On one of the benches punctuating the avenue of limes leading from Christ Church College’s Meadow Building to the Thames, a lady sat drawing. The wheeled shopping cart at her side evoked another era and, dressed head to foot in a light green cagoule, she was ready for anything the heavens might choose to throw her way. On her knees was a gigantic but expertly shepherded page. It was taped together from smaller sections, like a canvas stitched from animal skins. Walking past, I glimpsed the visible section of the image upon which she worked: a seemingly life-sized drawing of the tree opposite her bench. The time of day, the weather and the season would change but, for a number of years, I found that whenever I walked that avenue, the artist would be seated at one of its many benches, radiating a contemplative intensity. As an awkward youth, I walked on by but, as time smoothed off some of my rough edges, my wife and I joined Zoe one afternoon and talked. She passed away in 2011 but, for those of us who remember her, she has gifted her gentle stillness to that place.
Claire Booker’s latest, Pedestrian in the Multiverse, is published by the Waterloo Press. Thanks to the Marvel franchise’s dodgy 2022 effort, Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, ‘multiverse’ conjures inter-dimensional adventure but, in Booker’s hands, the multiverse is considerably more affecting.
‘Winter Tunnel with Snow, March 2006,’ is written in response to David Hockney’s painting of the same name. Coincidentally, Hockney passed away a month ago, adding a poignant interdimensional aspect to both painting and poem as we time-travel back to 2006 as Booker’s speaker addresses a dead man. The poem echoes Hockney’s winter tunnel as each line’s caesura widens to form an avenue of words. It opens with the statement that ‘every day is a season,’ a nod to the maddening, joyfully dramatic, sublime unpredictability of British weather and, in turn, to the unpredictability of life itself. Across the caesura’s rutted lane, the sentence runs-on with the single word, ‘turning,’ as we swap the one-point perspective of the East Riding of Yorkshire for an astronaut’s-eye view of our blue plant spinning on its axis. But Booker’s not done with us yet… The line is enjambed too, so, crossing the lane once again, it is Hockney doing the turning: ‘turning / at your easel again for the exact pigment of time.’ We’re two lines in, but neck deep in Booker’s vertiginous multiverse. Looking at the painting again, its left / right line of reflection is balanced by the up / down bisecting line of the horizon. Likewise, Booker’s poem is reversed on its horizontal axis (its second stanza is its first stanza in reverse), allowing it to end as it began with every day seen as a season, the artist turning at his easel for the exact pigment of time – its circularity gesturing towards infinity.
A later poem, ‘Kimono Recycled’, sets the present at odds with the past:
It was too tight even then, as if he wished
me slimmer or to spill out erotically
at every move. Now, as I rip strips for shoe
buffing, the cockerel-red cloth pulls
hard against me, held by its gristle of seams.
The man’s wishes present a tragic multiverse of impossible fantasies, with neither the thin nor the Reubensesque versions of his lover’s body realizable in reality’s middle ground / no man’s land. The kimono is ‘too tight’, awkward and uncomfortable to wear so, as she rips it to strips and it pulls ‘hard against me,’ we feel the echo of his arousal, an arousal which is troublingly adversarial as it is set ‘against’ the lover. Domestic entropy dictates that, in time, every garment becomes a cloth but, facing its final indignity, the kimono remembers ‘as it releases lost passion, the rapture of silk / between his palms and my thighs’, Booker’s couplets create an ironic tension as the mutual scent is ‘blended as we could never be’.
Although we might take some comfort from the familiar emotional intensity and often uplifting qualities of Booker’s multiverse, her consideration of Russia’s illegal war in Ukraine is more unsettling. The collection’s second section opens with ‘Rock Poolers.’ Perhaps the title evokes beach holidays but its opening lines are perilously unstable: ‘The women move across slippery channels, / ankle deep in a strange familiarity’ and, as we reach the final line of this first tercet, the women view this scene as as ‘khaki green as the Dnipro river.’ They search for whelks to recreate the cuisine, the domestic heart of Ukraine in The United Kingdom but ‘Shells rattle in the children’s buckets, / little universes waiting to explode.’
This poem conditions our response to the later ‘Redacted,’ written in response to Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s ‘The Massacre of the Innocents,’ on display in Windsor Castle. The Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolph II, sanitised the massacre as the mere plundering of a village. Thankfully, the version painted by Brueghel’s son, Pieter Brueghel the Younger, gives the viewer a sense of the original’s horrific impact before overpainting. Responding to the overpainting, Booker’s speaker observes:
How well those despots understood the shocking power
in a small body. The need to blot it out.
It becomes a compulsion to find them: the babies who float
on the edge of invisibility. They begin to surface
from under the varnish.
Contemporary forensic pathology hangs like a miasma over the poem: Srebrenica yesterday, Bucha today. The title, ‘Redacted,’ does much of the heavy lifting – a massacre, although horrific in itself, becomes more repugnant as it hides beneath the bureaucratic sharpie. We’ve always known that a disturbance in the earth portends no good. Like the écolte de fer still gathered annually by the farmers of northern France and Belgium, there is no burying the truth – not in the long run. In the past at least, the lies required to hide it were often ridiculous. Booker’s use of the absurd illustrates this as the viewer asks ‘why is this woman weeping over a mound of ham flitches?’ The dawn of images manipulated with the assistance of A.I. – images far harder to unmask as crude overpainting – will add their own chaotic evil to the multiverse.
Claire Booker’s Pedestrian in the Multiverse is a multiverse of its own. In the fissures between – and within – its poems, it is possible to catch glimpses of infinity, and to see ‘eternity in an hour.’
Buy Pedestrian in the Multiverse from Claire direct
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