ON VOODOO SHOP

Published in Poetry Book Society Bulletin, Spring 2002)                       

"About" is so many things: the poet is not always the best person to say. Voodoo Shop is, I think, about fatherhood,  jungles, sex;  darkness and light,  snakes, storm petrels and death; mourning, magic and faith. Or nakedness and decoration, both emotional and formal. Or women's creativity. Tatiana from Eugene Onegin, writing her mad love letter to a man she hardly knows, Tori Amos looking for a piano to compose on, Bridget Riley beginning the op art sequence that made her name by painting what she said was her very last picture. That poem's central line has a full stop in the middle which the poem denies. "She's going to give up painting. So she paints..."

    The book is dedicated to my father who died while I was writing it, and is prefaced by a couplet from a poetic father, Basil Bunting's The Spoils. It is also full of love and sex. "You're a feminist," said a woman in the audience at a reading I did recently in Kerala, "but you write love poems." "You wouldn't not travel on an aeroplane," I said, "just because men designed it." The love poem tradition was made by men about (mainly) women, and implies traditionally skewed power-relations: the male poet's power to look at, and represent, women. A woman writing a love poem has to drive a male-designed vehicle  her way. Loving a man, she has to  look at and represent maleness in a manmade form.

       I am particularly conscious of all this at present because I've just realized that apart from Anne Haverty (also Chatto& Windus) I am currently the only woman poet I know in Britain published by a woman.    

       The poems stray into many different scenarios and personae, and I wanted to mirror that variety formally by getting as many as possible different tones into each poem, and trying radically different  architectures, from tiny lyrics to long baroque arias. But the book is basically a love story. Lots of  happiness, sex, music and trust; but it ends sadly. The partners are together five years, cook together (you get one of the recipes), travel together to Ireland (where the man's family came from), New York, Cannes, and Brazil where they visit  a voodoo shop, jewel factory, and jungle. They sustain each other through bereavement (his mother dies, her father dies), split up -  and then get back together, for they can't live without each other.

     But they're going to have to. As Basil Bunting says,

                                  When Tigris floods snakes swarm in the city,

                             coral, jade, jet, between jet and jade, yellow...

You gradually realize the man has commitments elsewhere. A violent wife with a lover of  her own, who insists on separate rooms and flings glasses round the kitchen, but will wreck the children's lives unless he stays. At the end, the lovers are in New Orleans (more voodoo), the wife has discovered the affair, and the woman decides she must give up her lover for the sake of his fatherhood. As the number of lines in the stanzas of  these poems dwindles from five to four, three, two, she takes off - or the book takes off - on the wings of migration and valediction.