Poetry Review – MAHOGANY EVE: Pam Thompson admires the vividness of detail in this poetic memoir by Alan Payne
Mahogany Eve
Alan Payne
Smith|Doorstop,
ISBN 978-1-914914-82-9
96 pp
Alan Payne was born in Point-à-Pierre, in the south of Trinidad. His childhood memories of Grenada, Trinidad and Guyana are the backdrop to many of these poems. There are also poems based on memories of coming to boarding-school in England – Plymouth – when he was nine, having crossed the Atlantic on a French liner. Other poems are set in Sheffield, where the poet now lives. Some of these poems first appeared in the compelling competition-winning Smith|Doorstop pamphlet, Exploring the Orinoco.
The collection follows the journey of Alan Payne’s life, a life of movement and transitions where along the way the young boy absorbs the various facets of the cultures in which he is immersed. Local characters, along with places and members of the poet’s family, are brought vividly to life. I admire Payne’s ability to recall detail, and to produce from it these uncluttered poems that are precise but atmospheric and with emotional resonance. The first poem “The Bocas”, refers to a series of straits, The Dragon’s Mouths, separating the Gulf of Paria from the Caribbean Sea, and Trinidad from Venuzuela. These, and nearby islands, provide a waking dreamscape for the poet, ‘the journey / I dreamed of taking / when I lay awake’.
Memories loom large. It takes an exceptional gift, however, to be able to conjure them with such clarity and to also give the reader the understanding that this was a complicated past, both personally and politically, not least as a result of the legacy of colonialism. We get the impression that the boy poet was an old soul in a young body, astute, loved and yet often feeling on the outside and somewhat bewildered by the behaviour of the adults in his world.
The first few poems are mostly set in Trinidad where the poet’s father was a church minister. “Dwellings” evokes that time. The poem moves through six line stanzas (apart from one couplet) the opening one evoking a contrast between interior and exterior scenes:
I remember Tranquillity,
the church on the corner of our road,
funeral hymns, my father’s voice,
me on my skates in the sun,
scabs on my knee, cracks in the concrete,
a steel band in the distance.
I take ‘Tranquillity’ to be the name of the house, a beautiful name though possibly ironic too. In another stanza, the father prepares a sermon, ‘ambling along a print-black avenue / of chapter and verse’, as the son, ‘glide (s) past his window unseen’. We get the impression that the father is a loving man, if preoccupied, and that the boy would like more closeness, away from the imposing trappings of religion:
I imagine my father and I on skates,
chatting away, telling stories.
Secluded squares. Deserted boulevards.
No one else in the world.
There are loving portraits of other family members, of Lillian Welch, the poet’s grandmother, ‘Born in Holborn, a thirteenth child’, (“Grandma”). We learn elsewhere that she was a butcher’s daughter and had endured the Blitz. The poet seems to have had an especially close relationship with this maternal grandparent, who is a kindly presence in the Port of Spain and her imagined last rememberings are conjured movingly in “Saddle Road”:
She entered the Kingdom
in the flight
of a frigatebird
and with her memory
intact, the Southern Cross,
her father’s striped apron,
a season of landslides,
me chasing a butterfly
by the side of the road
to Maracas.
Here, as elsewhere, Alan Payne shows restraint in what to reveal and what to hold back. See how the poem moves in three stanzas, with judicious enjambed breaks between them, from place (the road through the mountains), to the grandmother’s burial place to speculation on her final memories, the very last of them being of the young boy chasing a butterfly. This is a fitting metaphor for the poet’s pursuit of flickering memories and their transmutations on the page.
Payne remembers his paternal grandmother, Elizabeth (‘Bessie’) Alice Payne, in the sequence, “Irises for my Grandmother”. The sequence begins and ends in March, 2016. Six other short poems are titled with various years between 1959 and 1966. In the first poem, the poet regards ‘a postcard of a single iris’ which is a trigger for memories: the gift of her engagement ring; airmail letters, borrowings from the characteristics of irises, ‘The familiar handwriting, / thin paper, darker blue of the ink …’ (“July, 1959”). We hear of her telling the young boy of the loss of his father’s older brother, and the terse relaying of the grandmother’s death by a school housemaster. Sadness seems through every poem in this sequence, not least the final one:
Irises for my grandmother,
fifty years too late.
I place them in a vase by the window.
(“May, 2016”)
There is no doubt that leaving Port of Spain to be sent to boarding school in Plymouth was traumatic. Payne chooses the technique of distancing in “The Touch Line” as though telling a story of other people when it is in fact his own story. Each of the three sections comprises three short lined quatrains, with the father as the main subject. The tone is matter-of-fact though the boy’s felt pain is clear in the juxtaposition of ‘the reforming minister’ who fought for workers’ rights, the ‘hymns / (that) lifted hearts / in Tunapuna’, in the second section with the act of waving off his son on a ship ‘bound for Plymouth, /and a Weslyan school /on the edge of the moors’:
where he was frozen
by the banter of other boys.
The headmaster noted:
He can’t even dress himself.
Stanza 3 shows a turn in fortune for the father, after being called a Jesuit by someone in the congregation. His wife’, the boy’s mother, ‘retreated to her room’. The fact that weekly letters from the son, ‘contained little more / than the loss of a match / observed from the touch line.’ suggests what the boy is unable to say.
There is little mention of the mother in these earlier poems of growing up in Trinidad yet later we learn more of her story. The prose poem’s title “A Stranger in a Foreign Land” sums up the situation of the poet’s mother, leaving London to be reunited with her husband in Trinidad. She carries a Bible and is comforted by the continual presence of Ruth the Moabite in The Book of Ruth. We learn more about the young woman as she views the unfamiliar sights, of the passage to Trinidad, how scared she was ‘of U-boats’ and how ‘she missed her cat’. Four more poems about the mother follow this one, poems relating to her death. Emotion is held back, especially in “Mother”, where short- lined couplets imply that the poet’s mother had gone on a journey without letting her family know, shockingly, ‘In the morning I woke to a lack / your body tidied away.’ “Skew Hill”, affectingly understated, brings us the poet scattering his mother’s ashes in Sheffield, in the rain, his loss translated into his demeanour, ‘a man’s bent back / in a field / stunned by rain.’
In the final third of Mahogany Eve, there is a movement from the past into the present, as several of the poems are grounded in Sheffield where Alan Payne now lives. The Caribbean continues to reverberate however. The question of what is truly ‘home’ looms large. I get the impression that Trinidad, the country of this poet’s birth, is an emotional and spiritual home. Sheffield provides ongoing stability and security from which to reflect on so many instances of loneliness and dislocation for the boy growing up. This is reflected in “Home” in which the poet, returning to his old house in Trinidad with his wife, imagines ‘me looking down at us, / the pair of us, in the heat, / standing on the pavement, gazing at the house / that’s no longer there.’ There are poems mentioning other family members and poems, directly or indirectly, dedicated to the enslaved and the emancipators.
The notes on the poems reveal interesting sources which flesh out some background. For instance, “The Blackbirds of St Giles” draws on Black and British: A Forgotten History by David Olusoga. The title is an overheard song, ‘a voice like a wisp of smoke’, heard by a man who is likely an escaped slave, ‘A Georgian ghost of flesh and bone’, as he ‘drifts’ along the side of the Thames firstly in London, meeting up with other African and Caribbean men, some on the run, who ‘meet in The Yorkshire Stingo, ‘to play music.’ These are men who have taken up jobs in London, ‘Coachmen, pageboys, bandsmen, / bargemen’, who, if their faces bear scars of previous enslavement’, are likely to be seized and to ‘disappear’. The poem celebrates, and gives visibility to, a resilient vibrant community. Its optimistic ending is heartening. The man, having been given a trumpet, ‘on a whim, travels north’ playing his way at various celebrations, and, on the outskirts of York, meets a woman with whom he is to spend his life.
Elsewhere too, there is a refusal to forget those who, too easily, might be forgotten, whether in the past or present:
Commemorating
all those lost at sea,
the blue-world window
harbours an altar
towards which, in the dark,
a prayerful boat sails.
(“Gruissan”)
Art and artists provide further inspiration: Henri Matisse, Henry Moore, Charles Monkhouse. The title poem refers to a sculpture, ‘Eve’, by Jamaican artist Edna Manley, part of the permanent collection in the Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield. It also references, ‘Passing the Bell Rock’, a watercolour by Eric Ravilious, part of the same collection. It is an imagined scene of Eve, watching, beyond the painting of warships to the actual ship, the Maaskirk, which carried his father to Trinidad. It’s true, as note on the back of the book suggests, that Eve is a guardian spirit for poems which hold their subjects tenderly even when we sense tensions. Alan Payne brings the past up close but never sentimentalises. It is doubly pleasurable to hear him read his poems, in a measured way, as they are written, yet also expressing the strong emotions they contain.
Sep 20 2024
London Grip Poetry Review – Alan Payne
Poetry Review – MAHOGANY EVE: Pam Thompson admires the vividness of detail in this poetic memoir by Alan Payne
Alan Payne was born in Point-à-Pierre, in the south of Trinidad. His childhood memories of Grenada, Trinidad and Guyana are the backdrop to many of these poems. There are also poems based on memories of coming to boarding-school in England – Plymouth – when he was nine, having crossed the Atlantic on a French liner. Other poems are set in Sheffield, where the poet now lives. Some of these poems first appeared in the compelling competition-winning Smith|Doorstop pamphlet, Exploring the Orinoco.
The collection follows the journey of Alan Payne’s life, a life of movement and transitions where along the way the young boy absorbs the various facets of the cultures in which he is immersed. Local characters, along with places and members of the poet’s family, are brought vividly to life. I admire Payne’s ability to recall detail, and to produce from it these uncluttered poems that are precise but atmospheric and with emotional resonance. The first poem “The Bocas”, refers to a series of straits, The Dragon’s Mouths, separating the Gulf of Paria from the Caribbean Sea, and Trinidad from Venuzuela. These, and nearby islands, provide a waking dreamscape for the poet, ‘the journey / I dreamed of taking / when I lay awake’.
Memories loom large. It takes an exceptional gift, however, to be able to conjure them with such clarity and to also give the reader the understanding that this was a complicated past, both personally and politically, not least as a result of the legacy of colonialism. We get the impression that the boy poet was an old soul in a young body, astute, loved and yet often feeling on the outside and somewhat bewildered by the behaviour of the adults in his world.
The first few poems are mostly set in Trinidad where the poet’s father was a church minister. “Dwellings” evokes that time. The poem moves through six line stanzas (apart from one couplet) the opening one evoking a contrast between interior and exterior scenes:
I remember Tranquillity, the church on the corner of our road, funeral hymns, my father’s voice, me on my skates in the sun, scabs on my knee, cracks in the concrete, a steel band in the distance.I take ‘Tranquillity’ to be the name of the house, a beautiful name though possibly ironic too. In another stanza, the father prepares a sermon, ‘ambling along a print-black avenue / of chapter and verse’, as the son, ‘glide (s) past his window unseen’. We get the impression that the father is a loving man, if preoccupied, and that the boy would like more closeness, away from the imposing trappings of religion:
I imagine my father and I on skates, chatting away, telling stories. Secluded squares. Deserted boulevards. No one else in the world.There are loving portraits of other family members, of Lillian Welch, the poet’s grandmother, ‘Born in Holborn, a thirteenth child’, (“Grandma”). We learn elsewhere that she was a butcher’s daughter and had endured the Blitz. The poet seems to have had an especially close relationship with this maternal grandparent, who is a kindly presence in the Port of Spain and her imagined last rememberings are conjured movingly in “Saddle Road”:
She entered the Kingdom in the flight of a frigatebird and with her memory intact, the Southern Cross, her father’s striped apron, a season of landslides, me chasing a butterfly by the side of the road to Maracas.Here, as elsewhere, Alan Payne shows restraint in what to reveal and what to hold back. See how the poem moves in three stanzas, with judicious enjambed breaks between them, from place (the road through the mountains), to the grandmother’s burial place to speculation on her final memories, the very last of them being of the young boy chasing a butterfly. This is a fitting metaphor for the poet’s pursuit of flickering memories and their transmutations on the page.
Payne remembers his paternal grandmother, Elizabeth (‘Bessie’) Alice Payne, in the sequence, “Irises for my Grandmother”. The sequence begins and ends in March, 2016. Six other short poems are titled with various years between 1959 and 1966. In the first poem, the poet regards ‘a postcard of a single iris’ which is a trigger for memories: the gift of her engagement ring; airmail letters, borrowings from the characteristics of irises, ‘The familiar handwriting, / thin paper, darker blue of the ink …’ (“July, 1959”). We hear of her telling the young boy of the loss of his father’s older brother, and the terse relaying of the grandmother’s death by a school housemaster. Sadness seems through every poem in this sequence, not least the final one:
Irises for my grandmother, fifty years too late. I place them in a vase by the window. (“May, 2016”)There is no doubt that leaving Port of Spain to be sent to boarding school in Plymouth was traumatic. Payne chooses the technique of distancing in “The Touch Line” as though telling a story of other people when it is in fact his own story. Each of the three sections comprises three short lined quatrains, with the father as the main subject. The tone is matter-of-fact though the boy’s felt pain is clear in the juxtaposition of ‘the reforming minister’ who fought for workers’ rights, the ‘hymns / (that) lifted hearts / in Tunapuna’, in the second section with the act of waving off his son on a ship ‘bound for Plymouth, /and a Weslyan school /on the edge of the moors’:
where he was frozen by the banter of other boys. The headmaster noted: He can’t even dress himself.Stanza 3 shows a turn in fortune for the father, after being called a Jesuit by someone in the congregation. His wife’, the boy’s mother, ‘retreated to her room’. The fact that weekly letters from the son, ‘contained little more / than the loss of a match / observed from the touch line.’ suggests what the boy is unable to say.
There is little mention of the mother in these earlier poems of growing up in Trinidad yet later we learn more of her story. The prose poem’s title “A Stranger in a Foreign Land” sums up the situation of the poet’s mother, leaving London to be reunited with her husband in Trinidad. She carries a Bible and is comforted by the continual presence of Ruth the Moabite in The Book of Ruth. We learn more about the young woman as she views the unfamiliar sights, of the passage to Trinidad, how scared she was ‘of U-boats’ and how ‘she missed her cat’. Four more poems about the mother follow this one, poems relating to her death. Emotion is held back, especially in “Mother”, where short- lined couplets imply that the poet’s mother had gone on a journey without letting her family know, shockingly, ‘In the morning I woke to a lack / your body tidied away.’ “Skew Hill”, affectingly understated, brings us the poet scattering his mother’s ashes in Sheffield, in the rain, his loss translated into his demeanour, ‘a man’s bent back / in a field / stunned by rain.’
In the final third of Mahogany Eve, there is a movement from the past into the present, as several of the poems are grounded in Sheffield where Alan Payne now lives. The Caribbean continues to reverberate however. The question of what is truly ‘home’ looms large. I get the impression that Trinidad, the country of this poet’s birth, is an emotional and spiritual home. Sheffield provides ongoing stability and security from which to reflect on so many instances of loneliness and dislocation for the boy growing up. This is reflected in “Home” in which the poet, returning to his old house in Trinidad with his wife, imagines ‘me looking down at us, / the pair of us, in the heat, / standing on the pavement, gazing at the house / that’s no longer there.’ There are poems mentioning other family members and poems, directly or indirectly, dedicated to the enslaved and the emancipators.
The notes on the poems reveal interesting sources which flesh out some background. For instance, “The Blackbirds of St Giles” draws on Black and British: A Forgotten History by David Olusoga. The title is an overheard song, ‘a voice like a wisp of smoke’, heard by a man who is likely an escaped slave, ‘A Georgian ghost of flesh and bone’, as he ‘drifts’ along the side of the Thames firstly in London, meeting up with other African and Caribbean men, some on the run, who ‘meet in The Yorkshire Stingo, ‘to play music.’ These are men who have taken up jobs in London, ‘Coachmen, pageboys, bandsmen, / bargemen’, who, if their faces bear scars of previous enslavement’, are likely to be seized and to ‘disappear’. The poem celebrates, and gives visibility to, a resilient vibrant community. Its optimistic ending is heartening. The man, having been given a trumpet, ‘on a whim, travels north’ playing his way at various celebrations, and, on the outskirts of York, meets a woman with whom he is to spend his life.
Elsewhere too, there is a refusal to forget those who, too easily, might be forgotten, whether in the past or present:
Commemorating all those lost at sea, the blue-world window harbours an altar towards which, in the dark, a prayerful boat sails. (“Gruissan”)Art and artists provide further inspiration: Henri Matisse, Henry Moore, Charles Monkhouse. The title poem refers to a sculpture, ‘Eve’, by Jamaican artist Edna Manley, part of the permanent collection in the Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield. It also references, ‘Passing the Bell Rock’, a watercolour by Eric Ravilious, part of the same collection. It is an imagined scene of Eve, watching, beyond the painting of warships to the actual ship, the Maaskirk, which carried his father to Trinidad. It’s true, as note on the back of the book suggests, that Eve is a guardian spirit for poems which hold their subjects tenderly even when we sense tensions. Alan Payne brings the past up close but never sentimentalises. It is doubly pleasurable to hear him read his poems, in a measured way, as they are written, yet also expressing the strong emotions they contain.