Kathleen Bainbridge’s “Inscape” explores loss, acceptance and turning to look towards a more positive future. There’s a sequence that re-examines studying Lorca. Her aim is to invoke and create an image or mood in her reader rather than explicitly detail her subject, allowing the reader space to inhabit and interpret the poems. “To Curiosity” explores love,
“I never gave my heart to you,
you crept up close and stole it
from my shadow.
A Japanese calligrapher’s brush
creates both word and thing
each time anew.”
It’s a gentle poem. Here love isn’t the shivers-down-the-spine, head over heels variety, but the soft, gradual realisation that there’s a person you can’t live without. The soft vowels in the first stanza quoted echo its sense. The second quoted stanza looks at handwriting, more intimate than typed words, and how it’s never quite the same even if the same words are made. Japanese is based on pictograms so the calligraphy isn’t just words, but images. It’s an image of enduring love: you know this person, what makes them tick but even a routine day can create new memories, a new way of seeing something familiar which reinforces the love between them.
It’s a love that endures after death. In “Holdfast”, i.m. Bainbridge’s late husband, Bill Moran, starts with “you fold your hand/ into mine” and continues the idea of love despite small irritating habits, when he sliced bread,
“I have to hide my eyes. You wonder aloud
at the roll of a batsman’s wrist, the fine rain
of Misty’s glissando shimmy. My gold band
stays on your fingerbone under the ground,
I see you wave to me often, cheering me on.”
The present tense is used even though these are memories as if the speaker isn’t yet ready to let go. He still has his wedding ring, the ring she put on his finger. Despite death, he’s still a presence in her life, but it’s a supportive presence.
The title poem explores self-development,
“I parted company with myself without a sound,
mind clear as champagne racing up a glass
to overflow, then settling. It was cloudless,
blue as an Arctic summer, sharp as ice, angular
as winter trees – the feeling lasted years:
it burned so bright I never saw the ash
on all sides, the scorched ground,
the forest fires in the distance.”
We can’t return to the past and can’t live the same life twice. Living in the past traps us there nad becomes a form of disassociation, numbing us from the current day and removing us from new sensations and a future.
The “Looking for Lorca” sequence has an epigram from Bly suggesting Lorca as a secret friend, someone you read and carry with you. The second poem, “What Does Life Want?” imagines having a drink with an imaginary Lorca,
“What does life want? A touch of winter consoles the green fizz
of August trees, toes dipped in snowmelt from the Sierra.
The cathedral’s bulk echoes with shouts of unborn children
chasing you down the river and mutes the angel-boy who sings
for coins in Calle Boabdil. When silence
stills the bells and the moon comes out
its chaste rose will scent the night,
silver these streets.”
It’s evocative with specific details and packed with ghosts suggesting a fluid boundary between past, present and future. Even in the silence, there’s still movement as fragrance of the flowers fills the air. It’s a sensual poem that doesn’t offer an answer, allowing readers to figure it out for themselves, which implies that life may want different things from different people and that’s how it should be. Ghosts appear in the fifth poem, “The Crime was in Granada”,
“I see you moving among the trees,
I know your voice, the music that you played
when I was young and like a girl in a song
I run downstairs too late and find you gone.
There was another August night,
there was a car and you and others
travelling the moonless road to Víznar.
Your name was lost for years.
Out there on the hill your grave lies
in the dust beyond the olive groves.”
The first quoted stanza implies a game of hide and seek, the speaker knows the poet is there, it’s just a matter of finding him. The third quoted stanza mirrors this idea but this time there are fewer clues. The speaker knows the poet’s body is someone but its state of being hidden is more serious, the poet is at risk of being forgotten and remaining unfound.
After the sequence, the collection turns back to personal loss and a baker boy style hat worn by Dickens’ Artful Dodger and the speaker in “Me the Dodger” which starts, “I put it on, looked in the glass and posed,/ Get it, it’s you, your face behind me smiled.” The hat is worn through many good memories,
“In twenty years I lost it a dozen times
till it floated free of the car I drowned
in Devil’s Water one night and sailed away
out of my reach. I thought of you then:
the December day we put you in the ground,
it hid my face and kept me from the rain.”
The hat became a constant companion, even if it wasn’t exactly the same one throughout. Naturally it was part of her funeral outfit, protecting her from the weather and also the gazes of others. It allowed her a private moment as the coffin was lowered into the ground. A moment free of the worry of how she appeared or how others might interpret her expressions or tears or lack of.
Throughout “Inscape”, Kathleen Bainbridge evokes an inner landscape of sensations, of ghosts, of love and care by building images and invoking senses. The poems are meticulously sketched but allow the reader to focus on wherever draws their eye and draw on their personal experiences and perspectives when reading the poems. The overall sense if of quiet, sensitive poems build on layers of details.
“Inscape” is available from Vane Women Poets.
Emma Lee’s The Significance of a Dress is available from Arachne Press. The link also has a trailer featuring the title poems and samples of some of the poems from the collection. It is also available as an eBook.
Emma Lee's Blog 