Dan Burt on Lucy Tunstall's 'Remembering the Children of First Marriages'

Remembering the Children of First Marriages by Lucy Tunstall

Oh remember the children of first marriages
For they are silent and awkward in their comings and their goings;
For the seal of the misbegotten is upon them;
For they walk in apology and dis-ease;
For their star is sunk;
For their fathers’ brows are knitted against them;
For they bristle and snarl.
All you light-limbed amblers in the sun,
Remember the grovellers in the dark,
The scene-shifters, the biders, the loners.

from New Poetries V © Lucy Tunstall

I read and reread many poems in New Poetries V, and would happily have written about any one of them. But I chose Lucy Tunstall's 'Remembering the Children of First Marriages' ('Remembering...'), a ten line lyric sermon, because its unusual subject, insight, logic and craft memorably embody an experience I had not thought about, and because she and her work were new to me.

'Remembering...' memorializes the damaged progeny of first marriages who grow up in the family of a second. The first line’s exhortation – Oh remember the children of first marriages – strikes an elegiac note, calling 'Adonais' to mind – Oh, weep for Adonais – he is dead! – in a tone sustained throughout the poem, and reinforced by its mostly tetrameter lines.

The next seven lines clinically evoke the miseries these children endure by showing how they behave, behaviour rooted in how others treat them, using Old Testament sonorities and repetition to suggest the inevitability of their suffering:

For they are silent and awkward in their comings and goings;
For the seal of the misbegotten is upon them;
For they walk in apology and dis-ease;
For their star is sunk;
For their fathers' brows are knitted against them;
For they bristle and snarl...

The last three lines of 'Remembering...', beginning – [A]ll you light limbed amblers in the sun – command us, the lucky reading congregation, to recall our good fortune in not having come from such families by parading the pariahs they produce, the grovellers in the dark /The scene-shifters, the biders, the loners. These lines starkly and unemotionally describe the lasting psychological damage done in second families, the lilting alliterative phrase used for the fortunate – light limbed amblers – juxtaposed with the guttural, harsh consonants of the damaged – grovellers in the dark. The last line's 'hook', which epitomises the damage the poem's subjects suffer by naming what they become – [T]he scene-shifters, the biders, the loners – suggests and is worthy of Larkin’s [A]nd don’t have any kids yourself.

'Remembering...' sympathetically and convincingly presents a class of children who suffer through divorce and remarriage, while simultaneously and dramatically analyzing how they are hurt. The reader is not told but shown the cause and the consequence of their affliction, almost scientifically, in plain language rendered resonant and memorable by its literary and biblical echoes.

I don't know if there is an identifiable class of children from first marriages damaged in the course of a second, though literature and anecdote make me rather suspect there is, but I do know 'Remembering...' is what a lyric poem should be, a world in a grain of sand.

Dan Burt

Helen Tookey on Lucy Tunstall's 'Aunt Jane and the Scholar'

Aunt Jane and the Scholar by Lucy Tunstall

In 1956, or thereabouts,
Aunt Jane fell in love with a beautiful
scholar from the subcontinent.

Her house is tall and thin like a doll’s house.
Pictures are filling in the walls,
but where the paint shows through in a chink
it is the authentic dull pink of oxblood and lime.

We take tea in the garden which is like a well
with its high walls, and deep shade and the underwater
grey-green of the thyme lawn; and sitting still
like a still ancient cloistered thing at the bottom of a well

she remembers (she must remember) a long trip
to the only part of Canada where it never snows,
weeks and weeks of sky and sea and sickness like snow-sickness.

Ever after a drawing-in, this square
of London sky, and the cypress leaning over.

from New Poetries V © Lucy Tunstall

We can easily imagine ‘Aunt Jane’ as the protagonist of a novel, say by E.M. Forster or Virginia Woolf (conveniently ignoring the mention of ‘1956’, which puts her a bit too late for either of them); yet I think that this poem of sixteen lines tells us as much and as little about her as we would ever discover from that putative novel. The poem is wonderfully compressed, economical; yet we feel that it has given us the essence of a life, and of the oblique yet strangely close relationship between an elderly spinster and (perhaps) a child or young girl, neither of whom really fits in the proper adult world of relationships and talk and work. ‘In 1956, or thereabouts’, the poem begins, ‘Aunt Jane fell in love with a beautiful / scholar from the subcontinent’. We hear no more about this scholar – the poem immediately switches into a kind of timeless vivid present, the point of view of the speaker visiting the elderly, spinster aunt – yet the opening lines inform everything that follows; we can imagine the implied narrative, the impossible, impermissible love, the forbidden realms of scholarship, the single journey to Canada, and then the withdrawing into the ‘cloistered’ life in her house in London, which is ‘tall and thin like a doll’s house’ – a kind of pretend version of ‘real’ adult life.

The poem draws us (with its speaker) in close, through its language, which in the third stanza becomes a mimetic echo-chamber:

We take tea in the garden which is like a well
with its high walls, and deep shade and the underwater
grey-green of the thyme lawn; and sitting still like a still
ancient cloistered thing at the bottom of a well

she remembers...

We are caught, disturbingly so, inside chiasmus and echoing sound-patterns (‘well’, ‘walls’, ‘water’, ‘lawn’, ‘still’, ‘still’, ‘well’). The language holds us, with the speaker, with Aunt Jane, in a kind of stasis, immured and motionless, with only memory as a kind of half-life.

The final couplet, spare and compressed, completes the mimesis:

Ever after a drawing-in, this square
of London sky, and the cypress leaning over.

With their echo of Owen’s ‘drawing down of blinds’, the lines convey loss (the ‘beautiful scholar’, the journeying, the possibilities that then seemed open) and the slow ongoing aftermath of that loss; Aunt Jane’s horizons are reduced to the ‘square / of London sky’, while companionship comes only from the cypress, which leans over her perhaps with solicitude but also with age – like the ‘tall’, ‘thin’ house and the ‘deep’, ‘underwater’ garden, another mirroring of Aunt Jane herself. The last two lines seem to tell us so little of Aunt Jane’s life after its early promise, and yet (‘Ever after a drawing-in’) they tell us everything.

Helen Tookey

Janet Kofi-Tsekpo and Jee Leong Koh on Lucy Tunstall's 'One Day a Herd of Wild Horses Came into the Garden and Looked at My Mother'

One Day a Herd of Wild Horses Came into the Garden and Looked at My Mother by Lucy Tunstall

Well, this is extraordinary, she is saying, this is quite extraordinary.
The horses stand on the grass and look at my mother. My mother stands on the path and looks at the horses. The horses nudge and shift; their manes tangle; their hooves are caked in mud.
Not until the mare has turned her head, like a sail in the wind, away from the

house and

                               out toward the hills, and led each straggling foal away,
will my mother go back into the house; close the door; pick up a book, a coffee,

a cigarette.

from New Poetries V © Lucy Tunstall

Jan: What I love about this poem is its apparent simplicity and clarity. The narrative of the piece is already contained within the title -- we know what's going to happen -- and yet what happens inside the telling of the story is very interesting. We hear the voice of the mother -- 'extraordinary' -- from her apparent background of domestic comfort. We then see her standing almost trance-like, as if being called away from that daily life. It reminds me of the Scottish myth about silkies -- half woman, half seal -- who live domesticated on land but must eventually return to the sea: 'the mare has turned her head, like a sail in the wind'...

Jee: Yes, I love its clarity too. I was going to say 'economy' when I realized that it isn't true. The poem is short -- mirroring the brevity of the moment -- but it is involved with expressive redundancy. The mother repeats herself in wonder. Looks are exchanged in nearly the same words in the second stanza, the chiasmus depicting simultaneity neatly. The encounter is brief but it expands in the poem. I especially admire how, in the third stanza, the poem finds a way to say what happens next without leaving the present moment. 'Not until the mare has turned her head...will my mother go back....' What a superb trick! Using the present perfect and future tenses to fix the present. The poem is so clear in its focus.

Jan: This echoing or repetition quite literally creates the poem's resonance. The words circle around something that can't be fully articulated, although we feel its vibrations.

Jee: Like you, I wonder what to make of this unexpected break from domesticity. They meet in the garden, the liminal grounds between hills and house. The mare, who is also a mother, leads her foals 'away from the house and out toward the hills, but the mother returns to the house and 'close[s] the door', as if turning her back on wildness. What is she thinking and feeling as she picks up, and puts down, in turn, a book, a coffee and a cigarette? Regret? Relief? Gratitude? Unrest? I think the poem's strength derives in part from its open-endedness, but I also think that the poem wants us to wonder.

Janet Kofi-Tsekpo & Jee Leong Koh

Lucy Tunstall on William Letford's 'Taking a headbut'

Taking a headbut by William Letford

your pal ruffled ma hat
i said, what? made the mistake of leaning forward
and that was that

blood-metal darkness and the taste of brass
the bell was rung
i know i went somewhere
because i had to come back

from New Poetries V © William Letford

Well, it’s funny, but it’s also brilliantly achieved in formal terms. The heavy use of rhyme in the first stanza -- ‘that’ (twice),‘hat’; ‘what’, ‘forward’ -- eases off in stanza two until the very last word -- ‘back’ -- does indeed call the ear back to where we began, only slightly adjusted by the experience.

Line two leans dangerously forward, awkwardly (foolishly) proud of the rest of the poem, inviting attack; and the detached and understated tone allows itself a flourish with ‘blood-metal darkness’. There is some really fabulous imagery here for the moment of impact, or of ebbing consciousness, where the sound of the knockout bell, the taste of blood and metal, and encroaching blackness, collide and reverberate, giving both resonance, and a very appropriate sensory confusion. And there is another subtle use of rhyme: after the ‘taste’ of ‘blood-metal’, ‘rung’ cannot help but invoke it’s absent rhyme-mate, ‘tongue’. The journey of the poem is into the body, and out of this world.

The last two lines are epigrammatic, bathetic, zen-like and cartoonish all at the same time. ‘Come back’ expresses the gravity of the situation, the sense that things might have been touch-and-go there for a moment, that there was ground to be covered to regain consciousness, and even the suggestion of a near-death experience. But they also call to mind the soul of Tom wafting gently to the ceiling as Jerry smashes his skull with a mallet. It’s all held together by a voice which, while scrupulously objective and devoid of self-pity, has a profound interest in the mysterious process of receiving a headbutt. This is awe as well as shock.

Lucy Tunstall