London Grip Poetry Review – Alison Binney

 

Poetry review – THE OPPOSITE OF SWEDISH DEATH CLEANING: Mat Riches enjoys Alison Binney’s deft handling and close examination of familiar subjects

 

 

The Opposite of Swedish Death Cleaning 
Alison Binney
Seren
ISBN 9781781727751
£10.99

Please note that my opening remarks are NOT saying that I didn’t click with this collection straightaway —that absolutely happened, and so much so that I immediately ordered Binney’s debut pamphlet, Other Women’s Kitchens. However, something particularly clicked for me on page 51 of Alison Binney’s debut collection, The Opposite of Swedish Death Cleaning, that really helped me find my way in and out again. The poem “Heeling in at Lower Wood” starts with the lines

We work in pairs: one digging and planting,
the others getting guards and hammering stakes,
swapping every few trees to switch muscles.

It occurred to me as I was reading that this was perhaps how the collection as a whole was working. The poems seem to come in sets that dig in and plant ideas, and (not to push this idea too far) they then make a switch and work different set of thematic muscles. And what a set of thematic muscles! By my count, the collection covers dementia, parental loss, identity, teaching, ecology, love, running and the Covid pandemic. Sometimes these themes collide in the same poem, but not to a disorientating effect.

That said, we begin with disorientation, or a state of ostranenie / Defamiliarisation in the poem “Inside the house of delirium”

The curtains sleep until midday.
The smoke alarm coughs behind its hand.
The mirror is nervous of strangers.
The sock in the bath has forgotten its partner’s name.
The razor is full of spiders.
The milk doesn’t want to be a burden.

Up until that last line it’s so far so strange, business as usual for some poetic weirdness (and I’m here for that), but the use of “burden” introduces a whole new layer. This is where we…ok, I had to go back and start again. The poem becomes a dementia poem, and everything that comes with it. Is it a poem of observation from above or from within the person with dementia? I’m not sure it matters, but my guess is the former as we’re inside the house as it were.

I know I’m going to spend a long time fixated on the mathematics of ‘The microwave counts backwards from one hundred in sevens, gets stuck on 88’. I think this speaks to the general confusion, but I’m intrigued by the use of words as numbers and numerical representation in the same sentence, aside from the tricky sum of more than one seven getting us to 86. The confusion this creates is, I am sure, deliberate.

And suspicions about this being about dementia are confirmed when we turn the page to the poem “Muscle Memory”. We’re greeted with more numbers in the opening line, spelled out this time…’Three weeks earlier I’d said My Dad has Alzheimer’s / to the sashed woman in the porch who swept me / past the kiosk through the transept to the vestry.’ This poem is quite the gut punch, it’s a mixture of well-meaning people attempting to help, the sound of someone struggling with looking after a person with Alzheimer’s , ‘while I stood like a lost child in a shop’. However, the real punch comes at the end when the poet’s father stands up to sing in church at a Christmas eve performance…A church organ rumbles

the chords of Hark the Herald, you pushed yourself up
on the frame to stand straight-backed, singing the bass line
by heart while the great west door swung open.

That sense of someone coming back to who they are, prompted by that (muscle) memory is strong and arresting. And the music at the end of a poem continues in the title poem that follows a couple of pages later. “The opposite of Swedish death cleaning”. The collection’s notes tells us Döstädning is known in English as ‘Swedish death cleaning’ — a method of decluttering one’s house, often in late middle age, in preparation for death’.

Rather than the cleansing or clearing of Swedish practice, Binney finds herself in a very different situation, sifting through a lifetime of accumulated items while her father is in a care home. She’s ‘frisking / your house for Ladybird books and egg cups, / stamp albums, paperweights and pebbles, / for fifty nubs of Imperial Leather soap’. In an article on her own website , Binney wrote about envying the imagined Swedish woman in the poem, a woman whose own father has left ‘one chair, / one mug, one teaspoon, one coffee filter’. At that point she (Binney) realised that

what I was doing was the opposite of Swedish death cleaning: I’m not Swedish,

I was the one doing the death-cleaning on behalf of my father, who didn’t even

know it was happening, and the whole process felt very far from clean. But I

wouldn’t have had it any other way. It was difficult, physically and emotionally

demanding work, but it was also deeply healing. I wouldn’t have missed those

experiences of being reunited with childhood games, cassette recordings of family

holidays, and 1970s picnicware for the world. And I felt closer to both my parents –

one having died twenty years previously, the other in the depths of dementia –

than I had for ages.

We can all admire that Scandinavian desire for simplicity, etc, but life is, as the poem says, ‘messy’. The third line of the second stanza hinges on the word ‘Frisking’ and it does a lot of heavy-lifting. If frisking is the search using your ‘hands to search someone’s body when they are wearing clothes to see if they are hiding illegal objects or weapons’ (Cambridge Dictionary), then it feels like the most perfectly chosen gerund of all time.

The listed items Binney describes may all seem simple, but what they hold beyond themselves is infinitely more interesting and transporting. I, for one, am straight back to my grandparents house at the evocation of ‘nubs of Imperial Leather Soap’, and they would have been among the first things discarded at their house clearance.

Now, look, we’ve spent a long time on this, and we are only 4 poems in to the collection. We may, as Binney does, return to this theme later, but for now I promised you other themes. Let’s have a look at some. There’s an interesting segue, or ‘swapping every few trees’, from the dementia poems to a different kind of identity in “The philosopher’s axe”. This poem talks about the myth of us all becoming different people as our cells change over time, ‘that thing about cells regenerating every few/ years’. The poem asks if we are our physical bodies or the experiences that made us, and ultimately comes to the conclusion we are both.

		[…] but your Achilles

knows you are no Ship of Theseus, no
philosophical conundrum. Ask the scar

at the base of your thumb if it’s still
the same axe. Ask the nick in your heart.

We are both, even if the axe affects us in different ways. This poem acts as a gateway to what follows. In “The way you knew” we are introduced to an older person looking back at their past, and working out their sexuality, and how it became apparent in a million different ways or cues. The form is prose-poem-like, full of repetition of certainties, unpunctuated to suggest the way all these ways run into each other..

the way you knew your own coat in the cloakroom    the way you knew
as you chewed how big the next bubble would be   the way everyone
knew the new boy was weird even before he began drinking ink […]

The poem carries on in this style, but picks up the pace in terms of threat levels after the ink line. A little later we are hit with ‘the way you knew the name carved on the / desk wasn’t yours but the izza lezza made you go red’ and it keeps building from there. I won’t spoil the final line here, but it’s there to be read on the Seren website  from when it was published in Binney’s debut pamphlet.

There’s a lot of self-discovery in the collection, whether that is recognising and/or wrestling with how to be in a world that is less-friendly, still, to anyone considered other. Poems like “Testimony” (a tricky one to quote here because of its cross shape, but it’s worth reading). It’s far from the best example of Binney’s work because it’s essentially a found poem. However, that basic description undervalues the power of the assemblage.

The content is taken from ‘a social forum where people shared experiences of other Christians’ responses to their coming out as lesbian or gay’. It is tempered with occasional positive notes like ‘I love you very much’, but in the same line (and I hope from a different comment) we find

I’ve stopped shopping at that supermarket that shows two men 
 cooking lasagne together in their home because I think they’re normalising  
something      disgusting. 

The word ‘disgusting’ is separated off from the ‘something’ by a space or pause for breath. You can see how it could be linked, but that one word pause adds something extra (and not a pleasant thing), as if the speaker can’t quite bring themselves to think the thought, let alone give it a voice.

Shortly after this poem, we change trees again – and trees are quite apt – as we enter a section where we think about humankind’s impact on the world. The best two examples of this, for me , are “How to conquer nature” and “38.7º”. The former details, in five couplets, the sheer lack of foresight, and the stupidity of Chairman Mao’s campaign to rid China of Sparrows in 1958. The final line reads ‘Stop your ears to the song of locusts’and speaks strongly to our regrettable ability to ignore what is going on around us.

The second poem of this pair uses elements of the absurd, mixed in with something as familiar as a weather forecast, to drive this same point out. The poem starts

Good morning! And it is a glorious morning,
with a ridge of high pressure set fair over
the whole of the UK for the foreseeable future,
bringing plenty of sunshine and even the chance 
of record-breaking temperatures later on. 
Further afield, in the far east, low-lying land
will give way to rising sea levels, with just
a possibility of one or worse nations vanishing
before noon…

The poem ends on a line that can be taken several ways. ‘Do be sure to get out and enjoy that sunshine!’ can be taken at face value, or as a friendly exhortation from a weather presenter; but given all that precedes it in the poem there’s an extra bite to it, an implicit criticism that suggests we are complicit in the impending (moot word here) climate disaster. It’s hard to argue with any of it.

Now look, here we are, several hundred words in and still only on page 23 of the collection. I’m going to skip a few, glossing over the sections on running and teaching (as wonderful as they are) and jump to the love poems. The love poems section starts with “Courtship”, continues with “How we knew” (a more positive call back to the earlier “The way you knew”?) and ends with “Grain”. I have read “How we knew” about 20 times now and have yet to tire of it. It’s relative simplicity belies its depth and, quite frankly, it’s loveliness. More of that please world.

I think when you told me you’d chosen the wine
because you liked the picture one the bottle,
while I was setting the oven gloves on fire
and trying to pretend I hadn’t.

It’s a poem about barriers coming down, pretence being broken away and much more. My heart swells when I read the lines

Then you knew and I knew and the evening
stretched before its, the air fat with so much
knowing it hurt too breathe….

‘the air fat with so much / knowing’ is worth the price of admission alone even with a ten-fold mark-up. I won’t spoil the end, but I would urge you to find the poem and read it.

The poems mentioned above are lovely examples of personal, person to person poems made universal. Between them we get the outside world impinging on the relationship between Binney and her female partner. She imagines what an aunt is up to when she sends ‘separate cards, in separate envelopes, / with separate stands, to the same address’ at Christmas in “Opening”and delivers a stinging retort in “Exposure” rebutting the garbage spouted by Andrea Leadsom about children being ‘exposed’ to ‘LGBT rights’. It’s a powerful poem, and again, I’d urge you to read it, but the most effective of these poems is for me is “Everyday heterosexual predicaments: the mini-break”. Here are the first two couplets.

The heterosexual couple arrive at the B&B
feeling a little on edge. Will their booking

have disappeared? Will they be asked
if they are siblings, cousins or friends?

This approach is a call back/partner poem to one from earlier in the collection called “Everyday heterosexual predicaments: the soap opera” that begins

After twenty years the Street is ready for a heterosexual.
Not that it’s clear at first. He’s just a normal bloke.

Friendly. Doesn’t shove it in your face. Decent, even.
Then he starts those over-the-shoulder looks..

This subversion of expectations is a familiar Binney approach (familiar is a good thing here—she does this sort of thing excellently, but not too much, throughout the collection) of flipping things to apply a light to them. It’s not the defamiliarisation we met at the start of the collection, but it’s close enough and it does its job most effectively.

The Opposite of Swedish Death Cleaning is chock full of life, items, thoughts and emotions. It’s never cluttered, and I wouldn’t want to see any of its surprises given away too soon. To come back to “Heeling in at Lower Wood”, there’s a line in the second stanza

…every damn sapling 
is a metaphor, or an omen, and it can’t 
just be me thinking, this is the way 
to spend an apocalypse. 

I’m not going to be so crass as to suggest every poem in this collection is a sapling. I’m not going to suggest that I’d want to spend the (post-)apocalypse with just this book, but I will suggest that I am saying something somewhere in-between those two things.