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<\/a><\/p>\nSo writes Helen Ivory, in response to my debut poetry collection, Full Sight Of Her<\/em> (Eyewear, 2020).<\/p>\n Many of these poems were written after my beloved\u2019s passing, in June of 2017. In fact, most were written long before she was unwell. Now as I read them back, the poems, arranged roughly in chronological order, offer a narrative arc of foreshadowings, premonitions and omens; there are also call-backs to previous losses. I have been left wondering if we were precognitive in some way, and surreptitious knowledge of the future was playing itself out in a series of psychodramas. Later, I became aware of the Cassandra Complex: to be cursed with a vision of the future and to not be listened to. Mourning is foreseen as though a script was written. Clues of what is to come are there, in plain sight, though they cannot be easily voiced \u2013 as is the case in \u2018What You Call Your \u201cWinter Mode\u201d\u2019:<\/p>\n I think of your blood, your bowel, your mother This collection provides only a perspectival and partial truth. The moments of bliss are usually not represented here. They were elsewhere, and joy had no reason to be recorded. The poems refer not to what\u2019s noticed in the daylight, waking hours, rather to night thoughts and dark mirrors that betray what\u2019s repressed; a compartmentalised darkness that allows the rest of life to be liveable. As John McAuliffe writes, \u2018Patrick Wright\u2019s moving, powerful\u00a0Full Sight of Her<\/em>\u00a0takes its reader to fearful, anxious places, describing love and care which come under terrible pressure. \u00a0Wright\u2019s bereaved, often bereft poems find words to protect the self, this lover who must become a \u201cwidower, prizing thumbnails\u201d in the book\u2019s densely visual poems, a man for whom even the \u201ctown scenery\u00a0is full of tears\u201d. Throughout, Wright finds forms which offer some protection for the bare feelings and memories the poems navigate, stanzas and shapes which mean that, as he writes, \u201cI proceed on the basis of metaphor\u201d even as he knows that he must \u201cwear the scar.\u201d\u2019 Likewise, for Gail Ashton, \u2018the sensual, anatomised poems \u2026 travel through interior and external landscapes, \u201cthe body\u2019s catacombs\u201d, to track apparitions, hospital wards, the night terrors of illness. These places where \u201cthe joke begins to wear itself thin\u201d nevertheless brim with light, colour, scent. At once loss and redemption, its song of \u201cI\u201d to \u201cyou\u201d is almost unbearably intimate and always extraordinary. In this heart-aching collection Wright is \u201cfaithful all along\u201d to lyrical form and its \u201climitless repertoire of love.\u201d\u2019<\/p>\n The spaces depicted are fraught with introspection: they\u2019re hotel rooms, bedrooms, waiting rooms; spaces of domestic anxiety and tension. Later poems address illness, loss, and grief more directly; they churn up past traumas and ask metaphysical questions \u2013 such as \u2018The Waiting Room\u2019:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Upstairs, she starts her chemo; down here it\u2019s limbo. Upstairs, a cannula\u2019s attached to her arm. Assistants whisper The final few poems are perhaps the most harrowing: the speaker lost in a state of numbness and dissociation. \u2018The End\u2019, for instance, is replete with images of apocalypse and nihilism:<\/p>\n With the close of a hospice door, clunk of a saloon, tyres Let it end with handed-over possessions, towels, slippers, Ask for no heroes, villains, nick-of-time pliers on wires, Let the chauffeur pull unsmilingly through the driveway. These are by no means \u2018garden-variety elegies\u2019 as Maggie Smith has observed in the Best New British and Irish Poets 201<\/em>8 anthology. They reveal a range of psychological complexities \u2013 often directed to God or the nature of human suffering. Here I have tried to bear witness, stricken at times with guilt about potential voyeurism, to the limits of love and pain. This has been done, though, with the hope that the journey \u2013 my Via Dolorosa<\/em> \u2013 will connect with readers or provide solace for those who\u2019ve lived through similar grief.<\/p>\n As a whole, the collection is described well by Patricia McCarthy, who observes: \u2018This powerfully moving, even harrowing, collection cuts to the very heart of loss. Yet it also celebrates a very special, strong, sensuous love that over-rides mental illness, an age-gap, and eventual physical illness, leading to the slow death of the beloved. These poems, while honouring his lover for her talent as an artist, her femininity and eccentricity, do not shy away from the graphic. They explore, analyse and sensitively articulate, through startling vivid images, often impressionistic and surreal, a whole world of time present and past, urban landscapes, seasides, claustrophobic interiors, ghosts, different kinds of sight and the liminal, questionable borders between dream and reality in a recognisable world of medicines, mobile phones and selfies. The haunting final elegy unites all the previous poems and demonstrates achingly \u201cthe price of love\u201d. This is a poet to watch.\u2019<\/p>\n Patrick Wright is an Associate Lecturer in English Literature and Creative Writing at the Open University.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u2018These are love poems at their most intense. Poems that celebrate the beloved as an artist with an alchemist\u2019s imagination and bide closely to her through illness in such a deeply affecting way that as a reader, I felt her … Continue reading
\n\u2018like this her age\u2019, juggling Naproxen and Co-codamol.
\nI think of your liver, think of your organs, think
\nstill of your brain in its skull as you sleep;
\nI think of your sunken eye sockets,
\nthe flight of your face in dream.<\/p>\n
\nDown here, an anteroom where outpatients mingle.
\nEverything tinged with the unreal:
\nfrom plasma screens to the walls and the vending machine \u2013
\nits crisps and sweets glint with surplus significance
\nThe nurse offers me watermelon, hands me Allsorts;
\nthe nurse smiles like no angel, a smile unreadable.<\/p>\n
\nand carboplatin gets pumped through the heart\u2019s blood
\nto zap the cells gone astray since surgery.
\nHere that\u2019s about all I know, with uncertainty.
\nNo one talks, not even couples beside each other
\nin the bucket chairs.
\nThough the ghosts in the empty ones talk. They talk to me.<\/p>\n
\non gravel: an ending if ever there was one. Let us slalom
\nround statues of Mary, grottos in grounds, funerary fetishes.<\/p>\n
\nphoto off the wall (she never saw), smell of softened linens,
\nfolded neatly with inventory, for no-one especially.<\/p>\n
\nno H-bomb to defuse on the horizon. Ask for nothing
\nas the sun pops, extinguishes. Let it end as a balloon.<\/p>\n
\nLet the leaves fall sometimeish in September.
\nLet unhappy accidents happen on dual carriageways.<\/p>\n