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Contemporary British poetry is obsessed with images, and much of it seems to understand a poem as essentially an event in which images are collected together - the more striking, apparently, the better. As far as her most recent collection is concerned, Sarah Corbett is no exception to this general rule of the poetic mainstream, with The Witch Bag offering a rich array of startling pictures. These are made up of such things as ‘fisted nipples’, ‘fear breaking / out of its egg’, buzzing blood, ‘a shadow so deep / it would eat you’, ‘milky husks’, the ‘feathered foot’ of ‘My Son the Horse’, the ‘fat gift’ of a child’s hand, birds ‘casting themselves in sound’, and so on. In terms of creating imaginative images, this collection is a virtuoso performance.
What makes Corbett more than just another image-monger, however, is the way in which she pushes such imagery to a point at which her poetry verges on both the gothic and the surreal - perhaps showing where the ‘striking image’ approach to poetry inevitably tends. This collection thus offers (to pick just a few examples) a son in the form of a horse, a feast that results in the speaker spitting out pearls, and a bed covered in ‘cherries, raspberries, strawberries’ to such an extent that ‘The sheets ran with their juice’. Admittedly, these are not quite the melting watches of a Dalí painting, but the persistent choice of unusual images and distinctly odd associations is certainly pushing The Witch Bag in that direction.
The gothic, by contrast, lies in poems such as the first two of the collection, which apparently seek to offer us dark and slightly disturbing figures: a ‘pond’s black belly’, ‘clammy limbs’, and a woman who hooks those ‘clammy limbs around her own / and sucks the water into herself’; a dead child, a body which is ‘left to sing through its mask of weeks’, and a speaker who finally lowers herself into a ‘green and stinking hole’. In short, if you like your poetry to be formed from cascades of imagery, The Witch Bag will give you a rich, dark feast - with just enough ambiguity to keep you on your readerly mettle.
Matthew Jarvis
It is possible to use this review for promotional purposes, but the following acknowledgement should be included: A review from www.gwales.com, with the permission of the Welsh Books Council.
Gellir defnyddio’r adolygiad hwn at bwrpas hybu, ond gofynnir i chi gynnwys y gydnabyddiaeth ganlynol: Adolygiad oddi ar www.gwales.com, trwy ganiatâd Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru.
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