Philip Rush reviews Claire Collison’s Placebo
Claire Collison’s Placebo is published by Blueprint Poetry (2022)
This last autumn and early winter I have been finding out about fungus. From time to time a specimen in the woods lured me from the path for closer examination. The magpie ink cap, for example, is a large, oily thing, with a dark and sinister beauty. Beneath it, in the secret microscopic world of the woodland soil is a huge and incomprehensible network of threads which forms the true identity of the fungus and of which the toadstool itself is only a part.
Claire Collison’s pamphlet Placebo seems to employ a similarly fascinating structure. The opening poem, with its own sinister beauty, lures us into an experience, and many of the following poems reveal to us in all their various perspectives and details, the true subject matter of the sequence, as it were beneath the surface of things.
That opening poem is short. It shares its title with the booklet, and it presents a lemon to the reader in the way which, hundreds of years before, and confronting a life-threatening illness, Keats presented readers with his ‘living hand’. The lines of ‘Placebo’ are irregular. They follow the intonation and rhythm of the speaker, who is giving us instructions, partly as a recipe might (‘cut/ the lemon into quarters’) and partly as a way of sharing some sort of wonder: ‘See how lemony it looks/ inside!’ The poem begins with the gift of a lemon and ends with a kind of rhetorical question: ‘Feel the saliva/ pooling?’ A lemon is a strange gift. It is exotic and foreign, a thing of hot places and hothouses. It is a luxury food, bringing zest and tang to otherwise tired and mundane ingredients. It is sliced into expensive drinks, squeezed onto delicately prepared fish, pressed into juice. But it is still an odd thing to be offered as a gift. And while that saliva suggests on one level the appetising nature of the fresh smell of broken lemon, it is also the mouth of a dog, a feeling of nausea.
Nearly half-way through the sequence is a poem called ‘The Ladies’ Pond’. It might well be the Ladies’ Pond at the Highgate end of Hampstead Heath:
The pond is still as cool and green;
you drop down rungs this time,
watching your limbs
porcelain.
The use of ‘porcelain’ as a verb is a treat there. The poem is told in the second person, a technique which deliberately invites the reader to share the experience. The second half of the poem slips into a past-tense memory—‘it was dawn and you were naked’—before returning to the present where two girls ‘half your age … blot themselves on leaves of pink Financial Times’. The pink of the FT serves to accentuate the pink of the swimmers, from the cold, from the exercise, as well as to underline how spontaneous (and free) the decision to swim has been.
This poem has begun with a frank and blunt statement of the theme of the whole booklet: ‘Days before the mastectomy’. The remembered trip to the Ladies’ Pond focuses in the end on a woman who peels off ‘her swimsuit without fuss.’
You can’t remember much about the scars
beyond her attitude.
Look, she said, dismissing them.
Like the girls with their newspaper, the woman defies convention, expectation, plans.
Not all the poems here focus directly on illness and the need for intrusive surgery, but, to be honest, each of them is coloured by it, in the way that, in ‘Mercurial’, the memory of a trendy law teacher, who believes that analogue watches are tools while digital watches ‘nag’, turns out to have been prompted by the use of a digital thermometer each morning ‘under my analogue tongue’. A poem which begins with the arresting lines, ‘When you told me how your freshly showered sister/ smelled of mozzarella’ ends with the living ‘overtaking the dead’; a poem ends with a massage ‘in cocoa butter’ is called ‘The Oncologist’s Ankle’.
There’s a lively sketch, in another poem, of ‘Pharaoh’s Island’, particularly welcome in its use of the one dialect word which comes easy to me, ‘eyot’; a poem about a spider plant, which winds down the page ready to grow a new plantlet from the seat where you are reading; a poem where the pupa seems to become a symbol for convalescence.
The pamphlet also includes ‘The Architect’ which was a prizewinner in the inaugural Resurgence Poetry Prize. Despite a brief respite midway in a sauna, this is a violent poem about skinning an eel. The man ‘slams’, hammers, ‘cuts’. He ‘wraps a collar of newspaper/ for purchase, tugs down, like a bell ringer’ and the eel’s ‘skin comes off in one.’ The poem has something about it of a scene from a novel or from the opening of a film. Every gesture is redolent with unspecified significance. The violence seems cruel, the whole business, with the eel nailed to wood outside, sacrificial and although the end result is the success the man is seeking, the process is discomforting. And the way that bell ringer shoulders a way in! Even the sauna, on re-reading, acquires unwelcome overtones.
