Defying Gravity: Variety Turns By Christopher Arksey

The title of Christopher Arksey’s new pamphlet for Broken Sleep Books gently ironises the elegiac nature of his poems. A backward glance to a life well-lived, Variety Turns extrapolates alternative meanings from the suggestion of a theatrical playbill to describe, instead, the many faces of his subject, his mother, who died in 2016. That his collection amounts to a panegyric need not indicate a moribundity of tone, for, as its title connotes, each poem is a mirror to idiosyncrasies and character traits that make of the mother figure a singular force - at once comedian, stoic, nurse and mother. The power of her son’s poems is weighed in direct proportion to the indelibility of the imprint she has left behind.

Desperately moving, Arksey’s poems are effective because simply rendered. Reminiscent of the languid focus of Jane Clarke’s poetics of remembrance, Variety Turns is distilled, purified of superfluity, clarified in order to reveal the subject, direct and unencumbered by sentiment. But the process of stripping back the sheath of circumscribed poetic mourning to expose nerve endings does not remove the impulse for gallows humour, for defiance, for pragmatic acceptance. Or a combination of all three in the weary, end-of-life valediction that almost mocks the sepulchral seriousness of the titular ‘Last Words’:

‘When the nurse asked why
you took your mask off, you said, dryly:

“Because I can.”

Composed in your resolve, even then,
not to give death the satisfaction’. (‘2’)

Arksey’s poems are tonally contiguous with, but stylistically divorced from, the proprieties of formal elegy: the act of remembrance is performed with gravitas and sincerity, but divested of the kinds of cloying sentiment in which poetic mourning is often mired. In travelling beyond the immediate circumstances of his mother’s death to construct a picture of a life, of a ‘formidable’ aspirant whose hopes congealed in her own father’s misogyny and misplaced sense of ambition, the poet embraces that life with a frankness that is corollary to honesty. The expression ‘Variety Turns’ takes on renewed metaphorical resonance when we learn that the young June Dillon harboured ambitions to become an actor:

‘Still, what could’ve been: university,
auditions, rejections, your first big break,
all the roles you wanted you couldn’t take.’ (‘Drama’)

The ease with which Arksey distils retrospective grief is no doubt facilitated by time’s tendency to etoliate the sharper edges of emotional distress, yet the received effect is uncommonly moving. With a fine line in understated irony, the poet successfully negotiates a passage between personal anguish and the pitfalls of bathos.

The direct apostrophic address foregrounds the loved object, brings her into a kind of continuous present, where the refulgence of memory is reinforced, but tempered. The simple act of slicing a banana for a sandwich yields focused observation of every detail of the process, neatly rendered in foreshortened lines whose immediacy is almost palpable, not least for the narrator:

‘If I train my ears
I can bring it all back:
the rhythmic jaw click
as you chew a bit intact’. (‘Ceremony’)

The poem’s title validates a shared ritual of observer and observed, a ‘ceremony’ as meaningless to others as it is meaningful, in terms of the augmenting of a bond, to the narrator. The exercise is repeated throughout Variety Turns, and to some degree ‘Amateur Gardener’ is the culmination, writ for posterity in a newly-planted bay tree, of cumulative remembrance, of a desire to fix an expression of love in perpetuity. The poem’s loosely rhymed couplets and sustained arboreal metaphor thrive in anthropomorphic harmony, melding to create resistless growth and colour. Ministering to the tree’s troublous needs, the narrator finds another figure for the tending of memory:

‘No, better to prune and pine
and bide my time

watering till you bubble and overflow.
Ridiculous, I know.’

Echoing Larkin in the final line, the poet’s sudden change of tack gently nudges the reader out of a reverie of metaphorical reflection and into rational overview. The conceit affixes the poem to a different order of reality and re-enjoins the quotidian, as it does elsewhere in this fine study of grief. The unintended fart, cracked ‘across the air’, that will become the mother’s ‘final blazon’, is a release of energy in the aether, transmuted over time into humour:

‘Impossible to unhear,
it yielded like a kept joke
within hours. And now years,
in their infinite mercy,
have amplified its comedy’. (‘Vigil’)

The ‘infinite mercy’ of time enables the kind of detachment that is an ironic measure of sincere attachment. In the beautifully wrought ‘Actor’, Arksey’s closely-observed description of his mother’s semi-comatosed final hours is an eavesdrop on a solemn and profoundly private moment in which the reader’s vicarious presence is privileged. Painfully authentic, the poet’s words successfully convey the increasing sense of unreality that accompanies imminent death. Finding a figure for grief in a sardonic form his mother would intuitively understand, Arksey expresses that unreality as an actorly sleight-of-hand, as though the act of dying were a final imposture for a loved-one who’d ‘already gone’:

‘The most convincing
rendition of dying
I’ve ever seen.’

And in the final frames of this portfolio of a life, Christopher Arksey describes a chronological passage in photographs presented as episodic reflections, each featuring his mother at different stages of her journey. By turns funny and elegiac, the images hold the reader in thrall for the echoing duration of each unknowable story, before the final release, whose trajectory follows only one arc:

‘It’s as if you’d beaten
gravity at its own game.
Sprung from a trampoline,
never to come down again.’ (‘Portfolio’)


Variety Turns is published by Broken Sleep Books

More information here.