Alice Willitts reviews Her Whereabouts by Joanna Guthrie
Her Whereabouts by Joanna Guthrie (Pindrop Press, 2023)
‘Her Whereabouts’ contains poetry ‘so subtle and adjacent / it casts a spell around you’. The potency of its spell is hidden in conversational poems fluent in symbolism.
‘Her Whereabouts’ is rooted in the landscape of salt marsh, meadow and flint. Concrete details and a precise language of place ground poems as much about the electric storm of a mother’s stroke as the aphasia of a world suffering the shocks of breakdown. The poet finds and invents new words and expressions for the new normal. In ‘drenge’ I can now name my own complex feelings of climate grief. I appreciate the effort to invent what is needed after catastrophe. Facing climate breakdown requires new language to help us see ourselves and describe our fears and hopes again. Yes, I feel drengey too.
Joanna’s poems are by turns hopefully defiant, that there is the possibility to come back from the ‘other side of pandemonium’, and darkly defiant about waiting for the worst to happen, such as in Longshore Drift:
‘How close I am to nudging
the sea at this second and saying: rise up
get on with it, lose us altogether, now you’ve started.’
Symbolic lightening bolts and crackling storms are offered for loving during disaster. We’re encouraged to stake out a kingfisher haunt so we might be reassured that bright hope and kindness can still be found, somewhere. We’re shown the moon baring fangs, slumping in a tree, and longing to pull the duvet over her head and never come out again in a discrete sequence where poet and muse lose themselves in grief and exhaustion. Later, much later, the moon is ‘bald and unafraid’, transformed by what ticks at the heart of the collection — time might heal grief but in a living grief like caring and living through The Emergency, time does not heal, time is glitching and threatening.
In a move that feels completely natural, Joanna often weaves together her mother and this dear place we all call home into one addressee. After all where else do we come from but mother and Earth? I find solace in the grieving anger explored in poems that also excite me with their language. The energy chimes with my own feelings and muddlings of who is who or what in the wider kin of family and place. Joanna’s choice to use a fluid ‘you’ that is often mother, sometimes the poet, sometimes a sister or an object and often Earth, means that you (the reader) can read all the poems all ways. ‘Time travel with polystyrene fishing float’ is ostensibly about a un-degradable manmade object. It is also obviously about resilience and what it means to be both beautiful and harmful, just like humans.
I’m warmed by the poet’s deep compassion for all things on Earth and in our hearts. I sense that the poet gets close to her own nature with the fishing float as ‘a defiant object always pointing upwards’. There is no sugar coating of the almost unbearable work of caring for a brain-damaged mother and an ailing Earth as their conditions take them into collapse but there is value in laughter, love and family, and honour in body, objects and place.
What I think will stay with me most from this richly tender and complex collection is how time, like the moon, like the tides, like love, like memories, like the labyrinth, can sometimes return to us what we thought was lost: ‘i must love you back to the beginning / and love you bobbing on through time’. The ability to hold loss and wonder together, to face our vanishing without falling into binaries of human bad/ nature good, is the radical work of our age. Joanna’s poems reflect the hard work of bearing alongside A Great Losing without losing our own minds.
Buy Her Whereabouts from Pindrop Press here.
Alice Willitts is the author of Dear, addressing her dying mother/Earth and With Love, which asks what we do with love in The Emergency. She is the co-creator and editor of DIRT, a plantable ecopoetry imprint at Dialect.
