Poetry review – EARWIG COUNTRY: DA Prince is drawn into Angela Topping’s poems about memories and connections
Earwig Country
Angela Topping
Valley Press, 2024.
ISBN 978-1-915606-22-8
£15.00
Could you find Earwig Country on a map? For Angela Topping it’s the real, ever-present world of childhood and where this collection of poems is rooted. It’s where the past reaches forwards and enters the present via vivid memories that can’t be shaken off, as in the title poem. Remember that childhood fear of having an earwig crawl into your ear because someone — a friend, perhaps — had said they eat your brains out? Memory isn’t always a comforting companion but more mixed. The poem “Earwig Country” begins with the porcelain-like beauty of white convolvulus (bindweed) flowers before considering the insect that might live inside the bloom:
Beautiful things have inner horrors
I learned to be wary of. The hedges held aloft
whole tea-services of bone china, pure white
full of the plotting of earwigs. Put your ear
too close an you will hear them, whispering
in their marble citadels. They are coming for us still.
I’ve started with this quotation to avoid any assumption that a collection themed around childhood memories and the natural world is cosy: the past can be a disturbing, unsettling place — not another country and still uncomfortably close to us. Topping’s “The Collecting Dolls” describes her childhood collection of dolls from around the world, lined up in her bedroom: four stanzas describing that childhood love of order before the final stanza reveals their fate —
Most were packed off to the loft,
remained, stifled in a suitcase,
when the house was sold, their little
plastic hands beating a tattoo on the lid,
trying to get out, reclaim their passports.
Only dolls, so why do I find this sinister and alarming? Is it because other stories — ghost tales, magic — are pushing at the edges? Is it that apparently harmless word ‘little’ that emphasises their vulnerability?
Fortunately not all memories lead to the unexpected. “Biscuit Barrel” also opens with description. Topping’s parents (like mine) didn’t use the decorative barrel for biscuits but for ‘… the sediment of the living:/ missing buttons, coins no longer legal tender,/ marbles, nuts, every kind of broken bit/ that might one day be needed.’ The poem brings back the feel of ‘… the squashiness of washers’ and the weight of ‘… those forgotten, unsorted things.’ Here is the remembered texture of childhood rummaging as well as — though it isn’t in this poem — a vivid memory of the sideboard, the room. Is there a literary term for this, the effect of adjacent association? This time Topping ends her poem with a question, one that could stand for the whole collection:
Where do they go, those things of little consequence
we don’t recall discarding?
Some of those little things stay with us, of course: we don’t discard everything. “Patching the Cashmere” details the darning and re-mending of an old hoodie, using ‘lazy daisy and running stitch’ when ‘Lockdown gave me restless fingers,/ time to fix and heal the fray’. The precise name of an embroidery stitch — one, I suspect, no longer in common use — plus the recent past evoked by the single word ‘Lockdown’ shows how Topping makes connections. At their best, her poems don’t sit in a single place and at one time; they draw together the scattered memories making up an individual world-picture.
“Deferment” uses the domestic vocabulary of house clearing, after a death, and the clutter of personal objects, to show bereavement’s power to disturb.
Grief is a cruel handbag —
its catch snaps shut like jaws.
Inside is buried an old compact,
hankie embroidered with an M
in a huddle of forget-me-knots.
These contents are immediately visible, conjuring up their owner: an old woman — because who, these days, has a powder compact and an embroidered ‘hankie’ (there’s another word from childhood). There’s a relationship in the poem, too, and all the stronger for not being specified: a mother? aunt? We understand the strength of relationship from the ending of this short 13-line poem:
What can be
done with it? It cannot be thrown away.
Best hide it in the bottom of the wardrobe,
an unexploded bomb.
There’s a deceptive simplicity here: the language of the poem, about an undramatic and apparently mundane action, is everyday and colloquial (‘Best hide it …’) and the title has a modesty that refuses to call attention to itself. Yet it’s essential to the underlining emotion: the potentially explosive force of grief when it is buried.
I wonder if Topping appeals more to female readers, and to older readers — those of us who share the same memories of family relationships, maintaining them, keeping the connections in working order? If so, that’s fine: there is a whole world of domestic work — essential daily work — in these poems and it deserves to be commemorated. “Nita’s Knitted Wardrobe: Garments from the Yorkshire Fashion Archive” brings a museum collection alive, recounting how Isora (a Russian refugee) used her inherited tailoring skills to create knitted clothes for her daughter, Nita, copying the photographs in fashion magazines — ‘… tailored suits,/ winter coats with astrakhan collars […] Always four ply, wool or cotton.’
Her head was a library of stitches:
andaloo, parquet, bramble, butterfly, tree of life,
jack-in-the-pulpit, double lattice, woven stitch,
lucine, eye of the lynx, hearts, lily of the valley,
travelling vine, mermaid’s mesh.
These stitches all exist; you can find them via Google. But this poem isn’t just about knitting but about family and how her mother’s creativity gave Nita a sense of herself —
A lifetime in Isora’s designs:
Nita wore them in the care home,
where they felted in the washing machine,
shrunk to fit her skinny frame.
Her son Michael brought them in
didn’t know if they were any use.
The poem’s title has already answered Michael’s tentative question; The Yorkshire Fashion Archive is part of the University of Leeds, holding examples manufactured and designed locally, including those handmade at home, clothes that Isora (and Nita) would never have envisaged as pieces.
These clothes have provenance. The past is trickier to interpret, however, when much of it is closer to guesswork, as in Topping’s final poem, “Cheshire Dig 2529”. This takes a wry look at how future archaeologists might try to explain the minutiae of our daily lives, or at least the scraps that survive. Set on ‘…the site of an ancient/ twentieth century house’ some random artefacts emerge:
Exhibit Two: shell button, once used
to fasten clothes. Note the traces
of a bird painting, which dates it
before such things became extinct.
This one is black with a yellow bill.
History suggests they were once common.
What will the future make of us? Buttons have appeared throughout this collection, from the first poem (“Mother of Pearl”) onwards; birds are, for now, taken for granted as subjects for poems. One stanza might apply to all of us:
From the many fragments of ancient text
and a few intact bound books
some printed and some handwritten
we think the owner may have been a scribe.
This is very much a collection about connection — past with present, families and generations, the way ‘stuff’ can stir memory — and I’ve read it as a single sequence despite the poems being grouped into nine sections (“Coming of age”, “Love poems”, “Foraging” etc). For me these divisions had the effect of containment, each set of poems kept tidily within its own boundaries rather than achieving what these poems do: reach across boundaries, bring the small scraps of memory into the present, join up the scattered detail of how we live. I’ve quoted from poems from across the collection, avoiding the section headings, because that is where Topping’s strength lies. The question of how to divide collections— and whether to divide them at all — is an individual choice, to be considered against the currents running within the poems, and perhaps this is just a reviewer’s quibble. Earwig Country is a collection that gives, generously, a great deal of pleasure as well as enabling the reader to find ways of cherishing the ‘things of little consequence’ that constitute our own memories.
Nov 20 2024
London Grip Poetry Review – Angela Topping
Poetry review – EARWIG COUNTRY: DA Prince is drawn into Angela Topping’s poems about memories and connections
Could you find Earwig Country on a map? For Angela Topping it’s the real, ever-present world of childhood and where this collection of poems is rooted. It’s where the past reaches forwards and enters the present via vivid memories that can’t be shaken off, as in the title poem. Remember that childhood fear of having an earwig crawl into your ear because someone — a friend, perhaps — had said they eat your brains out? Memory isn’t always a comforting companion but more mixed. The poem “Earwig Country” begins with the porcelain-like beauty of white convolvulus (bindweed) flowers before considering the insect that might live inside the bloom:
I’ve started with this quotation to avoid any assumption that a collection themed around childhood memories and the natural world is cosy: the past can be a disturbing, unsettling place — not another country and still uncomfortably close to us. Topping’s “The Collecting Dolls” describes her childhood collection of dolls from around the world, lined up in her bedroom: four stanzas describing that childhood love of order before the final stanza reveals their fate —
Only dolls, so why do I find this sinister and alarming? Is it because other stories — ghost tales, magic — are pushing at the edges? Is it that apparently harmless word ‘little’ that emphasises their vulnerability?
Fortunately not all memories lead to the unexpected. “Biscuit Barrel” also opens with description. Topping’s parents (like mine) didn’t use the decorative barrel for biscuits but for ‘… the sediment of the living:/ missing buttons, coins no longer legal tender,/ marbles, nuts, every kind of broken bit/ that might one day be needed.’ The poem brings back the feel of ‘… the squashiness of washers’ and the weight of ‘… those forgotten, unsorted things.’ Here is the remembered texture of childhood rummaging as well as — though it isn’t in this poem — a vivid memory of the sideboard, the room. Is there a literary term for this, the effect of adjacent association? This time Topping ends her poem with a question, one that could stand for the whole collection:
Some of those little things stay with us, of course: we don’t discard everything. “Patching the Cashmere” details the darning and re-mending of an old hoodie, using ‘lazy daisy and running stitch’ when ‘Lockdown gave me restless fingers,/ time to fix and heal the fray’. The precise name of an embroidery stitch — one, I suspect, no longer in common use — plus the recent past evoked by the single word ‘Lockdown’ shows how Topping makes connections. At their best, her poems don’t sit in a single place and at one time; they draw together the scattered memories making up an individual world-picture.
“Deferment” uses the domestic vocabulary of house clearing, after a death, and the clutter of personal objects, to show bereavement’s power to disturb.
These contents are immediately visible, conjuring up their owner: an old woman — because who, these days, has a powder compact and an embroidered ‘hankie’ (there’s another word from childhood). There’s a relationship in the poem, too, and all the stronger for not being specified: a mother? aunt? We understand the strength of relationship from the ending of this short 13-line poem:
There’s a deceptive simplicity here: the language of the poem, about an undramatic and apparently mundane action, is everyday and colloquial (‘Best hide it …’) and the title has a modesty that refuses to call attention to itself. Yet it’s essential to the underlining emotion: the potentially explosive force of grief when it is buried.
I wonder if Topping appeals more to female readers, and to older readers — those of us who share the same memories of family relationships, maintaining them, keeping the connections in working order? If so, that’s fine: there is a whole world of domestic work — essential daily work — in these poems and it deserves to be commemorated. “Nita’s Knitted Wardrobe: Garments from the Yorkshire Fashion Archive” brings a museum collection alive, recounting how Isora (a Russian refugee) used her inherited tailoring skills to create knitted clothes for her daughter, Nita, copying the photographs in fashion magazines — ‘… tailored suits,/ winter coats with astrakhan collars […] Always four ply, wool or cotton.’
These stitches all exist; you can find them via Google. But this poem isn’t just about knitting but about family and how her mother’s creativity gave Nita a sense of herself —
The poem’s title has already answered Michael’s tentative question; The Yorkshire Fashion Archive is part of the University of Leeds, holding examples manufactured and designed locally, including those handmade at home, clothes that Isora (and Nita) would never have envisaged as pieces.
These clothes have provenance. The past is trickier to interpret, however, when much of it is closer to guesswork, as in Topping’s final poem, “Cheshire Dig 2529”. This takes a wry look at how future archaeologists might try to explain the minutiae of our daily lives, or at least the scraps that survive. Set on ‘…the site of an ancient/ twentieth century house’ some random artefacts emerge:
What will the future make of us? Buttons have appeared throughout this collection, from the first poem (“Mother of Pearl”) onwards; birds are, for now, taken for granted as subjects for poems. One stanza might apply to all of us:
This is very much a collection about connection — past with present, families and generations, the way ‘stuff’ can stir memory — and I’ve read it as a single sequence despite the poems being grouped into nine sections (“Coming of age”, “Love poems”, “Foraging” etc). For me these divisions had the effect of containment, each set of poems kept tidily within its own boundaries rather than achieving what these poems do: reach across boundaries, bring the small scraps of memory into the present, join up the scattered detail of how we live. I’ve quoted from poems from across the collection, avoiding the section headings, because that is where Topping’s strength lies. The question of how to divide collections— and whether to divide them at all — is an individual choice, to be considered against the currents running within the poems, and perhaps this is just a reviewer’s quibble. Earwig Country is a collection that gives, generously, a great deal of pleasure as well as enabling the reader to find ways of cherishing the ‘things of little consequence’ that constitute our own memories.