Poetry Shelf review:

Posted: Friday Jun 09, 2023

This is a story about your mother by Louise Wallace

Poetry Shelf review: This is a story about your mother by Louise Wallace | NZ Poetry Shelf

Think of something you know about me.
Something you know for sure.
Step on it with both feet.
Make sure it can hold your weight in water.
Make sure it can hold you for a long time.

from 'Vessel'

I adore poetry books that exude a love of poetry and what words can do. I also adore poetry books that get me thinking. Poetry can generate so much as you read, whether you enter roadmaps of experience, imagination, or combinations of both. For decades I have been fascinated by how the ink in our pens (or pencils or keyboards) is infused with the personal, the recalled, the scavenged, the political, writing trends, writing regulations, societal trends, societal regulations, hierarchies, biases, ideology that circulates immunity, open challenges, open hearts and roving minds.

Louise Wallace's new collection, This is a story about your mother, gets me thinking. I am in awe of what her poems can do, the way we might delight in a poem for the sake of its poemness. I am also personally stitched into the weave of poetry that places motherhood and pregnancy, the anticipation and the actuality, centre stage. It is to be back in the thick and thrill and fatigue, the endless questions and precious epiphanies, the physicality of both becoming and being a mother.

Some critics continue to denigrate writing that favours a domestic focus, yet I continue to argue it is an enduring and rewarding subject for poetry with its multiple rhythms and rhymes, its myriad melodies and repetitions. It might be personal, political, physical, nurturing, mood or idea-generating, fortifying.

Louise's collection begins with the poem 'fact', a sequence of declarations that are rich in possibilities. Already I am hooked. Read the phrase, "life is not a bed", and hit the pause button, savour the sweet gap on the line. I want to put of roses in the gap but I make the poem's leap to "of white paper". Then I spin and spiral on the "bed of white paper", the reverberating rose. Ah. I keep reading the poem's punctuated flow, leaping over the spaces on the line to the next fact, the next rose.

I am breaking up with difficult poetry using a comprehensive guide
to my biggest childhood crushes then & now thanks people

life is not a bed of white paper don't forget to stop and smell
a white piece of paper by any other name

Begin with pregnancy, the mystery and miracle of birth and new babies, the how to put into words such experience. The larger section of the book is entitled 'like a heart', while the second slender section, 'vessel' contains a single poem, an epistolary poem, like a gift addressed to the baby, whether still in the womb or out in the world.

Questions permeate. How to be a mother? How to be mother lover writer woman? How to negotiate the bombardment of images and ideas that promote an ideal woman - the ideal body image, the ideal mother, partner, writer. Louise performs a resistance through her writing - there is no singular maternal rhythm or composition or thread or place to stand or sleep.

it's hard to be completely yourself while being beaten around the ears with
leafy greens. you can see freedom swinging further away as you try to relax
daily and not lift heavy things, blitzing vegetables and exposing your mood,
poking out your chin and the no-good nose, your hair constantly increasing
in volume so that everything feels like it might do you harm.

from 'cumbersome repetitions with friends'

I hold this glorious book out to you as an example of poetry as hinge. Poems offer continuity and flow but they also create invent juxtapose. The richness of the poetic hinge establishes connection, the pause, the gap. Louise uses numerous "hinges" that affect visual and aural effects as you read. A poem might be fractured and conversely connected by the use of an x, a blank space, a comma, a full stop, or slash /.

The opening poem 'fact' compiles a series of ands. Writing becomes a way of measuring and marking a life, the time, the day, what we must to do, what we might do. There are echoes and there are repetitions, but each arrival is nuanced. A word might be a musical note, a gesture, a thought, a feeling - it might be different keys, a chord, a swelling, a gathering, a recognition. There might be connection and there might be disruption.

Ah. The title of the collection offers us entry points. A way into the comfort of lists. A way into joy and pain. Ah yes. The way mothers might be invisible. The way self-doubt is a plague and the burnt chop is mother's choice.

this is the sound of waves / of no preference / of low-fuss mothering / or working
and staying reputable / the sound of being undercover / this is what it sounds
like to be secretly terrified / and this is the sound of washing / drying flatly / in
heat / the sound of a booster seat / being installed / this is sound of intent /
of planning / and preparation / for something for which you can't prepare / this
is the sound of size / the sound of a guarantee / and of hope / this is the sound
/ found / in a library / this is the sound of a screen / in the dark / the sound of

from 'talk you your baby'

When I reach the final poem, the long gift letter to the baby, it feels as though I am trespassing on something utterly intimate, so exquisitely private. But how this poem resonates; the way motherhood is both familiar and unfamiliar, with recognitions and misrecognitions. It is the most breathtaking sequence I have read from a mother's point of view in ages.

There are many different scales of pain.
Some are songs.
Some linen

with white lace trim.

As you read, you enter a realm where poetry is "like a heart" and like "vessel". Where poetry is a sublime rendition of what poems can be, where poetry pulsates, and poetry holds. Such is the glorious terrain of This is a story about your mother.

There are some things you cannot know.
There are some places I cannot go.

from 'Vessel'

Louise Wallace is the author of three previous collections of poems. She is the founder and editor of Starling, an online journal publishing the work of young writers from Aotearoa, and the editor of Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems 2022. She completed an MA in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters in 2008, winning the Biggs Prize for Poetry, and was the Robert Burns Fellow at the University of Otago, Dunedin in 2015. She grew up in Gisborne and now lives on the Otago Peninsula in Ōtepoti with her husband and their young son.