Merryn Williams is impressed by the frankness and defiant spirit of Fiona Sinclair’s new collection
Wonderland
By Fiona Sinclair
Indigo Dreams Publishing
ISBN 978-1-909357-20-4
38 pp £5.99.
Fiona Sinclair is a good poet who suffers from a chronic balance disorder, and several of her poems are about physical illness or about having a ‘wasp’s nest’ in one’s head. ‘Fear of Letter Boxes’ gives the flavour:
She listens all morning for the letter box’s warning
that causes her pen to skid across a page.
Careers downstairs scanning the door mat,
gingerly pokes a pile of junk mail where buff
envelopes often lurk like adders under compost.
Opens as if defusing a bomb.
Hospital appointments are welcome as negative test results.
Shreds Reader’s Digest’s practical joke.
Down-grading her fear to code orange at a drift of white letters,
knows even these are not always innocent as they appear.
Sometimes, the friendly face of familiar handwriting
or an invitation surprising as a modest lottery win.
Still no all clear by 12 o’clock,
she peeps from curtains,
catching the postman passing her gate,
exhales as if missed out of a house-to-house search.
Sundays, strikes and snow, she is a school-kid
whose bully has been excluded for a few days.
I’m not sure about line 8 (is ‘shreds’ a noun or a verb? – probably the latter) but this is enough to convince me of her talent. It hardly matters whether or not the fears are reasonable; the feelings ring true. Certain letters, she says elsewhere, explode in the mind like letter-bombs.
Other poems refer to Marilyn Monroe, who seems to haunt western culture, the significance of clothes, and, time and again, sterility or illness. A woman throws out her pills because she has assumed for too long that she could get pregnant and now she can’t (‘so Roberta and Oliver will always be fiction’). Another is ‘ambushed’ by the dreaded question Do you have children? Women wait nervously to see if they have breast cancer or eye one another in the psychiatrist’s waiting room. Elderly relatives die.
Depressing, you may feel. But while some of these poems do take us into very dark places others suggest that even deeply damaged people can fight back. In ‘Baby Birds’ a woman asks for help and receives it. And in ‘White Christmas’ the narrator and her mother forget their problems and dance in the middle of the road in the snow.
Poetry Review Summer 2013 – Sinclair
Merryn Williams is impressed by the frankness and defiant spirit of Fiona Sinclair’s new collection
Wonderland
By Fiona Sinclair
Indigo Dreams Publishing
ISBN 978-1-909357-20-4
38 pp £5.99.
Fiona Sinclair is a good poet who suffers from a chronic balance disorder, and several of her poems are about physical illness or about having a ‘wasp’s nest’ in one’s head. ‘Fear of Letter Boxes’ gives the flavour:
She listens all morning for the letter box’s warning
that causes her pen to skid across a page.
Careers downstairs scanning the door mat,
gingerly pokes a pile of junk mail where buff
envelopes often lurk like adders under compost.
Opens as if defusing a bomb.
Hospital appointments are welcome as negative test results.
Shreds Reader’s Digest’s practical joke.
Down-grading her fear to code orange at a drift of white letters,
knows even these are not always innocent as they appear.
Sometimes, the friendly face of familiar handwriting
or an invitation surprising as a modest lottery win.
Still no all clear by 12 o’clock,
she peeps from curtains,
catching the postman passing her gate,
exhales as if missed out of a house-to-house search.
Sundays, strikes and snow, she is a school-kid
whose bully has been excluded for a few days.
I’m not sure about line 8 (is ‘shreds’ a noun or a verb? – probably the latter) but this is enough to convince me of her talent. It hardly matters whether or not the fears are reasonable; the feelings ring true. Certain letters, she says elsewhere, explode in the mind like letter-bombs.
Other poems refer to Marilyn Monroe, who seems to haunt western culture, the significance of clothes, and, time and again, sterility or illness. A woman throws out her pills because she has assumed for too long that she could get pregnant and now she can’t (‘so Roberta and Oliver will always be fiction’). Another is ‘ambushed’ by the dreaded question Do you have children? Women wait nervously to see if they have breast cancer or eye one another in the psychiatrist’s waiting room. Elderly relatives die.
Depressing, you may feel. But while some of these poems do take us into very dark places others suggest that even deeply damaged people can fight back. In ‘Baby Birds’ a woman asks for help and receives it. And in ‘White Christmas’ the narrator and her mother forget their problems and dance in the middle of the road in the snow.