Woven Song—Liane Strauss’s ‘The Flaws in the Story’

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art, Liane Strauss, London, Marsh Hawk Press, museum, museums, travel

In a world of spoilers, ignorance can be a superpower. And so it was when I visited Sir John Soane’s Museum at 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London. I had expected a genteel drawing room, the tick of a clock, a clutch of louring canvases… In retrospect, the first clue that something was amiss about this place ought have been its name: Sir John Soane’s Museum. It isn’t named in memorium like The Ashmolean, or the Fitzwilliam. That possessive ‘s implies Soane’s continuing ownership of his collection. It’s located on an ordinary London square: a modest park boxed-in by terraced brick, but the muesum’s facade, faced in Portland Stone, sets it apart. Inside, there’s a Colonnade like a vertical shaft at its core. A Dome casts light down towards the basement’s sarcophagus of Seti I. It feels absurd to speak of yin and yang, of heaven and hell—but that’s how this space feels. With every dart of the eye, more is revealed and, in this little model of infinity, its Picture Room is a memorable flourish.

The Flaws in the Story is the latest collection from Liane Strauss, and winner of the 2023 Marsh Hawk Press First Prize in Poetry. The epigraph is taken from Odyssey, Book II, and shows us Penelope stalling her suitors. ‘Day by day she would weave at the great web, but at night would unravel it. …’ Strauss’s ellipsis reminds us, perhaps, that life is a breaking-off, a lapse in attention. Every day anew, we strap in, hoping to be seduced by the story, and that we are willing to recommit to this hope, day after day, is an article of faith.

Like Penelope’s tapestry, the collection is built from epic running stitches. Each stanza looks like a couplet but the indentation as we draw our breath for the second part of the line serves as a visual cue to treat both as a whole. The reader soon finds themselves in a web, in a neural network in which we can longer be certain of the entrance or exit. In another destabilising nod to the Epic, the poems open in medias res with the tangible and the domestic. For example, ‘Alive Again’ opens:

It’s a tangible, relatable moment but, as the speaker continues, we bounce off the story and into soliloquy:

There’s something faintly disturbing about all of this: to look at a park, to know the park, but to fail to read the space will set you on edge. If disorientation is to be unable to see the East, then our high-rise cities are, by their nature, disorienting, unsettling spaces. This moment takes us back to Sir John Soane’s Museum and, in that mullet, we catch a glimpse of the ‘terrible fish’ lurking in Sylvia Plath’s ‘Mirror’.

‘Sanctuary’ takes the reader inside the ‘subterranean levels’ of Sir John Soane’s Museum.

Here we encounter the shortest line in the collection. It’s stark and dramatic. The Germanic root of ‘wend’ (to turn), sends us down a staircase and towards the ‘sepulchral chamber’. Perhaps we’re conscious of something ancient at the foot of the stairs but Strauss’s ‘abyss’ resists anything too specific as her speaker, visiting the Archaeological Museum in Mexico City, stares at a jade death mask:

There’s no gentle ‘wending’ here as we’re shown a primal, formless chaos inside ourselves. There’s a black humour too as, at this moment, the speaker asks:

The Flaws in the Story is a dizzying encounter with a mind. It is humane and earthed but, from the safety and familiarity of this platform, somehow, Strauss switches gravity off.

With thanks to Liane and Marsh Hawk Press for a review copy of the collection.