I’ve been never one for zoos, but daily life offers the same anxieties. Visiting my mother in her gated compound, my first sight is the woman who paces behind and hangs from the railings like Odysseus, lashed to the mast. Inside, in the heat, residents doze in chairs, chins on chests, and others wail. Roy’s the only resident I’ve met with whom I can converse. This week, as I made to leave, a lady approached, asking for help. There had been some mistake. She shouldn’t be here. Please, would I help her to get home? I’m no different to the rest of us, I know. Shuffling off this mortal coil isn’t the problem, it’s death’s interminable antechamber that’s the worry.
The title of ‘The Curiosities’, Penny Boxall’s latest pamphlet, brings museums to mind. Oxford’s Ashmolean, Britain’s first public museum, started life as the Tradescant family’s ‘cabinet of curiosities’. Boxall will be well aware of this – her most recent work at the museum was 2022’s ‘In Praise of Hands’, a collaboration with the artist Naoko Matsubara. Museums contain objects which belong in the wider world: teapots condemned to a desiccated existence are least enjoyed by a viewing public, but those items are the iceberg’s tip – what of the objects packed away in storerooms? ‘First Date at the Zoo’, opens with an image of shocking violence: ‘It started when the big baboon / lugged another towards himself / and eyed us as he juddered’. The poem’s tercets feel neat, and transfer the baboon to a new kind of zoo – the poem itself. Line one ticks along with iambic elegance, caging the baboon between the bars of its metrical regularity. But then the force of ‘lugged’ banishes these pretensions. At least the objects in a museum don’t look back, but the big baboon ‘eyed us as he juddered’. It’s a moment of awkwardness. What should we feel? Shame? Pity? Revulsion? … Violation? – And where might the first date eventually lead? Standing together, watching the baboon juddering, rape in mind, what a pall is cast over the nascent relationship. Boxall’s first person plural reminds us that this was a shared experience but, by the poem’s end, “we lay untouched in parallel beds”. The bars prevented the baboon from touching either of them physically, although the speaker’s “stricken eyes” carry the encounter, and any ardour is quenched. Those parallel beds describe a hotel room with perfect economy, but there’s no amorous intersection ahead either.
“Equity” offers a counterpoint to the juddering baboon. We’re shown a woman in “the new retirement flats / near my mother’s house”. All the speaker gives her is the preposition “in”. Like the baboon, or an artefact, she’s been contained while the speaker’s mother owns her house. “Neat” is repeated as we’re shown the “neat sofa” and the “neat letters” she has written. Is she happy? Is she bored? The speaker concludes “Easier to think she’s on the payroll, Equity Card / tucked inside her model’s-own purse”. Boxall borrows from the credits for fashion magazine photoshoots and, at best, it’s a vignette of vapid vanity, or perhaps the view through the window has been styled within an inch of its life to sell real estate but, at worst, there’s something macabre and unsettling here. If you know Roald Dahl’s short story, “The Landlady”, then you’ll know that, when the view through the window looks too perfect, then you’re stepping into a honey trap. In stanza one, there’s “no mystery” and, in the final stanza, there’s “nothing to hide” – unless there’s everything to hide and its hidden in plain sight.
Life coaches send me into an existential spin, so I’ll leave you with “Life Coach” – a trademark piece of Boxallian subversion. Her speaker opens: “How hard I try to emulate / the tufted dandy dinmont”. Line one’s self-help books, gurus, effort and examples are undercut by the drooling joy of a dog, “snuffling up cherries where they’ve fallen / in dark circles under the leaves”. These cherries aren’t Instagramable – those dark circles lead me to imagine that they’ve gone a bit squishy, a bit frowsy – but no matter. I’d sell my soul to be able to follow the advice of a life coach like a dandy dinmont.
Buy ‘The Curiosities’ from New Walk Editions
Related links:
My review of The Ship of the Line, winner of the 2016 Edwin Morgan Poetry Award
Poor Rude Lines 