Review of ‘Zoetrope’ by Hilary Otto

Hilary Otto’s outstanding debut pamphlet, Zoetrope (Hedgehog Poetry Press, 2023), is the subject of my last review of 2023. I’ve reviewed 20 collections this year and whilst it wouldn’t be fair on the authors of the other books to say I’ve left the best to last, it would be true to say that Zoetrope is up there with the best of them, for Hilary Otto is a writer with a refreshingly individual perspective on experience which she conveys through inventive, layered poems.

Each of the poems in Otto’s pamphlet is distinctively different, ranging over a wide variety of subjects, yet linking them all is her interest in the nature of contemporary urban living and the direction of our society. The poem, The Illusion of Motion, appropriately signposts the direction of the collection. The image of the zoetrope, a device that gives the impression of motion, is the vehicle through which she raises and comments upon these subjects. She writes: ‘I look like I am moving forward’ yet ‘my feet don’t touch the ground.’ The narrator feels that (s)he is progressing at pace yet this is an illusion. There is a sense of urgency but also of pointlessness: (s)he is going nowhere. ‘Events flash through’ his/her mind’ and ‘People,/ animals fling limbs at the air./ They scatter as I approach.’ This haste is not only fruitless, it is destructive: it leaves others and the natural world lying in its wake. The meaning is delightfully open here, Otto may be talking about the nature of human progress, the advances in science and technology and their destructive consequences, or she may be writing at a more personal level, about the pointlessness of the hustle and bustle of everyday urban living that separates us from those things that give life meaning and purpose. I suspect both. The poem ends with a reflection on human potential: ‘If we draw the right images/ in this flip book, we will be capable/ of extraordinary things’, and yet the implication is that we have not, for what we pursue ‘is spinning ahead of us/ but just out of reach’. What we desire on an individual level and societal level eludes us.

The poems that follow develop these themes. Hills like White Elephants concerns itself with the effects of exploration, in this case of foreign lands that destroys indigenous cultures. She writes ‘We could only describe someone else’s hills/ in our language’ and as a consequence we ‘plant them (statues) at every crossing, name/ our streets for men who made it/ into stone./ The hills are in captivity/ a zoo animal staring through bars/ pacing the dust and tossing its trunk/ sweat flecking its back/ like vowels.’ Exploration in this poem  does not bring advances, quite the reverse. In No Signs of Life Otto turns her attention to artificial intelligence, drawing on similar imagery. The driverless cars are described as ‘caged’ and ‘sulking’. There is a tension between the cars and their human owners which seek to harness them. Significantly the narrator frequently makes reference to being lost: ‘it’s harder/ to get our bearings’ ‘the way forward is unclear’. Otto appears to be suggesting that humankind has got things wrong, juxtaposing the care and attention given to the cars with the disregard for the enormous quantities of chickens who are allowed to die. She is implying that this is not what progress should look like. Perhaps our values and aspirations are wrong. In Scarabs Got Talent, a title that plays on the popular T.V. programme title,  Britain’s Got Talent, we see the same egotism that perverts the outcome of exploration in Hills Like White Elephants. Like the narrator in Outside the Frozen Room, the scarab beetle would like to escape the drudgery of life but doesn’t know how. It recognises that there must be more than rolling a ‘stinking ball towards the dawn’ but doesn’t know how to attain fulfilment. It believes it can be found in fame in being noticed, admired, feted: ‘I wanted to be the one to watch’ but all that results in is despair and loneliness. The beetle’s  situation at the end as a consequence has not changed though there may be a suggestion that at least it may have found some direction by following the Milky Way

The discomfort of urban living appears in various forms in this collection. In A Mother’s Work it manifests itself in a persistent anxiety about the safety of her children. She is unable to escape the thought of the urban dangers that threaten her family: ‘car crashes’, ‘kidnaps.’ ‘shootings’, house fires, drugs, etc. The same sense of lurking danger can be found in Underworld. Through the extended metaphor of the poisonous mushroom, Otto conjures up a picture of a ubiquitous threat that it is impossible to anticipate or even protect against: ‘We look too ordinary to pose a threat./ We are experts at waiting in silence.’ The title Underworld might imply that this threat comes from criminal activity. It is exemplified in the graphic description of a bombing in How Slow the Sound Comes, where the sense of shock at the unexpected violence is vividly realised: ‘there is no time to register/ faces, expressions, to match detail to noise/ only the bang, which arrives long after/ the hot slap in the chest.’ If such danger is lurking in the urban world, it not surprising that we find nervousness and fear in quite ordinary contexts. Dinghy describes the unconscious intimidation of two schoolgirls at the seaside when a male sunbather intrudes upon their space. They had been laughing ‘for what seemed like hours’ but the atmosphere changes dramatically: ‘we checked his height, his mass/ his weight and lay quite still, not fight or flight but stiffness// and when he’d gone we didn’t speak of him/ or where he was but strained to hear the sound of oars// and planned the way to run while carrying a dinghy.’  The mere presence of the sunbathing man induced a panic which persists even when he has disappeared.

A depressing picture of urban life. Yes, it might be, were it not for the note of hope that emerges at the end of the collection in the last three poems. It starts with Small Acts of Rebellion, a poem that suggests that the individual has agency. It states it is possible to resist the pressures and drudgery of city life: one doesn’t have to collude with the demands to conform: one can ‘let a train pass without boarding/ to stand still on the emptying platform/ to allow the rush to flow around you/ to amble towards the jammed exit.’ One can slow down, take one’s time. Enjoy one’s surroundings, connect with the natural world: ‘saunter out into the street/ to tear your eyes from the light/ in your palm and raise them briefly…to find the small gap of blue above you’ and escape. Furthermore, the final poem, Blackbird , Remixed, concludes the pamphlet with a hymn to resistance sung by the blackbird that inspires the narrator to reinvent herself and discover a new positive way forward.

These are gritty, complex and layered poems that reward re-reading. Such is the quality of the writing that one of the poems, Plot, has understandably been nominated for the 2024 Pushcart Prize for Otto is a perceptive social observer, who has something of significance to say and has the poetic skills to say it. Sounds like a good Christmas present for poetry lovers!

Hilary Otto is an English poet based in Barcelona. Her work has featured in Ink, Sweat and Tears, The Alchemy Spoon, Black Bough Poetry, and The Storms, among other publications. In 2021 she was longlisted for the Live Canon International Poetry Prize and in 2022 she won the Hastings Book Festival Poetry Competition. Zoetrope is her first pamphlet. Signed copies are available directly from the poet via X formerly Twitter, on @hilaryotto, or you can buy it from : https://www.amazon.co.uk/Zoetrope-Hilary-Otto/dp/1913499723?

 ….with that I’m signing off for a short break and will be back mid January. I would like to thank all the poets who have allowed me to review their work this year and wish them and you, the  readers, a Happy Xmas and Productive New Year!