Poetry review – OCTOPUS MIND: Kate Noakes finds Rachel Carney’s examination of dyspraxia to be both perceptive and precise.
Octopus Mind
Rachel Carney
Seren
ISBN 978178727102
£9.99
In Octopus Mind Rachel Carney explores and explains to her readers and herself what it is to have dyspraxia. In the opening poem “Apologies” she asks us to ‘Pardon the universe you do not know’. Her hunt for answers is found in the letter clues in “The Clues Were All There, Strewn Out Along The Shore.” They point the way after 35 years to a “Diagnosis”; ‘let it illuminate your life.’ Her explanations to us offer riches in “Exhibits in the Museum of Dyspraxia” including bruises, noise, dropped objects, and ‘a cushion of air between the body and the mind.’ Squarely in the framework of health humanities, this book is largely a result of her PhD work. It chimes with me on two fronts: firstly the deep consideration of a debilitating and misunderstood medical condition, and secondly the deployment of art as motif and metaphor. We have much in common. We should meet and chat.
Carney has some ekphrastic poems which rather traditionally look at a named work of art, enlivening it by inventive description. We have for instance: “Impressions” after Turner where she questions what it is she is seeing; “Blue Nude”, where she imagines Picasso painting the same; and “Unremarkable”, where perceptively Gwen John paints ‘a corner of her mind…[and] the scent of the boulangerie, drifting from below’ in the well-known painting of her Paris chambre de bonne.
Art is deployed too in the service of other subjects. She makes Rousseau’s tiger earn its keep in two poems. “I Am Trying Not To Write a Poem about You” – where the ‘you’ is so often her dyspraxia – goes beyond looking at the painting to her condition: ‘a caveman in your element forcing your way inside’ the storm-tossed undergrowth from which rain she emerges and ironically finds ‘all I can see is tiger.’ The same painting is re-used in “Hidden Disability”, one of several poems deploying a fractured structure to reflect the trashing of the tiger/dyspraxic brain as Carney struggles to find her place, space and voice in the world.
Art making and art techniques are cleverly deployed in poems such as “I Half-close My Eyes” in an attempt to colour and paint the ‘you’. “Paper Women” involves drawing ‘in blue biro on the back of old bills’, posting them to a ‘you’, who by enquiry may or may not recognise the sender. And further, many poems are titled “Self-portrait as…”
But art is not the only medium/metaphor of this collection as its title makes plain. Octopuses are animus and the mind’s metaphor, along with widely deployed images of the sea. Her ‘Octopus Self’ took years to be lured out into the world, to be colourfully high on a rock:
content
with the strange shape of herself
coiling, uncoiling confident, serene.
This extroversion is matched by fear ‘sure that every shadow is a shark,’ and when things really start to fall apart, ‘casting off a tentacle in wet despair’, Carney can only huddle and wait. The titular poem, “Octopus Mind,” revisits ‘with such a weight, self-analysis,’ all words spoken, worrying over and quizzing them with her tentacles jabbing, squeezing and prodding
until each word
is worn down to the bone –
white and shivering,
with scraps of flesh still clinging on.
Thoroughly enjoyable for her inventions, variation of form from the villanelle to the prose poem, this super first collection ends with positivity in “Self-portrait as a Neurodivergent Tree,” the final words of which and this precise and perceptive book are:
we trees stand proud
hold out our canopy adorned
in white and green –
the mantle of our creativity
bursting into bloom.
Feb 21 2025
London Grip Poetry Review – Rachel Carney
Poetry review – OCTOPUS MIND: Kate Noakes finds Rachel Carney’s examination of dyspraxia to be both perceptive and precise.
In Octopus Mind Rachel Carney explores and explains to her readers and herself what it is to have dyspraxia. In the opening poem “Apologies” she asks us to ‘Pardon the universe you do not know’. Her hunt for answers is found in the letter clues in “The Clues Were All There, Strewn Out Along The Shore.” They point the way after 35 years to a “Diagnosis”; ‘let it illuminate your life.’ Her explanations to us offer riches in “Exhibits in the Museum of Dyspraxia” including bruises, noise, dropped objects, and ‘a cushion of air between the body and the mind.’ Squarely in the framework of health humanities, this book is largely a result of her PhD work. It chimes with me on two fronts: firstly the deep consideration of a debilitating and misunderstood medical condition, and secondly the deployment of art as motif and metaphor. We have much in common. We should meet and chat.
Carney has some ekphrastic poems which rather traditionally look at a named work of art, enlivening it by inventive description. We have for instance: “Impressions” after Turner where she questions what it is she is seeing; “Blue Nude”, where she imagines Picasso painting the same; and “Unremarkable”, where perceptively Gwen John paints ‘a corner of her mind…[and] the scent of the boulangerie, drifting from below’ in the well-known painting of her Paris chambre de bonne.
Art is deployed too in the service of other subjects. She makes Rousseau’s tiger earn its keep in two poems. “I Am Trying Not To Write a Poem about You” – where the ‘you’ is so often her dyspraxia – goes beyond looking at the painting to her condition: ‘a caveman in your element forcing your way inside’ the storm-tossed undergrowth from which rain she emerges and ironically finds ‘all I can see is tiger.’ The same painting is re-used in “Hidden Disability”, one of several poems deploying a fractured structure to reflect the trashing of the tiger/dyspraxic brain as Carney struggles to find her place, space and voice in the world.
Art making and art techniques are cleverly deployed in poems such as “I Half-close My Eyes” in an attempt to colour and paint the ‘you’. “Paper Women” involves drawing ‘in blue biro on the back of old bills’, posting them to a ‘you’, who by enquiry may or may not recognise the sender. And further, many poems are titled “Self-portrait as…”
But art is not the only medium/metaphor of this collection as its title makes plain. Octopuses are animus and the mind’s metaphor, along with widely deployed images of the sea. Her ‘Octopus Self’ took years to be lured out into the world, to be colourfully high on a rock:
This extroversion is matched by fear ‘sure that every shadow is a shark,’ and when things really start to fall apart, ‘casting off a tentacle in wet despair’, Carney can only huddle and wait. The titular poem, “Octopus Mind,” revisits ‘with such a weight, self-analysis,’ all words spoken, worrying over and quizzing them with her tentacles jabbing, squeezing and prodding
Thoroughly enjoyable for her inventions, variation of form from the villanelle to the prose poem, this super first collection ends with positivity in “Self-portrait as a Neurodivergent Tree,” the final words of which and this precise and perceptive book are: