Poetry review – MAKING DOLMADES IN ESSEX: Diana Cant visits a childhood and adolescence lived in the 1950’s and 60’s, brought to evocative life in Judith Wozniak’s debut collection.
Making Dolmades in Essex
Judith Wozniak
Vole Books, 2024
ISBN:9781917101059
63pp £9.99
Throughout her working life as a family doctor, Judith Wozniak has clearly been the mistress of detailed observation, and it shows. Her first two pamphlets, Patient Watching and Case Notes, both published by Hedgehog Press, are a testament to her ability to watch, listen and sensitively intervene. She’s the sort of GP we all might want.In this collection, she moves away from the consulting room, and back into the territory of a childhood and adolescence spent in Essex, and sometimes in Wales. It is a childhood within a single parent household, where the child is painfully aware of her mothers’ distress and does her best to help. That capacity to observe, to register another’s pain, and to attempt to intervene was present even then. Wozniak has the ability to remember in extraordinary detail, but as a poet, it’s not enough to observe and recall – you have to be able to put it into words, and they have to be the right words.
This is Wozniak’s skill. She conjures up a world that some of, us of a certain age, will remember, and those of us who are younger may begin to glimpse and understand. There is a narrative arc here, from an Essex childhood with visits to family in Wales, school days interspersed by mournful summer seaside holidays all leading towards growing independence, student life in insalubrious London digs, and then marriage, motherhood and adult caring. If that seems like too broad a sweep, it’s not – it’s managed in a skilful and understated way, packed with Wozniak’s trademark details that have you saying to yourself, ‘oh, yes. I remember that’. We follow the trajectory of a mother/daughter relationship that is shot through with sadness and worry, where the fathers’ absence is only explained at the very end.
In “Other People’s Families”, we learn that ‘Our new next-door neighbours have a dad’ that the child watches through a hole in the fence, worrying ‘I’ll snag my best cardigan,/poppy-red with ladybird buttons / and make my mother more sad.’ On holiday in “Coombe Martin,1957”:
My new red Jumping Jodi sandals, crepe soles
pale as sponge cake, had to stay in the box
until the morning of our holiday.
After which mother and daughter explore, ‘wrapped in Pakamacs and plastic/ concertina rain bonnets’, until the mother whispers ‘let’s go home’.
In the titular poem, there is ‘water melon, sliced into smiles’, and the mother’s depression begins to lift. There are touching moments of humour, when both mother and daughter reveal themselves as capable of deception, the mother to con a lift to the polling station, and the daughter to steal a pretend ruby from a game of Bucaneer:
When he left, he packed it up,
fixed the box at each end with a snap of two fat rubber bands.
I smuggled a ruby in my fist to stow in my box of secrets.
(“Treasure”)
There are a number of ‘Welsh’ poems, often linking to coal mining family connections. The recreation of the coal-man deliveries (when there were such things):
Stooped under a sack of coke
he swings it by its ears into the bunker
with a rumble like thunder
(“Coal”)
and an innocent question leads to tales of rats as big as cats in the mines. This is a child’s eye view, a child used to observing all the nuances of human behaviour and decoding them, often to protect a vulnerable parent.
Wozniak is also a mistress of the telling last line. Often a poem will end with a simple line that highlights the underlying emotion, be it sadness (often) or self-deprecating humour; as in “Life Lessons”, where the holiday girl in the office is taken under the wing of the old hands, advised to avoid Jeff, and given hair advice:
She gently pats my fine hair,
the droopy flick-ups.
Lovely shine though petal.
Aced by that final word! And in “Five Foot in her Slippers”, which describes the mother in hospital, elderly and reverting to schoolteacher mode in her confusion, the last line is the telling observation, ‘Her perm squashed flat at the back’, with its customary clear-sighted compassion.
There is a real economy in Wozniak’s work. The poems are often pared back and the language simple and unadorned. There is compression of description too, the poet alighting on those details, often involving colour, that will bring a scene to life. Here is an example, from a recurring theme of sewing, smocking and haberdashery, at a time when clothes were few and were often handmade and mended.
There was a haberdashery shop then,
served by a lady with a black velvet
pincushion bracelet and a pencil
tucked behind her ear. We chose
embroidery skeins, held at each end
with shiny black and gold bands.
(“Smocked”)
It takes considerable technical skill to write like this, simply and affectingly, conjuring a scene with such accuracy. The line breaks, the stanza breaks and the choice of form in this collection are carefully considered, but unobtrusive. Their simplicity should not disguise the skill involved. There is a villanelle, a Christopher Smart look-alike poem “Essex Girls”, in which you want to know the friend, or feel as if you already do; a wonderful evocation of a night out at the dogs, and a description of a student party that will make many of us cringe.
Behind all this stands the keenly observing child, often unobtrusive herself, but always watchful, empathic and compassionate. This collection does her justice.
Nov 25 2024
London Grip Poetry Review – Judith Wozniak
Poetry review – MAKING DOLMADES IN ESSEX: Diana Cant visits a childhood and adolescence lived in the 1950’s and 60’s, brought to evocative life in Judith Wozniak’s debut collection.
Throughout her working life as a family doctor, Judith Wozniak has clearly been the mistress of detailed observation, and it shows. Her first two pamphlets, Patient Watching and Case Notes, both published by Hedgehog Press, are a testament to her ability to watch, listen and sensitively intervene. She’s the sort of GP we all might want.In this collection, she moves away from the consulting room, and back into the territory of a childhood and adolescence spent in Essex, and sometimes in Wales. It is a childhood within a single parent household, where the child is painfully aware of her mothers’ distress and does her best to help. That capacity to observe, to register another’s pain, and to attempt to intervene was present even then. Wozniak has the ability to remember in extraordinary detail, but as a poet, it’s not enough to observe and recall – you have to be able to put it into words, and they have to be the right words.
This is Wozniak’s skill. She conjures up a world that some of, us of a certain age, will remember, and those of us who are younger may begin to glimpse and understand. There is a narrative arc here, from an Essex childhood with visits to family in Wales, school days interspersed by mournful summer seaside holidays all leading towards growing independence, student life in insalubrious London digs, and then marriage, motherhood and adult caring. If that seems like too broad a sweep, it’s not – it’s managed in a skilful and understated way, packed with Wozniak’s trademark details that have you saying to yourself, ‘oh, yes. I remember that’. We follow the trajectory of a mother/daughter relationship that is shot through with sadness and worry, where the fathers’ absence is only explained at the very end.
In “Other People’s Families”, we learn that ‘Our new next-door neighbours have a dad’ that the child watches through a hole in the fence, worrying ‘I’ll snag my best cardigan,/poppy-red with ladybird buttons / and make my mother more sad.’ On holiday in “Coombe Martin,1957”:
After which mother and daughter explore, ‘wrapped in Pakamacs and plastic/ concertina rain bonnets’, until the mother whispers ‘let’s go home’.
In the titular poem, there is ‘water melon, sliced into smiles’, and the mother’s depression begins to lift. There are touching moments of humour, when both mother and daughter reveal themselves as capable of deception, the mother to con a lift to the polling station, and the daughter to steal a pretend ruby from a game of Bucaneer:
There are a number of ‘Welsh’ poems, often linking to coal mining family connections. The recreation of the coal-man deliveries (when there were such things):
and an innocent question leads to tales of rats as big as cats in the mines. This is a child’s eye view, a child used to observing all the nuances of human behaviour and decoding them, often to protect a vulnerable parent.
Wozniak is also a mistress of the telling last line. Often a poem will end with a simple line that highlights the underlying emotion, be it sadness (often) or self-deprecating humour; as in “Life Lessons”, where the holiday girl in the office is taken under the wing of the old hands, advised to avoid Jeff, and given hair advice:
Aced by that final word! And in “Five Foot in her Slippers”, which describes the mother in hospital, elderly and reverting to schoolteacher mode in her confusion, the last line is the telling observation, ‘Her perm squashed flat at the back’, with its customary clear-sighted compassion.
There is a real economy in Wozniak’s work. The poems are often pared back and the language simple and unadorned. There is compression of description too, the poet alighting on those details, often involving colour, that will bring a scene to life. Here is an example, from a recurring theme of sewing, smocking and haberdashery, at a time when clothes were few and were often handmade and mended.
It takes considerable technical skill to write like this, simply and affectingly, conjuring a scene with such accuracy. The line breaks, the stanza breaks and the choice of form in this collection are carefully considered, but unobtrusive. Their simplicity should not disguise the skill involved. There is a villanelle, a Christopher Smart look-alike poem “Essex Girls”, in which you want to know the friend, or feel as if you already do; a wonderful evocation of a night out at the dogs, and a description of a student party that will make many of us cringe.
Behind all this stands the keenly observing child, often unobtrusive herself, but always watchful, empathic and compassionate. This collection does her justice.