Rosie Johnston finds Nancy Mattson’s poetry moves with seemingly effortless elegance while carrying a huge variety of subjects and voices
Vision On Platform 2
Nancy Mattson
Shoestring Press 2018
ISBN: 9781912524136
70pp ÂŁ10
In March 2017, some Carmelite nuns were making their way home via a north London underground station. Carmelites are an enclosed order, so it was unusual for them to be out (they had been to a meeting with the Archbishop of Westminster); but that wasnât what spurred a young commuter to photograph them on his phone. The station was Seven Sisters. The picture was posted online and went viral in no time.

Alongside the photographer was Nancy Mattson, the perfect person to capture the moment in poetry, as âVision on Platform 2â:
I didnât realise I was reading
Seamus Heaneyâs poems in Seeing Things
on the very day the Irish honour the holy
St Patrick. Let me assure you, he has no role
in this tale. A man with dreadlocks sitting
beside me on Platform 1 at Seven Sisters,
next stop Rectory Road, raised his eyes
from his smartphone and, lo, the moment
I looked up from Seeing Things, a vision
on Platform 2 appeared to us both. âBeholdâ
we would have said, but strangers never speak
at Seven Sisters. Our mouths fell open
at a row of seven nuns in black habits,
seven immaculate white wimples.
Mattson is at such ease in this, the title poem of her excellent fourth collection: âHis shot went viral on facebook and twitter,/ enchanting all save a pair of literal souls/ who believed they spied an extra holy knee/ draped in black, or an eighth sisterâs elbow.â But â here is the poetâs wry smile â âWho would accuse a man who never cuts/ his hair of cropping a redundant nun?â
Mattson was born in Winnipeg and brought up in Edmonton, Canada. She spent her childhood summers in Saskatchewan with her Finnish grandparents and has written, in her prize-winning first collection (Maria Breaks Her Silence, Coteau, 1989), the life of a 19th century Finnish woman living in Canada. Her second collection, Writing with Mercury (Flambard, 2006) and her presence the same year in Shoestringâs anthology Take Five established Mattson as a poet who strides from Canada to Finland, Italy and England, taking a variety of subjects and voices with her. If, like George Bernard Shaw, she showed her fondness for her native land by leaving it, the roots of her poetry are still deeply in the places of her family and early years. Finns and Amazons (Arrowhead, 2012) gave poetic voice to her great-aunt Lisiâs letters sent from Karelia to Saskatchewan in the 1930s. Mattsonâs poetry has an apparently effortless elegance, easy on the eye and ear, with wonderfully unobstrusive use of symmetry and refrains.
This latest collection is in three parts. The first, about childhood, starts with a stunning poem that almost made me forget to catch a train. âWading for Stonesâ takes us to the âshallows/ of the gravelly Saskatchewanâ where Mattson played as a child:
Barefoot on a wide sandbar,
ankled in silt, flour gold,
mastodon bones pureed
by glaciers, Iâm building
mudtowns with grandchildren
Before we can settle too long into grandmotherly âsiltâ, weâre off with young Nancy to see âReveen the Impossibilistâ. Like most of us, she is sure sheâll be immune to stage-hypnotist Reveenâs mesmeric powers but:
My boyfriend swore later I danced as a sugar plum fairy,
kicked off my snowboots and twirled petipa, petipa,
played an air violin, swung my elephant trunk
in a lumpen walk to the watering hole.
Section II is my favourite, about how we tell our survival stories. If weâre stumped for words, âThe Brothersâ Vow, 1946â tells us,
We will tell our stories in wood,
take turns splitting and stacking
lengths of poplar and birch. Each log,
stick and twig is a story we must tell.
In âPen and Inkâ, she addresses an artist and former âGreenham Common womanâ who âcaught babies in Brazil, cut their cords.â
Now you apply pen to paper
with the same clear purpose,
every scar a reason for a line.
Mattson performs her own magic trick of writing in a variety of voices, male and female, often with a sense that each poemâs story will be told only once, and to no-one but us. I was especially moved by the conjunction on facing pages of âHer Decisionâ:
They will come again, she fears.
The torso of this totem pole
is thicker than the hard belly
of this pregnant girl who kneels
at its foot, tracing crosses
with âEpitaph, Floatingâ, perhaps relating to the âpregnant girlâ, perhaps not:
Bury your fear she was lost in a field
Trust foxes and deer to visit her grave
Assume that nettles and thistles adorn it
and that snow and wind sing antiphons
Balance and symmetry pervade this collection and soon Mattson is telling us of another conjunction of London strangers, herself and a younger mum, who chat about getting children to sleep:
Motion is the cure
for infant insomnia, we agreed. How old is your boy?
Six months and Iâm lucky to have him. We both
nearly died at his birth when my heart gave out.
My own heart stopped at the story she gave,
unbidden, that mirrored mine over fifty years ago.
We need not speak of miracles, for we embody them.
Mattson is a poet for whom religious faith is the warp and weft of life, yet whose words are full of dance, fun and, that most Christian of vices, alcohol. Section III draws this together in some of the lightest poems of the collection. âHer Habitâ describes a nun coming into an Italian pub: âA blur of grey slid toward the barâŚâ
The barman knew her, poured four thumbs
Of mirto rosso, sweet and strong,
that Sardinian shot from the dark red berries
of myrtle bushes that crowd out the briers
in Isaiah. Like a swallower of knives
or fireballs, she threw back her head,
downed the liqueur, her crucifix bouncing.
Slow as a turtleâs head from a shell-hole,
her hand proceeded out of its sleeve
to situate her empty shot-glass on the bar,
high as an altar, with practised grace.
Not many collections combine grief, heroism, spirituality, sensuality and humour so rewardingly. Even for an atheist like me, this collection is addictive and fun.
Rosie Johnston‘s three poetry books, published by Lapwing Publications in Belfast, are Sweet Seventeens (2010), Orion (2012) and Bittersweet Seventeens (2014). Her poems have appeared or featured in Hedgerow, London Grip, Culture NI, FourxFour, The Honest Ulsterman, Ink, Sweat & Tears and in Live Canonâs anthologies 154: In Response to Shakespeareâs Sonnetâ (2016) & Â New Poems for Christmas (2018). She has read her poetry widely, including Hungerford Literary Festival, Watfordâs Big Word festival, Winchesterâs Loose Muse, the Poetry Cafe in Covent Garden, the Troubadour, Torriano, In-Words in Greenwich and Whitstableâs Harbour Books. Rosie was poet in residence for the Cambridgeshire Wildlife Trust until she moved to live by the sea in Kent. www.rosiejohnstonwrites.com
London Grip Poetry Review – Nancy Mattson
January 31, 2019 by Michael Bartholomew-Biggs • books, poetry reviews, year 2019 • Tags: books, poetry, Rosie Johnston • 0 Comments
Rosie Johnston finds Nancy Mattson’s poetry moves with seemingly effortless elegance while carrying a huge variety of subjects and voices
In March 2017, some Carmelite nuns were making their way home via a north London underground station. Carmelites are an enclosed order, so it was unusual for them to be out (they had been to a meeting with the Archbishop of Westminster); but that wasnât what spurred a young commuter to photograph them on his phone. The station was Seven Sisters. The picture was posted online and went viral in no time.
Alongside the photographer was Nancy Mattson, the perfect person to capture the moment in poetry, as âVision on Platform 2â:
Mattson is at such ease in this, the title poem of her excellent fourth collection: âHis shot went viral on facebook and twitter,/ enchanting all save a pair of literal souls/ who believed they spied an extra holy knee/ draped in black, or an eighth sisterâs elbow.â But â here is the poetâs wry smile â âWho would accuse a man who never cuts/ his hair of cropping a redundant nun?â
Mattson was born in Winnipeg and brought up in Edmonton, Canada. She spent her childhood summers in Saskatchewan with her Finnish grandparents and has written, in her prize-winning first collection (Maria Breaks Her Silence, Coteau, 1989), the life of a 19th century Finnish woman living in Canada. Her second collection, Writing with Mercury (Flambard, 2006) and her presence the same year in Shoestringâs anthology Take Five established Mattson as a poet who strides from Canada to Finland, Italy and England, taking a variety of subjects and voices with her. If, like George Bernard Shaw, she showed her fondness for her native land by leaving it, the roots of her poetry are still deeply in the places of her family and early years. Finns and Amazons (Arrowhead, 2012) gave poetic voice to her great-aunt Lisiâs letters sent from Karelia to Saskatchewan in the 1930s. Mattsonâs poetry has an apparently effortless elegance, easy on the eye and ear, with wonderfully unobstrusive use of symmetry and refrains.
This latest collection is in three parts. The first, about childhood, starts with a stunning poem that almost made me forget to catch a train. âWading for Stonesâ takes us to the âshallows/ of the gravelly Saskatchewanâ where Mattson played as a child:
Before we can settle too long into grandmotherly âsiltâ, weâre off with young Nancy to see âReveen the Impossibilistâ. Like most of us, she is sure sheâll be immune to stage-hypnotist Reveenâs mesmeric powers but:
Section II is my favourite, about how we tell our survival stories. If weâre stumped for words, âThe Brothersâ Vow, 1946â tells us,
In âPen and Inkâ, she addresses an artist and former âGreenham Common womanâ who âcaught babies in Brazil, cut their cords.â
Mattson performs her own magic trick of writing in a variety of voices, male and female, often with a sense that each poemâs story will be told only once, and to no-one but us. I was especially moved by the conjunction on facing pages of âHer Decisionâ:
with âEpitaph, Floatingâ, perhaps relating to the âpregnant girlâ, perhaps not:
Balance and symmetry pervade this collection and soon Mattson is telling us of another conjunction of London strangers, herself and a younger mum, who chat about getting children to sleep:
Mattson is a poet for whom religious faith is the warp and weft of life, yet whose words are full of dance, fun and, that most Christian of vices, alcohol. Section III draws this together in some of the lightest poems of the collection. âHer Habitâ describes a nun coming into an Italian pub: âA blur of grey slid toward the barâŚâ
Not many collections combine grief, heroism, spirituality, sensuality and humour so rewardingly. Even for an atheist like me, this collection is addictive and fun.
Rosie Johnston‘s three poetry books, published by Lapwing Publications in Belfast, are Sweet Seventeens (2010), Orion (2012) and Bittersweet Seventeens (2014). Her poems have appeared or featured in Hedgerow, London Grip, Culture NI, FourxFour, The Honest Ulsterman, Ink, Sweat & Tears and in Live Canonâs anthologies 154: In Response to Shakespeareâs Sonnetâ (2016) & Â New Poems for Christmas (2018). She has read her poetry widely, including Hungerford Literary Festival, Watfordâs Big Word festival, Winchesterâs Loose Muse, the Poetry Cafe in Covent Garden, the Troubadour, Torriano, In-Words in Greenwich and Whitstableâs Harbour Books. Rosie was poet in residence for the Cambridgeshire Wildlife Trust until she moved to live by the sea in Kent. www.rosiejohnstonwrites.com