Rosie Johnston is impressed by Martin Figuraâs boldness in applying Catastrophe Theory to the mechanics of human relationships
Doctor Zeemanâs Catastrophe Machine Martin Figura Cinnamon Press 2016 ISBN-10: 1910836184 80pp ÂŁ8.99
None of us wants to be defined by a single incident from the past, but readers of Martin Figuraâs work will know that when he was nine years old, his father killed his mother. Figuraâs collection Whistle (Arrowhead Press, 2010) â dedicated âIn Memoriamâ to his mother, and to his present wife, poet Helen Ivory â is a masterpiece of oblique understatement laden with powerful emotions. Many of the poems have the simplicity of an ink sketch, complete in their brevity, and the collection honours many facets of the familyâs loss.
Figura likes a good laugh too and is known to be a hilarious performance poet. Whistle became a highly acclaimed show and this present collection is having the same treatment, with its performance at the Camden Roundhouse reviewed here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMLWKFdG2Xw in London Grip.
Despite the dramatic title, Doctor Zeemanâs Catastrophe Machine leads us into more commonplace family territory this time: divorce. Sir Erik Christopher Zeeman (1925 â 2016) will be known to mathematicians as the man behind Catastrophe Theory, a branch of singularity theory that defines how tiny alterations in circumstances can lead to minute changes in behaviour that together can culminate in fracturing the entire status quo. Zeeman was thinking mathematically; Figura uses the theory to shine light, without shadows of guilt or blame, on the end of his first marriage. In the title poem, he imagines Doctor Zeeman explaining his theory to the warring couple with the help of a Catastrophe Machine which presumably features, elastic bands and all, in the collectionâs show. Here is the whole poem:
No more than elastic bands and a wheel nailed to plywood. My wife rolls her eyes when the doctor shows how our moods stretch out, how at a certain point the slightest shift in the pendulum can set us spinning. He draws arrows with a red felt pen on a sheet of paper, talks about displacement and its dependency on the load while he twists it in his hands. Youâre here he says smiling above the fold on the cusp of catastrophe where Iâve written growl.
This is essential Figura, askance yet precise, keeping us unsure whether he is joking or heart-broken.
The collection leads us in with âRooksâ, a nature poem, beautiful in its sense of place and time:
Their broken voices call against the hard ground of a dayâs work. They are the dark coming home in dissonant scores until this field of stubble is soft-black with them, the telephone wires thick and bowed. Ten thousand grey tongues honour the dusk the Lowestoft commuter train, the woods of Buckenham Carrs. Thrown like muck from a wheel until the sky is blind with them, they are the exact opposite of stars. And here they come, all bluster, their ostentatious flight across the moon to the hierarchy of branches, to the rough belonging of bark in their claws.
It was the second reading that brought it for me into the arid emotional land of marital disintegration.
Whistle works so well because of its single subject matter: June Figuraâs demise in 1966 and its long aftermath. Doctor Zeeman is broader in scope, taking in for example an elegy to Liverpool, Figuraâs birthplace, called âParadise Streetâ. Its eight parts range from fire-watching in the Blitz in 1941 â âThe Mersey is a hungry mouth, her dark city night / torn down by bombers, her fearful people / in cellarsâ â through recovery in the 1950s and â60s, the years of Thatcher and being European City of Culture (2008) to a recent visit by Michael Heseltine â âTarzan returns, silver maned in a long / camel coatâ â always with nineteenth century square-riggers heaving and bobbing at the quays.
Domestic violence keeps breaking through, though it is not always clear whose:
Bird He doesnât like her mouth of neat teeth, its yaff, mistakes his own temper for courage, the careful placing of a blow as restraint, a skill.
This home violence reprise builds so that by the time we reach âCameraâ, Figuraâs economy is deadly:
Camera Is an eye as a mouth is sprung blades snapping shut is your dad in a suit is prepared to lie is full of regrets is better behaved on Sundays is an empty bed in a room is carefully placed is elsewhere is proof of the loss
In 1972 Figura joined the Royal Army Pay Corps aged 15, as people looking for family security often do, and rose over the following 25 years to the rank of Major. In the midst of this varied collection, almost hidden, his poem âThe Machine Gunâ (after Stephen Grahamâs memoir âA Private in the Guardsâ, 1919) describes how a machine gun is âdesigned to ⌠reduce a man / tangled in the wire to ragsâ and
has an open bolt to permit cooling between bursts.
The brain needs to cool between of bursts of these words; I found myself wondering if here is this collectionâs core where the poetâs meditations on his military experience and family history come together in a sense that perhaps he and his family, all of them including his father, are victims of the twentieth centuryâs many layers of violence, with this gun, this military catastrophe machine as the symbol.
In Stagâs Leap (2012) Sharon Olds invites us to share every painful breath of her divorce. Figura is more reticent and at the same time deeper, combining playfulness with a fearless generosity that makes this an enriching, unforgettable read. I look forward to the show.
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Rosie Johnston‘s three poetry pamphlets are published by Lapwing Publications (Belfast), the latest Bittersweet Seventeens in March 2014. Her poems have appeared in various magazines and in April 2016 she was commissioned to take part in Live Canonâs ‘154 Project’ celebrating Shakespeare’s 400th anniversary. She has been poet in residence for the Cambridgeshire Wildlife Trust since 2014. www.rosie-johnston.com
Doctor Zeemanâs Catastrophe Machine by Martin Figura
November 8, 2016 @ 12:46 pm
[…] is my latest review for London Grip, a wonderful on-line arts magazine with a particularly strong and varied poetry section. If you […]
Dr Zeemanâs Catastrophe Machine â MARTIN FIGURA
July 15, 2019 @ 10:37 am
[…] “In Stagâs Leap (2012) Sharon Olds invites us to share every painful breath of her divorce. Figura is more reticent and at the same time deeper, combining playfulness with a fearless generosity that makes this an enriching, unforgettable read. I look forward to the show.” -Rosie Johnston, London Grip […]