Carrie Etter reviews Lorraine Mariner’s Bye for Now

Bye for Now, Lorraine Mariner’s first pamphlet, effectively combines contemporary British cultural references (such as GCSEs, OAPs, and Guinness) with well-enjambed, conversational free verse, such that her best poems read effortlessly and engagingly.

Many read as accounts of the author’s personal experience; one poem even refers to the speaker as Lorraine. These poems often strike a light note, sometimes humorous, and Mariner is at her best when such pieces appear to begin in personal experience then imaginatively take flight. In “Beast,” the speaker’s vulnerable self-deprecation leads her to muse that, given a fairy-tale chance to love a beast, she would fail.

As he came in for the kiss I’d turn away
or gag on the mane in my mouth
and the fair haired prince
and the dress that Beauty wore
on the last page of my Ladybird book
would be lost to me forever.

The fantasy takes another turn when the speaker imagines herself working as a cleaner at the beast’s castle, to compensate for her father’s “Volvo reversing into [the beast’s] carriage.” Noting the family trait of perseverance, she considers the rewards the beast would, on recognising her continued effort, bestow: a monthly visit home and permission to use his library. She concludes:

                        and in bed at night
reading by the light of a candle
I’ll shut another calf bound volume
and hear its quality thud
with something like happiness.

The narratives’ unpredictability is part of the pleasure in Mariner’s work.Other successful examples of poetic flights of fancy include “Nine to Five,” where the speaker envisions herself attending “the Dolly Parton School / of Old Age”; and “In My Worst Moments,” the speaker imagines her present grief transformed in old age when, as a grand dame of poetry, she is delighted to have a long lost love touch her again in a public confrontation over her writings about him.

When the primary subject matter is everyday experience, the presumably insignificant taking on importance in the poet’s perspective, a common fault is that the matter remains too slight, and that is the most palpable weakness in Bye for Now: sometimes the everyday events Mariner relates fail to achieve any substance. Instances include the villanelle “The Weather,” rather a bland exercise, and “Journey Planner,” whose address to a train matter-of-factly relates the speaker’s expectation of its recurring, predictable appearance.

It is with elegies for the author’s father that Bye for Now briefly becomes more sombre. Following his introduction as a supportive, then living parent in “Beast,” he is later addressed in two elegies, “My Father’s Soldiers” and “Tree.” Both poems relate to the father through objects in the present—a large collection of toy soldiers and an adopted tree in Kensington Gardens. The speaker’s explicit need to make meaning, to connect the object and father in order to find both solace and continuity, gives these poems a poignant nervous energy. The next few poems continue this theme and are more willing to acknowledge the drive to invest objects with meaning, sometimes quite haphazardly. In “Tea Cosy,” for instance, the speaker associates the twigs woven into the grandmother’s prize-winning cosy with her grandfather’s love for the garden, only to hear that the garden was really her grandmother’s interest. The speaker rather than her sisters will inherit the cosy because she has written this poem about it, because she has taken the time to deliberate its importance in family history. So the poem ends with both the playful consideration of this poem’s future effect as well as the more serious implication of how much “meaning” is actually fiction. This balance between her signature light tone and treatment of weightier issues produces Mariner’s most rewarding work and makes me look forward to her first full collection.

Lorraine Mariner, Bye for Now, Rialto Bridge Pamphlets No. 1, £5.50, ISBN 0952744473

The views expressed by contributors to the reviews section of Poetry Matters are not those of Tower Poetry, or of Christ Church, Oxford, and are solely those of the reviewers.