Jennifer Wong reviews a new book by Pippa Little.
Through her nuanced, free-spirited and
metaphorical language, Pippa Little’s latest collection, Twist, conveys the
intricate interplay between knowledge and imagination, and meditations on
the intimacy and bond of sisterhood.
Born in Tanzania, raised in Scotland and who now living in Northumberland,
Little’s poetry captures glimpses of the human imagination and one’s hidden
knowledge about life.
From history, ancient myths, wildlife, to
vexed relationships, Little’s poetry is marked by her perceptiveness and
unsettling language. In ‘I Think of You When I Think of Skin’, she unravels the
impenetrability of human thoughts deftly between contemplation on the ‘late
summer of my life’ and her forbidden thoughts being the ‘flawed, outlawed
script’ of a lover. In ‘Flower of Maryam’, a poem named after a desert flower
used during childbirth, the poet confesses:
It’s hard for an old woman to
keep herself alive: some days are
so twisted-small and brittle. Yet
even with the dying, something
greens in me, delicately strong,
ephemerals in a desert.
By offering the reader two contrasting
mythical visions of life—a fertile body in childbirth labour and a dying body
waiting for closure—she suggests the many twists and complexities of human
experiences. Moreover, in many of her poems, the poet complicates the poetic
text with unsettling language and the surreal. For example, in ‘Night Drive’, a
very beautiful poem named after Seamus Heaney’s poem with the same title, Little
interweaves the real with the surreal, showing us the ordinariness of a night
drive punctuated by strange thoughts on the glittering stares of cattle (‘The eyes
of cattle, starting open at the night, glitter and flare’) and the ‘momentary
leap of the heart’ in dodging a badger that slips under the ditch.
Little’s poems are powerful in questioning
the unnameable. In ‘Sister’, she portrays her endearing and at the same time
almost stifling closeness with her sister, hinting at the unspoken secrets and
anxieties that underlie their relationship (‘Years you talked for me, /coping,
coping. //I am sorry for all of it.’). The poet imagines the sister as her
other self ‘who I could never be’, filled with other imperfections and new
possibilities. ‘Suitcase Baby’ is a dark, powerful poem in which the poet
traces her earliest memories and articulates the sense of muted pain when
imagining the nameless mother who leaves her baby behind (‘I was born on a
black-hearted day / by a railway line and a silver lava road.’)
Altogether, this is a sophisticated and
adventurous collection from an assured poet, one that questions one’s everyday
beliefs and ways of seeing, while pushing the boundaries of poetic voice, syntax
and form.
