Poetry review – MY LOVER AS HOUDINI: Rennie Halstead considers the sense of loss conjured up in Robert Seatter’s poems about an abruptly ended love affair
My Lover as Houdini
Robert Seatter
Paekakariki Press 2023
limited edition of 250 copies
isbn 9781908133557
£10
My Lover as Houdini is a collaborative enterprise, with poetry from Robert Seatter and art work from Jessica Palmer. The focus of this limited edition collection is the sudden disappearance of a lover, without explanation, and the battle to come to terms with the loss experienced by the poet. The collection falls into two parts. The imagining of the lost lover as different characters or objects figures in nine of the poems, whilst the other poems in the collection have a thread of loss running through them.
The poems imagining the lost lover tend to focus on the mystery of his disappearance: “Is this another love poem about you when I want it to be about rhubarb?” is the opening poem of the collection, setting the scene of his love affair in an unlikely poem about this vegetable / fruit. Here Seatter is using rhubarb as a metaphor for the unlikely things that appear ordinary but can have great value, like a lover. The vegetable grows from ‘short, stubby rhizomes / and really a vegetable not a fruit at all.’ Rhubarb is a plant full of mystery, ‘harvested by candlelight in forcing sheds’ and ‘tending to a profusion of leaves’. The missing lover loves the red stalks of this vegetable and ‘hunts them out in every supermarket.’ And we learn that the missing lover isn’t the only one to value the mysterious vegetable. Marco Polo writing from Samarkand speaks of ‘the most precious merchandise, / silks, musk, rubies, rhubarb, / baled and ready to bring home.’
This then, appears to be something of an off-beat love, and this curiously endearing poem creates a sense of affection, with all the oddities and quirkiness of relationships. It’s the collection’s launch-pad and the very ordinariness of rhubarb as a vegetable sets us up for the voyage into the curious and bizarre that features in some of the poems to come.
The second poem, picks up the scene setting role. “A Short History of Romance” is a numbered list poem, a catalogue of a relationship. The lover has left, and the house is full of leftover belongings like the size 11 wellington boots and the button that both starts the poem (with the lover doing up and undoing the button on his blue jacket on their first date) and also ends it (with him doing up the button before leaving).
But this lover doesn’t just leave. There is no blazing row or heart to heart talk. He just disappears without trace. In “My Lover as Houdini”
He’s a disappearing act—
total, acclaimed, his name
on everyone’s lips: where’s
he gone, Mr Vanishing?
The poem imagines the lover thrown into the Thames, bound in chains and locks and never resurfacing, though reports of his being seen in other streets suggest he is alive but absent.
The theme of the lover as a different persona recurs in several poems. I particularly like “My Lover as a Collage,” which takes the elements that make up somebody’s identity and history, their name, their appearance, places they have been, things they have done, and dismantles them in a search for understanding, rather like dismantling a clock to find out how it works. The letters of the lover’s name, his photo, the maps of his history are all cut up, reassembled into a collage, an artistic homage to the lost. The end result is :
Now I glue my life back
to something else
where you and I
never met, never loved.
“My Lover as an Undercover Agent” takes a different view, questioning whether the lover has ever been real, whether the poet has truly known his lover. The poem is reminiscent of the reactions of women betrayed by police spies infiltrating their lives, and their personal relationships. This is not a case of ‘You knew me and tired of me.’ It’s more ‘You took trouble to make sure I never knew you at all.’
I know now he’s been one all his life,
though the effect is authentic:
[…]
While for my part I was credulous,
utterly believing,
[…]
right up to his vanishing
with that one impenetrable look—
In “My Lover as British Rail Lost Property” Seatter writes in a very different, impersonal style, as if filling in the requisite form: ‘If you think you have lost him / on a train or a station / tell us about him.’
As the poem develops, the poet begins to list the things the lost property might want to ask:
Please record too
how he flicked his raincoat
over his shoulder
saying I think I'll go now
at your last encounter
Other poems in the collection pick up the theme of loss in a different more reflective way.“Absence is here” works well because it picks up that sense of loss people feel in a wide range of circumstances. The loss of his lover is not unlike the loss of bereavement
Everyday it’s here
It wears your clothes, your shoes
It laughs like you
It cracks your bad jokes
The same idea is developed in “Émigré” where the abandoned lover seems ‘to have two separate lives: / one with you, one without.’, where he finds himself a stranger:
as separate as two countries—
and like an émigré I don’t speak
the new language, don’t know the routines
Towards the end of the collection the poet recognises his new reality and comes to some sort of resolution. In “What shall I do with his shoes?” the poet is ready to think about a new start, about jettisoning some of the shared past, the left behind items that are the detritus of this failed relationship. He begins with the external images that have made their shared life: the fog, the number 94 bus and then considers the clocks, realising that it is time for things to change, to go into the metaphorical dust cart waiting ‘outside my house asking me / if I have anything to recycle’.
And in “Today I walked right past you” he sees the lost lover again in the reception of the building in which he works:
this was the long imagined
encounter, the truth telling moment
when all those carefully stored up
words would come hurtling out.
But then comes the realization ‘… looking back, you suddenly / seemed so distant, so much smaller / … So I turned / and carried on walking.’
The risk, always, with individual poems or collections about loss, whether through a broken love affair or bereavement, is tipping into the self-indulgent, the assumption that something important to you will resonate with readers. Does Seatter achieve this? He avoids the self indulgent through the objectivity of his voice, and at his best his poems transcend individual loss and tap into that wider appreciation.
Jun 24 2024
London Grip Poetry Review – Robert Seatter
Poetry review – MY LOVER AS HOUDINI: Rennie Halstead considers the sense of loss conjured up in Robert Seatter’s poems about an abruptly ended love affair
My Lover as Houdini is a collaborative enterprise, with poetry from Robert Seatter and art work from Jessica Palmer. The focus of this limited edition collection is the sudden disappearance of a lover, without explanation, and the battle to come to terms with the loss experienced by the poet. The collection falls into two parts. The imagining of the lost lover as different characters or objects figures in nine of the poems, whilst the other poems in the collection have a thread of loss running through them.
The poems imagining the lost lover tend to focus on the mystery of his disappearance: “Is this another love poem about you when I want it to be about rhubarb?” is the opening poem of the collection, setting the scene of his love affair in an unlikely poem about this vegetable / fruit. Here Seatter is using rhubarb as a metaphor for the unlikely things that appear ordinary but can have great value, like a lover. The vegetable grows from ‘short, stubby rhizomes / and really a vegetable not a fruit at all.’ Rhubarb is a plant full of mystery, ‘harvested by candlelight in forcing sheds’ and ‘tending to a profusion of leaves’. The missing lover loves the red stalks of this vegetable and ‘hunts them out in every supermarket.’ And we learn that the missing lover isn’t the only one to value the mysterious vegetable. Marco Polo writing from Samarkand speaks of ‘the most precious merchandise, / silks, musk, rubies, rhubarb, / baled and ready to bring home.’
This then, appears to be something of an off-beat love, and this curiously endearing poem creates a sense of affection, with all the oddities and quirkiness of relationships. It’s the collection’s launch-pad and the very ordinariness of rhubarb as a vegetable sets us up for the voyage into the curious and bizarre that features in some of the poems to come.
The second poem, picks up the scene setting role. “A Short History of Romance” is a numbered list poem, a catalogue of a relationship. The lover has left, and the house is full of leftover belongings like the size 11 wellington boots and the button that both starts the poem (with the lover doing up and undoing the button on his blue jacket on their first date) and also ends it (with him doing up the button before leaving).
But this lover doesn’t just leave. There is no blazing row or heart to heart talk. He just disappears without trace. In “My Lover as Houdini”
The poem imagines the lover thrown into the Thames, bound in chains and locks and never resurfacing, though reports of his being seen in other streets suggest he is alive but absent.
The theme of the lover as a different persona recurs in several poems. I particularly like “My Lover as a Collage,” which takes the elements that make up somebody’s identity and history, their name, their appearance, places they have been, things they have done, and dismantles them in a search for understanding, rather like dismantling a clock to find out how it works. The letters of the lover’s name, his photo, the maps of his history are all cut up, reassembled into a collage, an artistic homage to the lost. The end result is :
Now I glue my life back to something else where you and I never met, never loved.“My Lover as an Undercover Agent” takes a different view, questioning whether the lover has ever been real, whether the poet has truly known his lover. The poem is reminiscent of the reactions of women betrayed by police spies infiltrating their lives, and their personal relationships. This is not a case of ‘You knew me and tired of me.’ It’s more ‘You took trouble to make sure I never knew you at all.’
In “My Lover as British Rail Lost Property” Seatter writes in a very different, impersonal style, as if filling in the requisite form: ‘If you think you have lost him / on a train or a station / tell us about him.’
As the poem develops, the poet begins to list the things the lost property might want to ask:
Other poems in the collection pick up the theme of loss in a different more reflective way.“Absence is here” works well because it picks up that sense of loss people feel in a wide range of circumstances. The loss of his lover is not unlike the loss of bereavement
The same idea is developed in “Émigré” where the abandoned lover seems ‘to have two separate lives: / one with you, one without.’, where he finds himself a stranger:
Towards the end of the collection the poet recognises his new reality and comes to some sort of resolution. In “What shall I do with his shoes?” the poet is ready to think about a new start, about jettisoning some of the shared past, the left behind items that are the detritus of this failed relationship. He begins with the external images that have made their shared life: the fog, the number 94 bus and then considers the clocks, realising that it is time for things to change, to go into the metaphorical dust cart waiting ‘outside my house asking me / if I have anything to recycle’.
And in “Today I walked right past you” he sees the lost lover again in the reception of the building in which he works:
But then comes the realization ‘… looking back, you suddenly / seemed so distant, so much smaller / … So I turned / and carried on walking.’
The risk, always, with individual poems or collections about loss, whether through a broken love affair or bereavement, is tipping into the self-indulgent, the assumption that something important to you will resonate with readers. Does Seatter achieve this? He avoids the self indulgent through the objectivity of his voice, and at his best his poems transcend individual loss and tap into that wider appreciation.