Poetry reviews – STILL LIFE and SUBCUTANEOUS: Emma Storr reviews prizewinning chapbooks by Rebecca Bilkau and Maria Isakova-Bennett
Still Life
Rebecca Bilkau
Wayleave Press
ISBN 978-1-0685762-2-5
£7.00
Subcutaneous
Maria Isakova-Bennett
Wayleave Press
ISBN978-1-0685762-0-1
£7.00
I’ve enjoyed reviewing these two outstanding chapbooks together, winners of the 2024 Litfest/Wayleave Pamphlet competition. They share several themes such as heritage, loss and surviving emotional trauma. Each poet has their own unique experience and way of interpreting these themes, which made comparing them a fascinating exercise.
In Rebecca Bilkau’s Still Life, death infuses the collection. In the first poem, “Last Dance”, the repetition of ‘Here we go’ conveys both the random way death can strike as well as a certain resignation to the inevitable. In other poems, unexpected mortality is a cause of enduring grief and loss.
The poem which gives the chapbook its title, “Still Life”, is a complex narrative written in couplets. It begins with a woman opening windows and watching flies and wasps form patterns on the ceiling. A character called Jacinta deals round cards:
On the upturned Tarot, a sweet-faced, silk-swaddled corpse
Is framed by snakes twisted into heart-shapes: yes
but there’s still life.
We know from a previous poem that the speaker has given birth to a stillborn son. This fact adds enormous weight to those two words ‘still life’ and the different ways we can interpret their meaning. We return to the insects:
Pests. Snips of life. She found their tiny precise survivals
endurable. Stopped sealing the windows, stopped
killing the boy in the busy ground with grief.
There is a shift in perspective as the couplets progress from ‘killing the boy’ to seeing the chance ‘he had at last: he could be anything she let him be.’
The theme of death does not preclude humour. In “Names”, we hear that Grandma used euphemisms with capitals when talking about anything important (The Big C for cancer) but God is simply ‘Himself’. When she was dying, despite being a lapsed Catholic, ‘she sent for The Father by name’ who reassured the family that Grandma was with the angels now. ‘We didn’t / mention her worry there’d be little fun in heaven.’ The poem ends:
And anyway, what did we know, now we knew
she and Himself were on closer terms than she’d let on.
One of my favourite poems is “Last Offices” in which the speaker imagines laying out her husband’s body after death. She describes his physical features with enormous tenderness and affection and says she will address his corpse with thanks and humility. She promises she will do all these things when he is 84 or more but reminds him: ‘That’s the deal. Don’t you dare get ahead of yourself.’
Adaptation to loss is a recurrent theme in the pamphlets. Bilkau’s “Relocation” is a powerful evocation of grief following a stillbirth and the way it can be tempered by thinking of others and ministering to their needs. The phrase ‘preposterous resilience’ in the last stanza emphasises the challenges involved in surviving the loss of friends ‘as names / erase themselves from address books;’
Bilkau and Isakova-Bennett both imagine the lives of family predecessors, the unsung who may not even have a grave to visit. In Bilkau’s “Forebear” we are introduced to an anchor-maker who ‘eases his back against our family tree,’ The speaker has alternative versions of what he looked like and how he spoke. Sadly ‘Nothing of him remains for me to know, to touch, to query;’ but she claims his blood and possibly his chin and ends ‘I hold steady’, giving us a portrait of someone steering safely through life.
The metaphor of ships and sailing is continued in “After having my carotid artery cleaned”, in which the speaker wakes up from an anaesthetic with heightened sensitivity to the natural world, grateful to be alive and not to have been shipwrecked by a stroke. Following recovery ‘there is this sense of great waters navigated. / I am planning deck wear.’
The final poem in Still Life titled “Tomorrow into today” lyrically describes life’s impermanence. Looking through a window, the garden ‘fuses with my reflection’ and embodies the speaker. The lime tree becomes her spine, the chaffinch ‘footles in my hair’ and she is ‘a body composite’, ‘an epic of transience’ at one with the natural world.
**
Maria Isakova-Bennett’s collection Subcutaneous focuses particularly on her Ukrainian grandfather Samuel and her relationship with her father Joseph. The poetic forms vary greatly and her use of white space on the page and minimal punctuation often enhance the subject matter. We see this in the first poem “I live with him in my soul all the time, and that’s it” (a quote from a violinist on playing a Chopin étude). The couplets tell the story of a grandfather on a journey:
Horizon east to west, a bare forest And you leaving
travelling for days, for nights, arrival uncertain
Repetition of ‘leaving’, ‘travelling’ and ‘trees are bones’ throughout the poem underline the long journey undertaken in winter.
The next two poems provide more insight into Samuel’s experience of leaving Lviv in 1907. “Departure i.m. my grandfather” is a poignant portrait of this lonely expedition.
His country covered in snow
Packing case bag trunk
numb his feet his heart storm in his head
The sparse, carefully chosen and spaced words, convey his vulnerability and bravery in setting off into the unknown.
The poem “Subcutaneous” painfully captures the sudden disappearance of the grandfather when the speaker is a child:
I wanted to play out,
but what if I left the house
and when I returned
someone was dead?
Her terror and guilt seem to lead to anorexia.
All I had was six stone of body.
I painted shallow estuaries,
a boat stranded, the tide far out.
the Jewish cemetery, leafless birch.
These powerful images show the isolation and exile of both the speaker and the grandfather, a theme continued in the poem “edge stones only the document says”. Samuel’s grave is unmarked and therefore missing any inscribed tributes to him. The speaker wonders:
In the beginning and at the end – big disappearances –
cast out, taken back, cast out
But what was cast out and what was taken back?
Trans-generational trauma underlies poems about the speaker’s father who does not dare express his needs or love openly. “My father Drinking, the Queen Anne, 1985”, recounts an occasion when the narrator is watching him become more and more inebriated while she sketches him:
Cross-hatching describes his slump. Start and endpoint
close together. He becomes darker, overlaid by himself,
his arm raises another glass, makes a black-blue star.
That ‘overlaid by himself’ conveys much anguish and self-destruction.
Both poets reference sculptures that cause them to stop and reflect. Bilkau’s “A response to Barlach’s angel” celebrates the solidity of the bronze figure suspended above a tomb in a cathedral in Germany, a memorial to the soldiers killed in the First World War. She imagines the angel can understand ‘the whole muddle of it all, all the ideals / not quite abandoned but safely compromised;’. Believing in angels allows her imagination free range, where ‘impossibility is just a fad’. On the other hand Isakova-Bennett contemplates a kinetic piece by Mona Hatoum in “Self-erasing”. The sculpture consists of a rotating disc, half of which produces concentric circles in sand while the other half erases it. The poem is in two contrasting columns and ends:
Draw and erase efface and be
half of you harrowed
half of you redeemed
The tension between contrasting emotions is succinctly expressed.
Family glassware features in both pamphlets but is handled very differently. Bilkau’s “Heirloom” is unwanted, an epergne centrepiece which she decides not to reconstruct but stashes in the shed instead. In Isakova-Bennett’s “The green glass vase will break”, the poem is a list of instructions to smash the vase and carry it in pieces on the journey. It is a powerful metaphor for leaving the old behind and starting again:
At your destination,
don’t try to reassemble
the vase:
Instead, the speaker urges the traveller to ‘fuse them into something new.’ Hope and recovery have the final word.
Do read these pamphlets and enjoy the skill with which Bilaku and Isakova-Bennett craft emotive poems that are without sentimentality and which celebrate survival and resilience.
Jun 18 2025
London Grip Poetry Reviews – Rebecca Bilkau & Maria Isakova-Bennett
Poetry reviews – STILL LIFE and SUBCUTANEOUS: Emma Storr reviews prizewinning chapbooks by Rebecca Bilkau and Maria Isakova-Bennett
I’ve enjoyed reviewing these two outstanding chapbooks together, winners of the 2024 Litfest/Wayleave Pamphlet competition. They share several themes such as heritage, loss and surviving emotional trauma. Each poet has their own unique experience and way of interpreting these themes, which made comparing them a fascinating exercise.
In Rebecca Bilkau’s Still Life, death infuses the collection. In the first poem, “Last Dance”, the repetition of ‘Here we go’ conveys both the random way death can strike as well as a certain resignation to the inevitable. In other poems, unexpected mortality is a cause of enduring grief and loss.
The poem which gives the chapbook its title, “Still Life”, is a complex narrative written in couplets. It begins with a woman opening windows and watching flies and wasps form patterns on the ceiling. A character called Jacinta deals round cards:
We know from a previous poem that the speaker has given birth to a stillborn son. This fact adds enormous weight to those two words ‘still life’ and the different ways we can interpret their meaning. We return to the insects:
There is a shift in perspective as the couplets progress from ‘killing the boy’ to seeing the chance ‘he had at last: he could be anything she let him be.’
The theme of death does not preclude humour. In “Names”, we hear that Grandma used euphemisms with capitals when talking about anything important (The Big C for cancer) but God is simply ‘Himself’. When she was dying, despite being a lapsed Catholic, ‘she sent for The Father by name’ who reassured the family that Grandma was with the angels now. ‘We didn’t / mention her worry there’d be little fun in heaven.’ The poem ends:
One of my favourite poems is “Last Offices” in which the speaker imagines laying out her husband’s body after death. She describes his physical features with enormous tenderness and affection and says she will address his corpse with thanks and humility. She promises she will do all these things when he is 84 or more but reminds him: ‘That’s the deal. Don’t you dare get ahead of yourself.’
Adaptation to loss is a recurrent theme in the pamphlets. Bilkau’s “Relocation” is a powerful evocation of grief following a stillbirth and the way it can be tempered by thinking of others and ministering to their needs. The phrase ‘preposterous resilience’ in the last stanza emphasises the challenges involved in surviving the loss of friends ‘as names / erase themselves from address books;’
Bilkau and Isakova-Bennett both imagine the lives of family predecessors, the unsung who may not even have a grave to visit. In Bilkau’s “Forebear” we are introduced to an anchor-maker who ‘eases his back against our family tree,’ The speaker has alternative versions of what he looked like and how he spoke. Sadly ‘Nothing of him remains for me to know, to touch, to query;’ but she claims his blood and possibly his chin and ends ‘I hold steady’, giving us a portrait of someone steering safely through life.
The metaphor of ships and sailing is continued in “After having my carotid artery cleaned”, in which the speaker wakes up from an anaesthetic with heightened sensitivity to the natural world, grateful to be alive and not to have been shipwrecked by a stroke. Following recovery ‘there is this sense of great waters navigated. / I am planning deck wear.’
The final poem in Still Life titled “Tomorrow into today” lyrically describes life’s impermanence. Looking through a window, the garden ‘fuses with my reflection’ and embodies the speaker. The lime tree becomes her spine, the chaffinch ‘footles in my hair’ and she is ‘a body composite’, ‘an epic of transience’ at one with the natural world.
**
Repetition of ‘leaving’, ‘travelling’ and ‘trees are bones’ throughout the poem underline the long journey undertaken in winter.
The next two poems provide more insight into Samuel’s experience of leaving Lviv in 1907. “Departure i.m. my grandfather” is a poignant portrait of this lonely expedition.
The sparse, carefully chosen and spaced words, convey his vulnerability and bravery in setting off into the unknown.
The poem “Subcutaneous” painfully captures the sudden disappearance of the grandfather when the speaker is a child:
Her terror and guilt seem to lead to anorexia.
These powerful images show the isolation and exile of both the speaker and the grandfather, a theme continued in the poem “edge stones only the document says”. Samuel’s grave is unmarked and therefore missing any inscribed tributes to him. The speaker wonders:
Trans-generational trauma underlies poems about the speaker’s father who does not dare express his needs or love openly. “My father Drinking, the Queen Anne, 1985”, recounts an occasion when the narrator is watching him become more and more inebriated while she sketches him:
That ‘overlaid by himself’ conveys much anguish and self-destruction.
Both poets reference sculptures that cause them to stop and reflect. Bilkau’s “A response to Barlach’s angel” celebrates the solidity of the bronze figure suspended above a tomb in a cathedral in Germany, a memorial to the soldiers killed in the First World War. She imagines the angel can understand ‘the whole muddle of it all, all the ideals / not quite abandoned but safely compromised;’. Believing in angels allows her imagination free range, where ‘impossibility is just a fad’. On the other hand Isakova-Bennett contemplates a kinetic piece by Mona Hatoum in “Self-erasing”. The sculpture consists of a rotating disc, half of which produces concentric circles in sand while the other half erases it. The poem is in two contrasting columns and ends:
The tension between contrasting emotions is succinctly expressed.
Family glassware features in both pamphlets but is handled very differently. Bilkau’s “Heirloom” is unwanted, an epergne centrepiece which she decides not to reconstruct but stashes in the shed instead. In Isakova-Bennett’s “The green glass vase will break”, the poem is a list of instructions to smash the vase and carry it in pieces on the journey. It is a powerful metaphor for leaving the old behind and starting again:
At your destination, don’t try to reassemble the vase:Instead, the speaker urges the traveller to ‘fuse them into something new.’ Hope and recovery have the final word.
Do read these pamphlets and enjoy the skill with which Bilaku and Isakova-Bennett craft emotive poems that are without sentimentality and which celebrate survival and resilience.