Unity Books was packed with a
friendly crowd on Thursday night for the launch of Helen Heath’s first full
collection of poetry - ‘Graft’.
Some extracts from Harry
Ricketts’ heart-felt speech follow:
Sometimes
launchers of first collections find themselves in a tricky position. You can
tell by the odd telltale twitch, by a general air of unease. They like a few of
the poems, maybe; they want to be encouraging, certainly; but they clearly wish
they’d never agreed to the whole damn thing and that, like Bilbo Baggins
at the start of The Lord of the Rings, they could just put on a magic
ring and disappear. That’s not the case with me. I think I’m really lucky to be
here speaking about Graft. It’s a terrific, handsomely produced
collection, full of memorable poems which are constantly shining a light on
each other and on the world…
Helen,
as some of you will know, is currently doing a PhD in creative writing at the
IIML at Victoria, working on poetry and science. So, it’s fitting that several
of the poems in ‘Spiral Arms’, the first section of Graft, are about
scientists: Isaac Newton, David Brewster, Beatrice Tinsley, Rosalind Franklin,
Marie Curie. These poems beautifully, subtly, reflect on the scientists
themselves and capture something distinctive about them…
As
Helen’s note points out, the word ’graft’ is linked etymologically to Old Norse
and Old German words for ‘digging’, and hence to our word ‘grave’. But the
reader is also expected, I think, to link ‘graft’ horticulturally to ‘a shoot’
or ‘cutting’. In this sense we are all ‘grafts’ or ‘shoots’ of our parents and
ancestors. And poems themselves might be thought of as ‘grafts’ because they
are ‘grafted’ onto or out of other poems and language structures. And, in a
different sense again, writing poems is often ‘hard graft’, hard work, a test
of craft, though that kind of ‘graft’ often doesn’t, and perhaps shouldn’t, be
obvious in the final version, and isn’t here.
The
third section, ‘Truth & Fiction’, as its title implies mixes the real and
the fictive, also the homely and the dangerous, carving out spaces where, to
quote from ‘Making tea in the universe’: “There is no apron to stand behind.”
At the moment one of my favourites in this section is ‘Ripple’. I can’t think
of a poem which so poignantly and unself-dramatisingly suggests the
vertiginous, world-swinging topsyturviness of early motherhood. The poem is all
one sentence with brilliant line-breaks, and I hope Helen won’t mind if I read
it:
The
floor has a ripple
in
it, which is funny
because
the carpet is blue
like
the sea and the baby
is
pulling and chewing
on
my nipple so hard
that
it bleeds
and
her little legs kick-
kick
me, her hands find
my
hair and pull hard
and
there‘s a roaring
in
my ears that might
be
the sea and they ask
me
if I’m blue and
I
say I just need
some
sleep then everything
will
be all right but now
the
floor has a ripple in it.
Last
year I was lucky enough to have Helen in my creative non-fiction class at the
IIML, and the domestic pieces she wrote then share a good deal of the emotional
territory and emotional power of the domestic poems in Graft. One
particularly goosebumpy prose poem Helen did as an exercise was called ‘O
Brother’, and I was pleased to see it show up again here as ‘Fairytale iv: O
Brother’ - having lost none of its frisson. Before I read Graft, I still
had hopes that Helen might be lured back to non-fiction, but these poems are so
compelling and engaging that I don’t think that will be any time soon. So,
congratulations to Helen.
Buy this
book; get Helen to sign it; carry it around with you; live with the poems; you
won’t be sorry.
Thank
you.
Harry
Ricketts
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