Poetry review – WHAT IT WAS: Cherry Doyle is impressed by the reality of the people and places evoked in Tina Cole’s new collection
What it Was
Tina Cole
Mark Time Books
ISBN 9 783127323207
£8.50
The cover of What it Was by Tina Cole (new from Mark Time Books) is a bust of a woman draped in chains. No better scene could have been set, as by the end of the opening poem, “What it was”, Cole has already established a sense of unease:
just what we carried
in cardboard suitcases
stones rocks
a mountain
By page 4, “Three Black Country Women”, we’re rooted deeply in the Black Country of the English Midlands, and in the central themes of the collection; loss – the kind that tears families apart – and the seeming inevitability of trauma being carried across generations.
In fact, the Black Country is a perfect setting for this collection, not just because that does happen to be where the poet hails from, but also because this place where fathers ‘cycle along the canal path’ to ‘forge pockets of swarf’ is very much a place of struggle, of survival. There is a certain industrial pallor ascribed to the Black Country – where soot, smoke, and terraced houses are the dim backdrop for the day-to-day domesticity Cole evokes so precisely.
Within these pages we find ‘crystal glasses’, ‘digestive biscuits’, ‘Weetabix’, ‘black pudding’ and a ‘two-bar electric fire.’ In other words, this is a family home which appears from the outside almost painfully ordinary. Yet scratch the surface and you’ll find the poet has conjured a vivid and alarming world through repeated iconography and themes threaded through the poems.
For example, this is a collection weighty with ‘bricks’, ‘stones’, ‘fists’, ‘fear’, and ‘disappointment’. It flares red with wine, crying eyes, ‘carbolic burned’ hands, flowers with ‘blood-red heads’, lipstick named ‘Last Tango in Scarlet’, ‘ketchup stains’ and ‘a red silk hankie’. Like ‘a red sock in a white wash’, this collection is tinged with warnings. It’s rippled through with flame, smoke, and ashes, and iced over with frost. This is a book of extremes. Repeated references to Carroll’s heroine Alice remind the reader that down this particular rabbit hole, nothing is as it seems.
This is not poetry that asks you to appreciate the beautiful things in this world, but it is beautiful poetry nonetheless. Cole’s observation turns even the most everyday views into images that stop us in our tracks. Gardens are ‘star salted’, the horizon, ‘splayed in a slick taut line’, the sky ‘sags like a loose awning’.
Cole’s world-building doesn’t stop at landscapes; a litany of characters bustles through this book. The vibrancy of their depictions gives them life beyond their passing mentions. A grandmother ‘Milk stout in hands, shouting obscenities at the tiny television’, female ancestors with ‘a temperament to boil kettles’, ‘watery-eyed / golden-curled factory girls’, and an aunt who ‘left babies on doorsteps’. These women sing from history through these pages.
The central and most conflicting character in the collection is the poet’s mother. In “Mother in Pieces”, we see a woman described as ‘Vulnerable’, ‘Obedient’, ‘Adrift’, ‘Self-Effacing’, ‘Capricious’, and ‘Bewildered’ – a personality which resonates with many of us, no doubt, but whose nuance can only truly be appreciated through the lens of adulthood. Elsewhere, as in ‘More Words’, we see pure cruelty – ‘She says, I wish I had remained childless.’ Cole captures the consequences of living with a mother such as this in astoundingly gentle ways which still manage to knock the wind out of the reader. We learn of a child who was ‘a sponge for family fueding’, a rag doll whose ‘stuffing / was knocked out’, children who ‘believed someone would always be listening.’ The tragedy is left hanging for the reader to absorb.
In “Let’s talk”, Cole opens the door to the fear that permeates this collection – of becoming like the overbearing adults she grew up with:
…genetic hand-me-downs preserved
like grandma’s Irish linen
…
…in the dirty
windows of late-night trains her long-dead face is still
slipping over mine
But how do we avoid falling into the trap of becoming our mothers? In several poems of defiance, such as “Good Girl – Bad Dog”, Cole details the extraordinary lengths it takes to break patterns of trauma – and the repercussions of taking such action.
I stray find bad company
wear slutty dresses pad late-night city pavements.
Yet we find What it Was tenderly dedicated ‘for my mother’. Much like the cover image, the reader feels Cole’s mother was a woman in chains. Whether you sympathise, relate, or feel angry at this woman’s actions, Cole leaves you, the reader, to make that decision. Such is the deftness of her writing, she has captured the perfect complexity of loving those who hurt us, and recognising their pain in turn. Despite laying highly personal (and no doubt difficult) memories out on the page, Cole does not steer the reader towards a judgment, but explores the family dynamics from every angle.
The collection finishes with a flourish. ‘Let’s meet somewhere outside time and space’ is brimming with Cole’s signature succulent imagery. It seems to accept what has gone before as a way of breaking the poet’s own chains which have been bestowed upon her. The poem posits that, when it comes to relatives we have complicated relationships with, we can at least aim to ‘speak a similar language’.
as the year prepares to wane, as the planet implodes,
let’s light a candle, whisper a fierce prayer for each flame,
for each other
Aug 23 2024
London Grip Poetry Review – Tina Cole
Poetry review – WHAT IT WAS: Cherry Doyle is impressed by the reality of the people and places evoked in Tina Cole’s new collection
The cover of What it Was by Tina Cole (new from Mark Time Books) is a bust of a woman draped in chains. No better scene could have been set, as by the end of the opening poem, “What it was”, Cole has already established a sense of unease:
By page 4, “Three Black Country Women”, we’re rooted deeply in the Black Country of the English Midlands, and in the central themes of the collection; loss – the kind that tears families apart – and the seeming inevitability of trauma being carried across generations.
In fact, the Black Country is a perfect setting for this collection, not just because that does happen to be where the poet hails from, but also because this place where fathers ‘cycle along the canal path’ to ‘forge pockets of swarf’ is very much a place of struggle, of survival. There is a certain industrial pallor ascribed to the Black Country – where soot, smoke, and terraced houses are the dim backdrop for the day-to-day domesticity Cole evokes so precisely.
Within these pages we find ‘crystal glasses’, ‘digestive biscuits’, ‘Weetabix’, ‘black pudding’ and a ‘two-bar electric fire.’ In other words, this is a family home which appears from the outside almost painfully ordinary. Yet scratch the surface and you’ll find the poet has conjured a vivid and alarming world through repeated iconography and themes threaded through the poems.
For example, this is a collection weighty with ‘bricks’, ‘stones’, ‘fists’, ‘fear’, and ‘disappointment’. It flares red with wine, crying eyes, ‘carbolic burned’ hands, flowers with ‘blood-red heads’, lipstick named ‘Last Tango in Scarlet’, ‘ketchup stains’ and ‘a red silk hankie’. Like ‘a red sock in a white wash’, this collection is tinged with warnings. It’s rippled through with flame, smoke, and ashes, and iced over with frost. This is a book of extremes. Repeated references to Carroll’s heroine Alice remind the reader that down this particular rabbit hole, nothing is as it seems.
This is not poetry that asks you to appreciate the beautiful things in this world, but it is beautiful poetry nonetheless. Cole’s observation turns even the most everyday views into images that stop us in our tracks. Gardens are ‘star salted’, the horizon, ‘splayed in a slick taut line’, the sky ‘sags like a loose awning’.
Cole’s world-building doesn’t stop at landscapes; a litany of characters bustles through this book. The vibrancy of their depictions gives them life beyond their passing mentions. A grandmother ‘Milk stout in hands, shouting obscenities at the tiny television’, female ancestors with ‘a temperament to boil kettles’, ‘watery-eyed / golden-curled factory girls’, and an aunt who ‘left babies on doorsteps’. These women sing from history through these pages.
The central and most conflicting character in the collection is the poet’s mother. In “Mother in Pieces”, we see a woman described as ‘Vulnerable’, ‘Obedient’, ‘Adrift’, ‘Self-Effacing’, ‘Capricious’, and ‘Bewildered’ – a personality which resonates with many of us, no doubt, but whose nuance can only truly be appreciated through the lens of adulthood. Elsewhere, as in ‘More Words’, we see pure cruelty – ‘She says, I wish I had remained childless.’ Cole captures the consequences of living with a mother such as this in astoundingly gentle ways which still manage to knock the wind out of the reader. We learn of a child who was ‘a sponge for family fueding’, a rag doll whose ‘stuffing / was knocked out’, children who ‘believed someone would always be listening.’ The tragedy is left hanging for the reader to absorb.
In “Let’s talk”, Cole opens the door to the fear that permeates this collection – of becoming like the overbearing adults she grew up with:
But how do we avoid falling into the trap of becoming our mothers? In several poems of defiance, such as “Good Girl – Bad Dog”, Cole details the extraordinary lengths it takes to break patterns of trauma – and the repercussions of taking such action.
Yet we find What it Was tenderly dedicated ‘for my mother’. Much like the cover image, the reader feels Cole’s mother was a woman in chains. Whether you sympathise, relate, or feel angry at this woman’s actions, Cole leaves you, the reader, to make that decision. Such is the deftness of her writing, she has captured the perfect complexity of loving those who hurt us, and recognising their pain in turn. Despite laying highly personal (and no doubt difficult) memories out on the page, Cole does not steer the reader towards a judgment, but explores the family dynamics from every angle.
The collection finishes with a flourish. ‘Let’s meet somewhere outside time and space’ is brimming with Cole’s signature succulent imagery. It seems to accept what has gone before as a way of breaking the poet’s own chains which have been bestowed upon her. The poem posits that, when it comes to relatives we have complicated relationships with, we can at least aim to ‘speak a similar language’.