Today I feel particularly honoured to welcome Matthew Stewart to reflect upon a poem from his fabulous second collection, Whatever You Do, Just Don’t, (Happenstance Press 2023).
For the reader. And the process of communicating with the reader and moving them is where I find my satisfaction as a poet, not via the mere act of self-expression. And how am I attempting to communicate with my afore-mentioned reader? By generating empathy, by encouraging them into this poem’s world of a house clearance, of loved ones who have died. And through this process, I’m inviting the reader to find fresh parallels and comparisons with their own world, with the significance of certain objects for them, with their own family heirlooms, with their own grief.
Let’s have a quick look at the poem in technical terms. The original scaffolding might have been removed, but here’s an insight into how its rooms and walls were built. For a start, each couplet might form a sentence, but only the first of them possesses a main verb. This accumulating absence of a verb generates the wait for a syntactic resolution that never arrives, mirroring the semantic impossibility of finding the answers to the poem’s implicit questions. In this way, form works in tandem with content, just as the syllabics also provoke further uncertainty: the first line of each couplet is made up of a conventionally solid ten syllables, but the second line of each contains nine, falling just short of the reader’s expectations, refusing to tie up the poem’s doubts.
And what about the ending? At first glance, it might seem neat, drawing its elements together in a concise conclusion, but it’s also projecting outwards, far beyond the physical limitations of these six lines. Its unanswered questions reach into the reader’s imagination and provide a point of departures for every person’s story to unfold in their mind. Less is often more, so long as the poem engages and resonates. I hope Opening the Box has managed to do so for you..!
Next week read my review of what must be 2023’s best collection, Whatever You do, Just Don’t.
Nigel Kent - Poet and Reviewer 