Books

Review by Francis Sheppard

Two things stand out: her precise language and the full content  of each and every sentence. The two books, both published by Mindforest Press, visit at points the same places. Though serving different purposes the poetry (The Matter ) written for the diligent adult reader and the middle-grade novel (An Ancient Haunting ) anticipating only a degree of experience, they both come to a powerful notion of the earth and its ancient forces, deities perhaps, contained therein.

In An Ancient Haunting  an eleven year-old narrator is possessed by ‘spirits’. In the story’s early stages these are quite simple entities. When Lily Ash at midnight descends into the cellar of the creaking manor house where she unhappily lives, these are the ‘conflicting cries of the dead’ that are ‘almost drowning me out’. These she can keep at bay. Her resistance is far less certain when she encounters the ‘Lady of the Sea’ who threatens to pull her under the waters of the southern Mediterranean.

But I will teach you. Teach you how to make proper offerings, how to serve me, how to harness the power of the Sea and the Beasts. How to walk in the Underworld. I will teach you, but you must come down to me. Come.

And yet, a more powerful element is Time. The children’s novel examines the notion essentially through ghostly figure. As mentioned, there are the omnipresent gods and the ‘ancient’ early civilisations of which they were the fountainhead. Naturally they should demand the agency of one such as Lily, endowed as she is, not only with bravery and capability, but also psychic powers. Her role will be to right the wrongs done to the gods by the archaeologists of the early 20th century. They will repay their young votary by their divine intervention, saving lives. Their reach is across thousands of years.

Nonetheless a supernatural entity, much more related to Lily’s present, is there as a countervailing force. This presence takes the form of a nominally-dead ten year-old boy – anarchic, devious, sometimes kind, rarely misleading. It is this ‘voice’ that guides Lily through an arid and troubled childhood right up to the verge of adolescence. It is an assertive masculine clamour there to warn, counsel – and to criticise also. At first I took this to be Lily’s Christian conscience, but later found it to be equal in devilry. Monotheism, by the way, has place in neither book.

Time then, and the connection made with past ages (and with a single individual) is at the heart of the story, justly to be identified as a novel – if Edith Nesbit of The Railway Children  can occupy an adult reader’s attention then so can this. Time is the subject of most of the poems in The Matter, the collection so called because, in particle terms, nothing is destroyed by time.

But there is death. Although these poems propose for us nothing that will follow death (other than that expressed by the speaker in ‘Mother Wite’) our deaths nevertheless unite us with the great natural processes of the material universe. There are the permanencies created by ink (p.1) and art (p.10-13). The matter that forms Earth, which ‘has its own organs’, forming and re-forming beneath the surface over vast aeons, is the representation of time that interests this poet.

The constantly-shifting nature of the earth’s crust is part-subject of both texts. The earthquake at Heraklion, of which Lily Ash receives ghostly warning, becomes metaphor for the contractions of birth in ‘Eileithya Cave’, where the goddess is sought to ‘appease the Fates’ while at the same time ensure the continuation of humanity through childbirth.

The journey to the ancient Greeks and their metaphysics continues with ‘The Third Fate – Atropos’ In the 1950s poet, memoirist and historical-novelist Robert Graves researched the south-east European cult of the Triple Goddess (The White Goddess ). Atropos’ terminal function was ‘with one sharp cut’ to sever the thread that unites you with your birth. And you become…matter. What we are, what composes us, is so vividly illustrated in ‘Underworld’ considering the corpse bequeathed to medical science after ‘organs capsized one after the other’. The mortuary is a place where –

Lungs, heart and liver –
eddies in a polluted river

bear witness to a life and the physical damage sustained. Such ‘damage’ is visible but

less so the other scars

which are psychological trauma which, after death, the speaker now has learnt to understand, returning to view the cadaver to ‘be your home and let you leave it’.

The sequence rooted in the vastness of Time, the poet nonetheless situates herself in the present world. An assemblage such as ‘Children of Daedalus’ connects the great artificer of mythology to the ravaged earth that we now inhabit. The final line of ‘The Armageddon Afterparty’,

behind them, earth loosens her belt

suggests the retribution to the ‘trillionaires’ responsible for its devastation.

Two poems towards the end: ‘Adam’s Return’ and ‘I Become a Tree’ serve both as polemic and expression of longing. In the first, re-entry into the Garden of Eden, the ‘gate unguarded, except by thorn’ finds a new wilderness where he (Adam) ‘would lay out his days like seeds and forget’ and ‘breath in wild, untainted air’. This return to nature, to an original state where, Thoreau-like, he can ‘rise to fix the leaking roof / without a word’, where the true fruits are…

solitude
the hone of a wren’s eye as it alights
unnumbered days

… the second poem takes this further to a state where you

dissolve
become water, mineral
seep into earth

from which you

Become upright
Breathe, fall grow,
taste light

Kate Innes has written her understanding of birth, life and the deaths that follow in a way that is contemporary and nuanced, drawing on the ancient world and its myths as much as present-day scientific knowledge. I found relief in An Ancient Haunting  in the regenerative healing it pointed to, as much, in The Matter  from the proposition that we are not separate from the great physical cycles, vast beyond any imagining, and neither from the minute atomic processes that sustain our lives.