of a skilled hand at the tiller, the variety giving ironic vent to a poetics of the conditional.

A tendency towards abandonment is palpable here, a yielding up of 'self' to sea, wind and sky. And not the least moving element of the narrator's journey towards salvation is the transition from a desire to escape, to one of simple, quiet embrace.

The volume is not without weaknesses - there are clichés and grammatical inconsistencies amongst the jewels - but the landslide of emotion which overwhelms the reader tends to wash critical judgement away. What remains is a poetry of wisdom, integrity, and real beauty.

Poetry for the Newly Single 40 Something by Maria Stephenson
Published by Stairwell Books