Snow Child (Pindrop Press, 2011)
Abegail Morley has the talent for the cool, long-line lyric. Snow Child, her second collection, is rife with the viscerally felt modulations of a mind ill at ease. These poems are pre-occupied with “love”: a word moved from poem to poem (“your mouth a love poem”; “love hurts”; “We pile up a love songs”), or present behind what is actually said (“my body yearns for you at night”; “your name burns my skin”; “I want your footprint. Just one”). Sometimes things don’t seem to add up. “Unstable” flits beautifully through “mercury”, “beauty”, “later” and “gravity”, but the success of the central conceit depends on accepting the mercury that is being stepped in affects one’s gravity. “I learn this from him” plays with this mismatch suggestively: a man who writes “love poems with loops and doodles around the borders” serves slightly bitter coffee. Sentiment is flirted with before being undercut (“I think he’ll put his thumb / on the dimple in my chin, but he doesn’t”). Between poems words retreat, only to regather and recollect themselves. Morley’s subtlety is not always obvious from single poems read in isolation, but as she herself writes: “there is a deficiency in loss / it cannot be found”.
“Light” recurs with particular insistence: A “trick of the light” becomes “a squat of light” or more pointedly, “when you go… you leave part of yourself in the hallway, trapped in the afternoon’s half-light”. The unsubtle “love hurts” sentiment is transfigured into a delicate longing. The mindset of a protagonist during “visiting hour” is unsettled by “light”; saved by paradoxical obliquity: “I move from the room with the piercing light”. That “with” allows resistance to remain unoffered; to avoid being looked at directly one must move in the right direction. “Water” is another motif (“rain weeping from our sleeves”; “you leech into the water”; “nothing smells of you / it pelted with rain last night”). Liquid becomes a paradoxically stable way of expressing loss. These reiterated words all seem part of the grander scheme of, as the final line of the collection has it, “trying to catch myself, before I disappear from view”.
Aime Williams, Times Literary Supplement
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Morley is a real talent. She combines that rare gift of forensic self-scrutiny with an absence of self-pity, of being able to convey a richness of emotional experience through a punctilious use of imagery. One example here in full:
In the story I’m dreaming of Pickwell Lake
when it’s dark and only a squat of light
hunches at the far side.
He holds me up,
rubs my scales, fins, gills, whispers
to me whilst looking at the sky
and pressing me in grubby fists,
weighs me, pound for pound.
He takes a skinning knife – I’m tiny-boned;
bone on thin boniness. Later, my eyes
solidify and chink on the plate.
(Angler)
Here Morley exploits the image of the fish as victim to its extreme, a catch, just as a lover devoured callously in a relationship. This is beautifully clinched with the eyes which ‘solidify and chink on the plate’, devoid now of life, almost as currency.
The disturbing nature of a range of relationships is explored with the same meticulous craft. ‘Snow child’ itself is one such example where a child is mourned before its birth, yet perversely it has the ability to ‘spit my name’ and have ‘a possessing smile’. Bizarrely the ‘child’ is both ‘warm’ and ‘too cold. / The ice found you – / it erased your fingerprints.’
The inexactness of what is happening is, ironically, part of the compelling nature of this and many others of Morley’s poems, and reinforces the disordered emotional world she describes. There are, however, others where the pattern is more decipherable such as ‘The Letter’ where she traces the spit on an envelope to a lover through to the café where he stirs his tea and pays, and the washer-upper ‘stirs bubbles in the sink, washes me away.’ However whimsical a notion, this fits well with other poems dealing with annihilation such as ‘Breaking up’ in which a lover steals letters from her name until ‘When he starts on the vowels, / she’ll disappear completely.’
Comparisons with Plath inevitably arise but Morley is her own poet. There is a confidence in the way she handles her themes that defies any dependence on others as in ‘Manic episode’, for instance, where the persona is reassured that
You’ll get through, they say. Just wait.
And I’m clawing at my hands,
just blood and sinew telling each other stories:
a hand-me-down of cells
and secrets of sins.
The waiting to come through culminates in more surreal images:
I breathe on mirrors, steal eggs from the chickens,
hold them up to the sun waiting for lungs
to lunge with new air and for lips
to snap open.
Soon, they say. Soon.
But all is not about the destructive aspect of relationships. There are some beautiful love lyrics such as ‘Make me love you’ and ‘Your best side’ as well as the marvellous ‘Moved in’ where she has a different take on romance:
Now he he’s here, he’s pissing me off….
I fancy launching him like a rocket.
I’d be Crete to his Icarus – propel him to the sun.
Space prohibits me from going further. Suffice it to say, read it or better still, buy it and read it.
Malcolm Carson, Other Poetry
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Abegail Morley’s Snow Child is a tour de force that moves on from her excellent debut short-listed for the Forward Prize for best first collection (How to Pour Madness into a Teacup, Cinnamon Press). Morley has an uncanny gift for the intense and slightly disturbing, for looking objectively and in minute detail at what might otherwise be unbearable and bringing it into the light.
The clarity of these poems is dazzling, always perfectly controlled. George Eliot wrote, ‘If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.’ Morley approaches such vision, yet also the skill to mediate it with elegance. Jan Fortune, Envoi
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Abegail Morley’s second collection focuses on a sense of loss and relationships, effectively using a sparse lyricism. In “I learn this from him” where he has written
“love poems with loops and doodles around the borders.
He says he’ll read them to me some time. I realise this means
I’ll be coming back. The coffee is strong, slightly bitter,
grainy at the bottom of the cup – dries on my tongue.
He runs his hand down my cheek. I think he’ll put his thumb
in the dimple on my chin, but he doesn’t. I feel
the touch of his fingertips on my collarbone.”
The poem captures the sense of a doomed relationship, not just in the bitter dregs and reluctance to return but also in his actions: he’s reading love poems not written for her and that controlling action of fingertips on her collarbone.
The title poem is worth quoting in full:
Snow Child
I didn’t think you
would exist this much,
not now, not with this snow.
You are unborn,
you are not my child.
I did not extend life to you.
You spit my name;
a tiny ball of phlegm
keeps itself in a tight circle.
I retch.
There are teeth in it.
It has a possessing smile.
Frost has spoken to you,
it has a soft sound.
Its mouth is small.
I lost you to a glass jar;
you have a fin and a tail.
You sleep.
I hear you breathe.
I didn’t think your breath
would be this warm.
You are too cold.
The ice found you –
it erased your fingerprints.
With the exception of stanzas three and four, each is built around long vowel sounds, creating a soft drawn-out feel fitting with the theme of grief and loss. Stanzas three and four are built around shorter vowels and harder sounds, echoing the change in mood and capturing anger and denial. The change from speaking of the snow child in second and then third person and then back again to second in the fifth stanza further underlines the mood. The poet is firmly in control and all the elements within the poem complement each other.
“Snow Child” contains focused, controlled poems that demonstrate poetic skill and a precise use of language to achieve poetic aims.
Emma Lee
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Abegail Morley’s first collection How to Pour Madness into a Teacup, a winner of the Cinnamon Press Poetry Collection Competition and shortlisted for the Forward Best First Collection prize, was always going to be a hard act to follow.
With the very smart Pindrop Press edition of Snow Child, Morley has gone for a swift second collection (published just two years after How to Pour Madness into a Teacup) which bears the same hallmark of emotional power. Snow Child again demonstrates that this poet is a force to be reckoned with.
Running to sixty-three pages of poems, the collection could seem in need of some pruning, but part of the message of Morley’s work appears to me to be its protracted nature. She has a way of approaching her subjects from several different angles, and the resulting layers of emotion, the build-up of impressions, the accretions of weight, are central to the effect of the collection as a whole.
The poems describe and inhabit a state of super-sensitivity (this term is more aware of a need for covering than the word ‘rawness’, though that word is tempting). It is manifested in ‘Angler’ as the skinned fish with eyes that “solidify and chink on the plate”. It appears in ‘Family Album’ as a yearning: “At the end of the darkness is the thread of my child./ I carry the weight of the dead”. It re-emerges in ‘Northern Line’ as “a disembodiment,/ a straining to replace nothing with something”. This super-sensitivity, questing comfort and seldom finding it, gives the poems their urgency and provides their uniformity of tone and drive.
Many of the poems focus on loss of one kind and another. Often the loss seems predatory, ineluctable, as in ‘Wasps’:
By now you’re 50 miles away at the Dartford Tunnel,
thrumming your way through. Here my skull’s stuffed
with wasps bashing their wings, wedged between
bone and skin. Soon their humming stops.
The loss is generally associated with menace, violence, the potential for more loss, making the compound effect of the collection hefty. In ‘Knoll Beach’, the speaker not only envisions the subject of the poem “slumped like sculpted rock … shoulders slack inside your coat” but shows layer after layer of loss – words shifting their balance, rocks breaking and opening “like scars, thin/ white lines bruising blue then mauve”. Until, finally “your body’s gone/ and all that’s left is the yell of gulls”.
The more loss there is at work in the poems themselves, that is to say the more the poet strips them down, the more effective and affecting they become, and in one of my favourites, ‘Sea’, everything depends on the last word, the possibilities it offers. Here is the whole poem:
I hang seaweed on a doornail.
It is psychic, predicts all manner of things.
My weather glass, my barometer of change,
it keeps away spirits and fire.
I know its air-bladders are mouths
and they talk of nothing but rain
when I pass. I hear their whispers.
I wait for the sun to die.
Pursing my lips and whistling across the sea,
I bring home the wind, the tide turns.
These are determined poems – their bleak beauty will hollow out a place in you, and will rest there.
Clare Best, Peony Moon
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How to Pour Madness into a Teacup (Cinnamon, 2009)
“It has fallen to Abegail Morley to draw aside the veil suspended between the world we know and the unholy of unholies that lies beyond. We are shown the painted veil of everyday life, only to have it slashed with a knife before our eyes, allowing us to glimpse the horror that lies within, sometimes frightening but always lit with a strange visionary beauty. Morley’s poems are daredevil ambassadors to a savage place.” Hugo Williams
“These poems are moving, sensitively written, compelling and well worth a read.” Sophie Hannah
“Abegail Morley’s collection, How to Pour Madness into a Teacup, unsettles me for completely different reasons. Morley exposes to the light the trauma, and sometimes horror, of the ordinary. But it is an ordinary tinged with creeping insanity. She presents a vulnerable, closed and private world, peopled but somehow temporary: “she doens’t leave prints”, “the day is lost, the memory gone”. She deals with material sensitivity, refusing to rely on what is predictable.
Her poems are short and intense, glimpses into an intimate, private world. At just five lines long, “Therapy” is vivid, impressionistic and surprising:
Unwinding her legs from
the chair that holds them
she dives underwater,
her screams softening.
She lives in a world of action replays.
The brevity of some of the pieces feels unsatisfactory at first, as do the similes and metaphors, which feels stale on a first reading: “cling like limpets”; “widening to a stretched yawn”. But on second and third readings, the layers pull apart and reveal the meaning like an intricate exploded drawing. The reader is sucked in, like the constant “she” in the piece “Submerging”, where she is “caught in the water’s throat”. The tension, once created, is never broken.
The “she” of the poems is our guide. Brittle and yet strong, “she” battles with her words, finding liberation in them. Honesty pours out of her and yet the words are always in danger of being compromised, as is the woman herself. Vulnerability runs throughout, as does anger, concentrated into the minutiae of domestic life. In “Cry Baby”, the simple domestic task of sewing a hem undergoes a metamorphosis into a dark act:
she sews tears
to the hem of her coat
with thread that doesn’t match
The brevity is clever, almost as if the place she takes us is too painful to stay. Morley offers no final relief in the concluding pieces. In the devastating “Passenger”, “she” is lost to the “inconsolable past, / unresolved”. Her past “circles the terminus [...] like some terminal illness /waiting to begin.”
Morley’s collection makes me feel always on the brink, on the verge of destruction, but I want more. Her declarations hand in the air, neat and deceptively simple: “He is the serious, silent listener / stern as a constant funeral”, with intoxicating atmosphere which follows me even as I close the book and do something else. A strangely beautiful collection.”
Laura Bottomley
“There’s the curious juxtaposition of tears, dark and rain, the man and the child and the moons. It reminds me of that quote from Anne Sexton – ‘the walk from breakfast to madness’ which so perfectly illustrates the invisible line between domestic normality and a state of unreality.”
Kathleen Jones
“Abegail Morley’s first poetry collection How to Pour Madness into a Teacup is brutally depressive. Repeatedly she gives us images of a love which is being ignored, left stranded, kept at arms’ length: of a woman whose life is being ripped up by a man who cares only about himself, about a woman who craves the touch that is denied her, of a series of revenges on a love gone wrong which hurt rather than heal. It is a sequence not unlike some of the darker of Selima Hill’s sequences, but stripped, almost, of the surreal asides with which Hill sometimes comforts the reader. As a result, the collection is coolly obsessive, raw, hard to avert one’s eyes from, exquisitely painful.
What holds it together is the brevity of the poems and the sharp, almost fearful strop of the images. Time after time, a line is packed with loathing – with terror – with the acute understanding of what it is like to be treated like an object. What is breathtaking is the cool way in which Morley comes at the subject again and again, the little flashes of detail that render the speaker and reader helpless. It is rare to find a collection which is so hypnotically filled with trapped desire. It is like being inside the head of Munch’s The Scream. It is like nothing else around: the poetry of rejection. That’s what marks it out and makes it so special. Even a mundane setting inspires the writing. In ‘Slice’, the man and the woman are in a street. He has a burger:
Between biting his burger
and talking to her,
he stops at the kerb
of Gerald Street.
He smiles at her,
squeezes tomato pips between his teeth,
slides them through gaps,
and licks them away without a thought.
Morley leaves us to fill in the missing words, the absence of touch, the self-seeking indolence of the man, who is so self-absorbed that you half-hope a runaway taxi will emerge from another poem and run the bastard over. Not long after this poem there is a succession of poems in which the speaker tries to drown herself, but even here there is no solace:
her lips cling like limpets to her drowning mouth.
Her face swells, it purls and falls. (‘Submerging’)
And yet still the couple are together:
He reads her by her scars.
Does he remember writing them? (‘One Last Time’)
When (it seems) he leaves her, she is driven into a slow frenzy of memory (never remorse), while trying to cleanse herself (there are several startling images of attempts at purification): ‘Tonight she will have to wash the madness out of her jeans.’ In one of the most startling poems, at the end of the tether of poems, she makes a statue of the man, and then dismembers it. Every time you think the sequence is resolving itself, either into the speaker’s madness, or even escape, the man returns. Sometimes the couple seems like an old married couple, sometimes like a pair of teenagers – the slippages of time and place keep the reader alert. Writing about depression/ anger/ longing is hard. This is a brilliantly uncomfortable sequence, and you won’t get it out of your head. No matter how hard you wash.”
Bill Greenwell
“How to Pour Madness into a Teacup is a compelling first collection from a poet whose exploration of mental illness is acutely observed, wry, poignant, dark and humane. Deceptively simple poems are layered with precise observations and meaning that resonates long after reading. Lucid and accessible, this is poetry that takes risk with stunning results.”
Rowan Fortune-Wood
“Morley’s writing has intense fragility and strength; it’s simple and immensely complex, utterly recognisable and as unreal as a bad dream. With all these paradoxes it’s hard to express what I felt, except to say some of the pieces feel like snowflakes, magically patterned and melting, and some of them make me think of the endless reciprocity of a hall of mirrors. Some of them seem like they’ve been written about me, and some of them take me beyond discrete veils into an unknown world which makes me shiver. They are all wonderfully crafted, visually and sensually amazing, and – like the mania of one of her characters – they glow through darkness like the sun at midnight. A fantastic achievement.”
