P OE TRY

Beasts of Nalunga

Jack Mapanje Bloodaxe Books / 64pp. / £7.95

Review by Niccolóó Milanese

JACK Mapanje’s latest collection starts with a new proverb which, rather than encapsulating his spirit, should be read as introducing it:

Resilience is like a swallow, It swoops and turns across Mountains, valleys, waters Evading the sharp beaks of Killer-hawks until it perches On fragrant tree branches.

Mapanje was imprisoned under the Hastings Banda dictatorship in Malawi between 1987 and 1990, and has lived in exile in the UK since. He has often chosen swallows as symbols for his time in the notorious Mikuyu prison, and in an earlier volume uses this metaphor to evoke both his fellow prisoners and their conditions: “those hyenas yapping ... scorpions whose sting sings like brain / tumour, the swarming mosquitoes and bats –/ What, who you won’t find here, welcome / To the chattering wagtails of Mikuyu Prison”. The swallows represent at once the negation which is prison, and the violent unnamed, brought to song and turned to restful silence. Mapanje is one of the most adept followers of his late friend Ken Saro Wiwa’s injunction: “Dance, dance the guns to Silence!”.

The spectres of prison and tyranny are as present as ever in Mapanje’s consciousness, and the poet knows they will not leave. The ‘Beasts of Nalunga’ from the impressive title poem are mysterious vampires creatures which were reported to have appeared in Dowa District of Malawi in 2003, prompting up to 3000 people to leave their homes. They become metaphors for other vampires, and seem at times to represent the World Bank, the IMF, Western pharmaceutical companies, or some of the many other problems and cures that have appeared in Malawi over the last fifty years. But these creatures are ultimately spectres of history and forgetfulness, which live in the people themselves: they lurk here and there, “even in you and me”.

“There is a violence stared-out by laughter –not overcome, but neutered”

Banda’s dictatorship fell in 1993, yet Mapanje still sees the ugly ghost of the tyrant. There are several poems furious about the mausoleums built to the dictator. In one, the endless ghosts of those who Banda condemned –“accidentalised” or “car-crashed” –seem to rise up from the earth and swirl around the new memorials. Yet what is most unexpected about this work is the humour of it. One might be tempted to call it a sense of farce, but these situations are too real for that. There is a violence stared-out by laughter –not overcome, but neutered – and the result is that sometimes the poetry seems peculiarly domestic. Mapanje picks this out himself when he

titles one of the sections of this collection ‘Of Homes Weirdly Sweet’. The kind of at-homeness the poet finds is always that of a traveller or exile, but in this collection one senses that Mapanje believes he has been in the United Kingdom long enough to make claims about it: “Hang on, Mister”, one of his poems starts, “I too was here when / The Winter of Discontent broke out ...”. No doubt the Wordsworth Trust residency, in which he wrote much of the collection, has had some impact too. On the basis of a couple of readings, it seems that there is also a change in the poetic register; and that Mapanje has now started writing for a British audience, and that his poems are often about his homeland, where there was perhaps no need for description before. One of the poems – ‘a prayer for paramount sages’ –seems to be a call for new voices in Malawi. Perched here, Mapanje has started to uncover the beasts that haunt the West: there is a poem about the fallout from the Iraq war, and an angry composition about the cynical reaction in “our Christian claimed states” to pop-singer Madonna adopting an orphan, and other glancing allusions to the kind of sermonising the poet has so deftly avoided. In response to a question about how –in spite of all the tragedies of the continent –African writing can be called a celebration, the Nigerian author Chinua Achebe has remarked that there is an age-old tradition for rejoicing, even in the face of the carvings of the white district officers, of small pox, of thunder: that if one does not celebrate nearby the terrifying monsters, they will go where you cannot keep an eye on them. Mapanje has kept a close eye on the monsters he encountered in prison, and has spotted many new ones since, and possesses the inspiring integrity to make them dance to his songs.

Niccolóó Milanese is a director of European Alternatives, and a Contributing Editor of The Liberal

52 | The Liberal | Autumn 2007
P OE TRY

Talking to the Dead

Elaine Feinstein Carcanet / 64pp. / £9.95

Review by Fiona Sampson

THEcover of this collection tells us that it “is Elaine Feinstein’s most passionate book of poetry”; and there is nothing careful about these elegies, or the memories and memorials which surround them. And yet to read Talking to the Dead is to be taken through its dark matter by an absolutely sure-footed guide, a mistress of the most difficult literary and human subjects. It is as if the poetic voice has the capacity to contain not only those experiences the author explores, but the reader’s own intimate terror of bereavement and death. Dante famously understood how only a true poet – a Virgil – can guide us through this territory; and few writers have the range and dignity equal to this task. Coincidentally, the last eighteen months have seen the publication of two moving and important ‘Widow’s Necklace’s’: Penelope Shuttle’s Redgrove’s Wife and the Russian Inna Lisnianskaya’s Far from Sodom(itself with an introduction by Feinstein). The phrase ‘Widow’s Necklace’ is Feinstein’s; and it is the title of one of the shortest and yet most fullyincorporated of the poems, and one in which we begin to see, perhaps, the secret of an enormous poetic toughness. The first of five couplets declares: “Friends try my stories on their teeth or / with a match: are they plastic or

amber?”. The pentameter which underpins much of the book is at its loosest here, and the narrator seems to suggest she’s isolated, perhaps even untrustworthy. A lesser poet would make much of this ekphrastic technical variation but, as she segues into more stable form and explication – of the ambivalence at the heart of marriage – Feinstein instead offers us something to take our eye off the technical ball. “[...] my story as a wife / is threaded on the string of my own life”; “I still remember your warm back / as we slept like spoons together”. It isa risk to be emotionally declarative like this, especially in today’s climate of poetry cool. It’s also a risk to use the cosy imagery of pillow-talk. But Feinstein’s work effortlessly earns its emotion; and is never cosy. Instead, it brings both intensity and range of diction to bear, with certainty and discernment, on the central challenges addressed. These are, as always in bereavement, problems of love: at once its ambivalence and irreplaceability. Talking to the Deadgives us a – perhaps inadvertent – picture of love as tender observation: “What hurt me, as you chose slowly, / was the delicacy of your gesture” (‘Rosemary in Provence’); “After so many fevers and such loss, / I am holding you in my arms tonight, as if / your whole story were happening at once” (‘Bonds’); “once home from / hospital, you called me wife and mother – // that last was what you wished” (‘Flame’). Elsewhere, there are jealousies, slights and exactly-rendered hauntings. Of these, ‘A Visit’ risks the most:

Hallucinations. Dangerous nostalgia. And early this morning you whispered as if you were lying softly at my side

Are you still angry with me?

But don’t be deceived by the simplicity of the diction: Feinstein has already taken the reader with her through that hallucinatory dreamscape, and she responds to this ghostly prompting with a double-edged “tenderness”:

I never reproached you much that I remember, not even when I should; to me, you were the boy in Ravel’s garden who always longed to be good, as the forest creatures knew, and so do I.

These are complex pieces, in which the to-and-fro of emotional exchange is lucidly articulated, not because it is in itself simple but because Feinstein is bringing resources of literary, emotional and cultural intelligence – note that easy reference to L’Enfant et les sortilèèges – to bear upon it. The full weight of the poet’s distinguished related careers in fiction and biography are making themselves felt. Throughout – and most explicitly in a group of poems which centre on the sequence ‘Scattering’ – immediate grief sits inside an older, diasporic lament, what Feinstein calls “my usual Hebraic bleakness”. Two poems ‘after Olga Martynova’ enlarge this native pessimism: “We are in a dark, hidden / hollow full of sings, moans, whistling / and the click of fingers”. Here as elsewhere, enjambments which could have been leaden or tricksy are carried off with the lightest of touches. It is this technical grace, along with the profound emotional intelligence at work, which allows this collection to be so comprehensive and comprehending. But such profound authority is always more than the sum of its parts. Talking to the Deadis a book which, with unfailing beauty and dignity, reminds us what poetry can be for; and of the nature of those human rights and responsibilities which we call love.

Fiona Sampson is editor of Poetry Review. Her new collection, Common Prayer, is published by Carcanet. For more details, visit www.carcanet.co.uk

Autumn 2007 | The Liberal | 53