Poetry review – THE NEW HERBAL: Nick Cooke finds a way through the complex poems in Fran Lock’s latest pamphlet
The New Herbal
Fran Lock
Blueprint Poetry Press
ISBN: 978-1-7393695-2-1
£7
Over the last decade Fran Lock has established herself as one of the most exciting, significant and acclaimed new voices on the British independent scene. Drawing upon her working-class Irish/Traveller background, she is a passionate spokesperson for marginalised people of all types, with an often astonishing verbal flair that fuses constant wordplay, witty neologism and wide-ranging cultural allusiveness. Of her now eight collections, the penultimate, Hyena!, was short-listed for the 2021 T.S. Eliot Prize.
The title of this latest pamphlet is taken from a work of the same name, by the German 16th-century botanist Leonhart Fuchs, a landmark in the field which contains over 500 detailed drawings of plants, printed from woodcuts. The poet describes her book as ‘a kind of feraltern, sapphic, trash-feminist response to the idea of the herbal and to the folklore and language of flowers’ – a typically Lockian subversion of received wisdom and other blandly accepted so-called truths.
The preludial quote, from 12th-century German abbess and polymath Hildegard von Bingen, offers an analysis of humanity that incorporates a faded but perhaps still just-alive hopefulness, within an overall sense of despair: Now in the people that were meant to be green there is no more life of any kind. At least they were ‘meant’ to be green, so there must have been potential of some sort, presumably. Lock appears to be asking if that flicker is still alive, nine centuries on.
In the opening poem, “The Romance of the Rose (redux)”, the speaker probes the cultural assumptions behind the heteronormative language of flowers, musing upon all the levels on which the rose as a traditional love symbol might now operate. As in other Lock poems, each line is preceded by a forward slash. This, she has explained, suggests the medieval ‘virgule’, which ‘would often be the only form of punctuation in a manuscript, so it was asked to do a lot of heavy lifting: it could signify a pause, or a connection between words and phrases, as opposed to indicating mutually exclusive alternatives as it is often used now’. For Lock, the usage instead allows her to say ‘and/or’ rather than just ‘or’, hinting that although each line might appear unconnected to its predecessor, it is in fact connected.
Various forms of typically wry qualification (‘/ a love poem, parried’, ‘/ after sappho. if you must.’) sit alongside some cryptic, laconic metaphors (‘/ the yellow rose of hindsight./ the black rose of cynical allegory.’), with a dash of overt topicality (‘/ a grabbed pussy of a rose’), plus an occasional laugh-out-loud affirmation of the general dearth of literary awareness that all poets currently face, and some exhibit: ‘/ not Courtney Love, courtly love, you twit!’, ‘/ i saw her and puked. all the boisterous twaddle of metaphor’.
After the title poem comes one which takes its place in the micro-pantheon of Lock’s epistolary poems, a genre which formed a central plank her subsequent Ph. D thesis. The writer of this letter combines SMS-style abbreviation, ‘old school’ poetic alliteration, portmanteau and neologism, as they address a ‘grl’ in an opening that’s both amatory and somehow coldly menacing, with its heavy-breathing ‘h’-sounds and repeated allusions to stone:
hey grl, u r my grindstone, my girdstone, grid
of stones. u r my holesome though homelie
handful of herbs.
Gradually the fusion of references links the addressee with the natural world, indicating a link with the previous poem, as the introspective wordplay verges on the obsessive:
sweet bawd of boar, sweet whore of wort
and haw and mistletoe, mistletoe, mistletoe!
Does that repetition of the Christmas-associated plant make the implied kisses more or less welcome? This being a Lock poem, we can’t rule out that they could be both.
Alan Morrison, in a 2022 essay on Lock’s earlier work, detailed a string of influences, from Eliot to Stevie Smith, Sexton and Plath, also mentioning Hopkins, who definitely has a presence in this volume, notably at the start of “Daffodils”:
and what of them? hardy stragglers
between wastelands, waste lanes
with the weather wetly trepanning
the factories.
By the poem’s end, there are two more writers to add – Shakespeare (Antony and Cleopatra) and Louis MacNiece (“The Sunlight on the Garden”), with Lock drily voicing a belief – as a ‘conventional poet’ might – in the flowers’ immortality:
here they are, swollen
with staying power. immortal
hosts. we are dying, we are all
dying, but they did not get
the memo.
Politics simmers under the surface and sometimes breaks it, as in “Let us now” –
let us, despite her escalations, her pall of
finitudes and skid-marks, her calendar of strangulations, string vests
and supremacist lynchings, the amplified pleasantries blared
in the face –
where the ending gives temporal as well as emotional specificity to her focus, as events such as the Good Friday Agreement are regarded with unwonted scepticism, although the emphasis on love does imply a measure of positivity:
let
us now be braver than we were. in ninety-eight, in eighty-nine, and not
in guilt, like some spendthrift confessor’s apprentice. in nerve and
circulating murmur. not hunkered in recovery, but in love, you fucking
gam, with love.
Occasionally the messages take on a simplicity that is all the starker for the flurry of high-octane lexical boldness all around, as in the climax to “all is calm”, in which the inevitability of the human fight to survive, the impossibility of escape – albeit in this case put into a deliberately bathetic context of down-to-earth domesticity – is condensed into a choice of prepositions:
in marigold gloves.
the only way out is through,
you said, the only way out
is through.
And ultimately, in the final poem, “Green sleeves”, despite an aura of negativity, for instance through the wonderful allusion to ‘flatulent marriages’, Lock appears to find that sliver of hope in what might seem an act of regression:
i have invented time-travel:
i go into the past to bind you more
completely to all the beauty you refuse
to see.
In an addition to a positive twist on the last lines of Stevie Smith’s most famous poem, the finale savours of another poet cited by Morrison, Eliot, and in particular some memorable words from “The Dry Salvages” (‘Not fare well, / But fare forward, voyagers’):
and you take my hand, clean black wrist
through the sling of your sleeve, an arrow,
a buckthorn branch, it is reaching out for something,
no, not reaching –
growing.
Significantly, the hand-holding points to solidarity, while the concealed arrow evokes the necessary steel behind the sweetness, recalling Lock’s comments in a recent Substack piece: ‘Whether or not i feel hope is irrelevant: the poem [meaning poems/poetry in general] is neither offering nor seeking reasons to be hopeful, but trying to imagine ways of being hopeful; is itself such a method of hope. my wish for the poem is that it might gather, store and spark the practical and imaginative energies required for change to take place. the poem says “we’re fucked”, that we are without hope, in order to rid itself of the narcotising palliative of catharsis, so that we might manifest those conditions, so that we might organise and do better.’
To which I can only reply: more power to her anti-cathartic, ever-energetic elbow, with particular reference to its engagement in her prolific and inspiring literary work.
Nov 19 2024
London Grip Poetry Review – Fran Lock
Poetry review – THE NEW HERBAL: Nick Cooke finds a way through the complex poems in Fran Lock’s latest pamphlet
Over the last decade Fran Lock has established herself as one of the most exciting, significant and acclaimed new voices on the British independent scene. Drawing upon her working-class Irish/Traveller background, she is a passionate spokesperson for marginalised people of all types, with an often astonishing verbal flair that fuses constant wordplay, witty neologism and wide-ranging cultural allusiveness. Of her now eight collections, the penultimate, Hyena!, was short-listed for the 2021 T.S. Eliot Prize.
The title of this latest pamphlet is taken from a work of the same name, by the German 16th-century botanist Leonhart Fuchs, a landmark in the field which contains over 500 detailed drawings of plants, printed from woodcuts. The poet describes her book as ‘a kind of feraltern, sapphic, trash-feminist response to the idea of the herbal and to the folklore and language of flowers’ – a typically Lockian subversion of received wisdom and other blandly accepted so-called truths.
The preludial quote, from 12th-century German abbess and polymath Hildegard von Bingen, offers an analysis of humanity that incorporates a faded but perhaps still just-alive hopefulness, within an overall sense of despair: Now in the people that were meant to be green there is no more life of any kind. At least they were ‘meant’ to be green, so there must have been potential of some sort, presumably. Lock appears to be asking if that flicker is still alive, nine centuries on.
In the opening poem, “The Romance of the Rose (redux)”, the speaker probes the cultural assumptions behind the heteronormative language of flowers, musing upon all the levels on which the rose as a traditional love symbol might now operate. As in other Lock poems, each line is preceded by a forward slash. This, she has explained, suggests the medieval ‘virgule’, which ‘would often be the only form of punctuation in a manuscript, so it was asked to do a lot of heavy lifting: it could signify a pause, or a connection between words and phrases, as opposed to indicating mutually exclusive alternatives as it is often used now’. For Lock, the usage instead allows her to say ‘and/or’ rather than just ‘or’, hinting that although each line might appear unconnected to its predecessor, it is in fact connected.
Various forms of typically wry qualification (‘/ a love poem, parried’, ‘/ after sappho. if you must.’) sit alongside some cryptic, laconic metaphors (‘/ the yellow rose of hindsight./ the black rose of cynical allegory.’), with a dash of overt topicality (‘/ a grabbed pussy of a rose’), plus an occasional laugh-out-loud affirmation of the general dearth of literary awareness that all poets currently face, and some exhibit: ‘/ not Courtney Love, courtly love, you twit!’, ‘/ i saw her and puked. all the boisterous twaddle of metaphor’.
After the title poem comes one which takes its place in the micro-pantheon of Lock’s epistolary poems, a genre which formed a central plank her subsequent Ph. D thesis. The writer of this letter combines SMS-style abbreviation, ‘old school’ poetic alliteration, portmanteau and neologism, as they address a ‘grl’ in an opening that’s both amatory and somehow coldly menacing, with its heavy-breathing ‘h’-sounds and repeated allusions to stone:
hey grl, u r my grindstone, my girdstone, grid of stones. u r my holesome though homelie handful of herbs.Gradually the fusion of references links the addressee with the natural world, indicating a link with the previous poem, as the introspective wordplay verges on the obsessive:
sweet bawd of boar, sweet whore of wort and haw and mistletoe, mistletoe, mistletoe!Does that repetition of the Christmas-associated plant make the implied kisses more or less welcome? This being a Lock poem, we can’t rule out that they could be both.
Alan Morrison, in a 2022 essay on Lock’s earlier work, detailed a string of influences, from Eliot to Stevie Smith, Sexton and Plath, also mentioning Hopkins, who definitely has a presence in this volume, notably at the start of “Daffodils”:
By the poem’s end, there are two more writers to add – Shakespeare (Antony and Cleopatra) and Louis MacNiece (“The Sunlight on the Garden”), with Lock drily voicing a belief – as a ‘conventional poet’ might – in the flowers’ immortality:
Politics simmers under the surface and sometimes breaks it, as in “Let us now” –
let us, despite her escalations, her pall of finitudes and skid-marks, her calendar of strangulations, string vests and supremacist lynchings, the amplified pleasantries blared in the face –where the ending gives temporal as well as emotional specificity to her focus, as events such as the Good Friday Agreement are regarded with unwonted scepticism, although the emphasis on love does imply a measure of positivity:
let us now be braver than we were. in ninety-eight, in eighty-nine, and not in guilt, like some spendthrift confessor’s apprentice. in nerve and circulating murmur. not hunkered in recovery, but in love, you fucking gam, with love.Occasionally the messages take on a simplicity that is all the starker for the flurry of high-octane lexical boldness all around, as in the climax to “all is calm”, in which the inevitability of the human fight to survive, the impossibility of escape – albeit in this case put into a deliberately bathetic context of down-to-earth domesticity – is condensed into a choice of prepositions:
And ultimately, in the final poem, “Green sleeves”, despite an aura of negativity, for instance through the wonderful allusion to ‘flatulent marriages’, Lock appears to find that sliver of hope in what might seem an act of regression:
In an addition to a positive twist on the last lines of Stevie Smith’s most famous poem, the finale savours of another poet cited by Morrison, Eliot, and in particular some memorable words from “The Dry Salvages” (‘Not fare well, / But fare forward, voyagers’):
Significantly, the hand-holding points to solidarity, while the concealed arrow evokes the necessary steel behind the sweetness, recalling Lock’s comments in a recent Substack piece: ‘Whether or not i feel hope is irrelevant: the poem [meaning poems/poetry in general] is neither offering nor seeking reasons to be hopeful, but trying to imagine ways of being hopeful; is itself such a method of hope. my wish for the poem is that it might gather, store and spark the practical and imaginative energies required for change to take place. the poem says “we’re fucked”, that we are without hope, in order to rid itself of the narcotising palliative of catharsis, so that we might manifest those conditions, so that we might organise and do better.’
To which I can only reply: more power to her anti-cathartic, ever-energetic elbow, with particular reference to its engagement in her prolific and inspiring literary work.