Poetry review â SEHNSUCHT: Stephen Claughton admires Christine McNeillâs intriguing and enigmatic poems
Sehnsucht
Christine McNeill
Shoestring Press
ISBN 978-1-912524-63-1
ÂŁ10.00
âPride of place have foreign words / encrusted with meanings,â says Christine McNeill in her poem, âA suitcase for my mother tongueâ. As she is Austrian by birth, Sehnsucht wouldnât be foreign to her, but it is certainly encrusted with meanings. Translated variously as ânostalgiaâ, âlongingâ, or âdesireâ, it sounds a little like the Welsh hiraeth, although without the Celtic emphasis on place. As well as making it the title of her sixth book of poetry, she also takes as an epigraph the beginning of a poem by the German-Swedish writer, Nelly Sachs: âIt all begins with Sehnsucht âŚâ
Knowing that Sachsâs poem is about the impossibility of fulfilling our yearning for love, except in God, certainly helps in reading McNeillâs poem, âIn his employmentâ, about the relationship between a man and his secretary (âI was fuel to his Sehnsuchtâ). It begins with her being forgiven for a mistake, when âhis voice came, / like a hand putting pearls round my neckâ and ends:
At our last meal
his shaking hand spilt wine:
I wanted to reach across and touch him.
but the red spread so fast,
my handkerchief
was unable to soak it up.
McNeill isnât wilfully obscure, but she certainly likes to âtell it slantâ. A feeling for mystery is perhaps to be expected in a poet who uses the word âsoulâ (five times by my reckoning) to mean more than just âfeelingâ. But these arenât religious poems, other than in a general, pantheistic way.
Often the circumstances surrounding a poem are left deliberately unclear. âOutingâ, the first poem in the book, is about a child being taken for a trip. It begins:
Your car moved away like a whale
freed from a sandbank,
out into the open
I did not know.
Freeing a stranded whale ought to be a good thing, but there is something ominous about this. At the most basic level, it could just be that the car seems large to the little girl, but it also places her in peril and implies that the car shouldnât have been there in the first place, âparked at motherâs homeâ. The day, as described, sounds innocent enough:
We drove through the countryside,
stopped to pick berries,
scrambled around the ruins of a castle,
but there follows the more sinister âpicnicked in deep woodsâ. The suspicion that there has been more to this than meets the eye is confirmed at the journeyâs end, when: âmy heart slid out of the doorâ / ignition running like a tender muscleâ. Has the girl been abused? Is it like a later poem, âQuestion and answerâ, about a schoolteacher attempting to seduce one of his pupils, or more like the woman in âMissingâ, who temporarily absents herself to get âaway from dark feelingsâ:
She cycled along blossoming trees
away from fear,
light in the saddle,
escaping the words I canât cope.
The ambiguity in âOutingâ encapsulates the childâs uncertainty both about what has happened and about her attitude towards it, ending: âand I too small to say what I felt.â
There is an extreme use of ambiguity in âCrossingâ, where you arenâtâor I wasnâtâsure at first whether it was the partner or the relationship that had died, or was in the process of dying, or even whether the dead or living partner was speaking in the poem: âBe with me in this room where we / bed each night without wordsâ and âsee with an inner light / my hand reaching / not meeting yoursâ. The title implies that itâs someone whoâs dying and the last lines (âListen to my movingâ / such a small step, / a birdâs hopâ / I wonât be able to say afterward / what a huge distance it wasâ) suggests with the soul-as-bird image that itâs the dying person speaking. Even so, I was reluctant to give up the alternative readings: maintaining ânegative capabilityâ as a reader makes the poem multi-faceted.
A number of the poems are epiphanies, often involving light, or the weather, or birds and usually revealing a connectedness to nature. Interestingly, in poems about nature, where other people are involvedâ for instance, the migrant birds and âthe old man picking bus tickets / from a litter binâ in âKings of the airâ or the heron and âan old man / watching a small boy running / round and round the blossoming cherry treeâ from âIn a Japanese gardenââthe human and non-human exist in parallel, the connection or connectedness being provided by the poem.
Other poems are more straightforwardly narrative or anecdotal and although it may be her home ground, McNeill doesnât confine herself to the domestic: there are poems about music, art and literature, as well as Californian wildfires and Syrian refugees. There are also moving poems about death and dementia.
Her typical role is that of an observer (âand I couldnât change anything, / only watchâ, she says of a hawk plucking a dove in âSummer afternoonâ). Or inâLookingâ:
At times I just want to
watch the rain
against the dark yew-hedge.
Watch for as long as it lasts
She uses some arresting images to describe what she sees (âA dormouse darts ahead / like a gloved handâ, âIt is as if the chair you sat in / were beating like a heartâ, âa radio voice / will pour like warm milkâ, âlisten to the lark / pull up its bag of trills / from the groundâ). As well as the stranded whale and âignition running like a tender muscleâ, there is another image in âOutingâ: âI drew the final minutes of the return journey // in long, winding threadsâ, which uses the idea of Ariadneâs thread through the Minotaurâs labyrinth to capture the girlâs eventual recognition of where she is on the journey home.
The book ends with a poem called âEpiphanyâ, although it isnât a moment of revelationârather the opposite. It concerns The Epiphany itself, or more precisely a memory of its annual re-enactment, as a woman looks out of her window:
Mid-morning, and still no sight.
The hour shrank. No star,
no Caspar, Melchior and Balthazarâ
the costumed boys from the farm.
âŚ
Then, she saw: the three on horseback!
Older than before. At a steady trot
and gone in a flash âŚ
This relatively straightforward account ends in a typically oblique way. There had also been a fourth child, carrying a sun stitched on a table-cloth (âWhere was the star-bearer? / Swallowed by fog?â) and we realise at the end of the poem (âHer meal, unfinished / where the embroidered sun / lived onâ) that this must have been her own son, his absence seemingly as much a mystery to her as it is to us, although âthe frosty land / to a huddle of houses / beyond the cemeteryâ and the sun that âlived onâ may be clues.
These quietly observant poems are anything but superficial. Itâs a measure of their quality that one wants to return to them again and again to look for resonances one might have missed. Like the word itself, the poems in Christine McNeillâs Sehnsucht are âencrusted with meaningsâ.
London Grip Poetry Review – Christine McNeill
January 6, 2021
Poetry review â SEHNSUCHT: Stephen Claughton admires Christine McNeillâs intriguing and enigmatic poems
âPride of place have foreign words / encrusted with meanings,â says Christine McNeill in her poem, âA suitcase for my mother tongueâ. As she is Austrian by birth, Sehnsucht wouldnât be foreign to her, but it is certainly encrusted with meanings. Translated variously as ânostalgiaâ, âlongingâ, or âdesireâ, it sounds a little like the Welsh hiraeth, although without the Celtic emphasis on place. As well as making it the title of her sixth book of poetry, she also takes as an epigraph the beginning of a poem by the German-Swedish writer, Nelly Sachs: âIt all begins with Sehnsucht âŚâ
Knowing that Sachsâs poem is about the impossibility of fulfilling our yearning for love, except in God, certainly helps in reading McNeillâs poem, âIn his employmentâ, about the relationship between a man and his secretary (âI was fuel to his Sehnsuchtâ). It begins with her being forgiven for a mistake, when âhis voice came, / like a hand putting pearls round my neckâ and ends:
McNeill isnât wilfully obscure, but she certainly likes to âtell it slantâ. A feeling for mystery is perhaps to be expected in a poet who uses the word âsoulâ (five times by my reckoning) to mean more than just âfeelingâ. But these arenât religious poems, other than in a general, pantheistic way.
Often the circumstances surrounding a poem are left deliberately unclear. âOutingâ, the first poem in the book, is about a child being taken for a trip. It begins:
Freeing a stranded whale ought to be a good thing, but there is something ominous about this. At the most basic level, it could just be that the car seems large to the little girl, but it also places her in peril and implies that the car shouldnât have been there in the first place, âparked at motherâs homeâ. The day, as described, sounds innocent enough:
but there follows the more sinister âpicnicked in deep woodsâ. The suspicion that there has been more to this than meets the eye is confirmed at the journeyâs end, when: âmy heart slid out of the doorâ / ignition running like a tender muscleâ. Has the girl been abused? Is it like a later poem, âQuestion and answerâ, about a schoolteacher attempting to seduce one of his pupils, or more like the woman in âMissingâ, who temporarily absents herself to get âaway from dark feelingsâ:
The ambiguity in âOutingâ encapsulates the childâs uncertainty both about what has happened and about her attitude towards it, ending: âand I too small to say what I felt.â
There is an extreme use of ambiguity in âCrossingâ, where you arenâtâor I wasnâtâsure at first whether it was the partner or the relationship that had died, or was in the process of dying, or even whether the dead or living partner was speaking in the poem: âBe with me in this room where we / bed each night without wordsâ and âsee with an inner light / my hand reaching / not meeting yoursâ. The title implies that itâs someone whoâs dying and the last lines (âListen to my movingâ / such a small step, / a birdâs hopâ / I wonât be able to say afterward / what a huge distance it wasâ) suggests with the soul-as-bird image that itâs the dying person speaking. Even so, I was reluctant to give up the alternative readings: maintaining ânegative capabilityâ as a reader makes the poem multi-faceted.
A number of the poems are epiphanies, often involving light, or the weather, or birds and usually revealing a connectedness to nature. Interestingly, in poems about nature, where other people are involvedâ for instance, the migrant birds and âthe old man picking bus tickets / from a litter binâ in âKings of the airâ or the heron and âan old man / watching a small boy running / round and round the blossoming cherry treeâ from âIn a Japanese gardenââthe human and non-human exist in parallel, the connection or connectedness being provided by the poem.
Other poems are more straightforwardly narrative or anecdotal and although it may be her home ground, McNeill doesnât confine herself to the domestic: there are poems about music, art and literature, as well as Californian wildfires and Syrian refugees. There are also moving poems about death and dementia.
Her typical role is that of an observer (âand I couldnât change anything, / only watchâ, she says of a hawk plucking a dove in âSummer afternoonâ). Or inâLookingâ:
She uses some arresting images to describe what she sees (âA dormouse darts ahead / like a gloved handâ, âIt is as if the chair you sat in / were beating like a heartâ, âa radio voice / will pour like warm milkâ, âlisten to the lark / pull up its bag of trills / from the groundâ). As well as the stranded whale and âignition running like a tender muscleâ, there is another image in âOutingâ: âI drew the final minutes of the return journey // in long, winding threadsâ, which uses the idea of Ariadneâs thread through the Minotaurâs labyrinth to capture the girlâs eventual recognition of where she is on the journey home.
The book ends with a poem called âEpiphanyâ, although it isnât a moment of revelationârather the opposite. It concerns The Epiphany itself, or more precisely a memory of its annual re-enactment, as a woman looks out of her window:
This relatively straightforward account ends in a typically oblique way. There had also been a fourth child, carrying a sun stitched on a table-cloth (âWhere was the star-bearer? / Swallowed by fog?â) and we realise at the end of the poem (âHer meal, unfinished / where the embroidered sun / lived onâ) that this must have been her own son, his absence seemingly as much a mystery to her as it is to us, although âthe frosty land / to a huddle of houses / beyond the cemeteryâ and the sun that âlived onâ may be clues.
These quietly observant poems are anything but superficial. Itâs a measure of their quality that one wants to return to them again and again to look for resonances one might have missed. Like the word itself, the poems in Christine McNeillâs Sehnsucht are âencrusted with meaningsâ.