Fran Brearton reviews The Pomegranates of Kandahar by Sarah Maguire

At the close of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood steps into the room full of doctors who will grant her her freedom ‘guided…as by a magical thread’. That freedom is qualified by the past she will always carry with her, the events that, as Esther says, ‘were part of me. They were my landscape.’ The ‘magical thread’ in The Bell Jar is suggestive in terms of the recurrent imagery of Sarah Maguire’s fourth collection, The Pomegranates of Kandahar (and Maguire begins with an epigraph from Plath’s ‘The Bee Meeting’ – a clue to the pervasive presence of the American poet throughout the book.). At the close of ‘Solstice’, Maguire writes ‘Because I have lost you, I must take up this thread’. In the next poem, ‘Cotton Boll’, garments are ‘spun from that one fine thread, yanked / straight out of your heart’, and the motif weaves its way through other poems too: in the ‘heartbeat / threading through the scales’ in ‘my Father’s Piano’, the piano itself ‘stitched through with steel’; in the ‘coil of hair’ in ‘Coil’. There’s ‘a wet ore threading through / potholes’ in ‘The Water Diviner’ (the title a bold move and indicative of another key influence); in ‘Landscape, with Dead Sea’ there is ‘barbed wire threaded with jasmine’. One might extend the image out to the motifs of stitching, embroidering, to the rivers and waterways which themselves thread the collection. And the book itself sometime picks up its own threads, or dropped stitches, one of the closing poems, ‘Reflection’, for instance, answering one of the earliest, ‘Vigil’, to reflect the collection back on itself.

This kind of stitching together has been seen before, most obviously perhaps in another poet who shares Maguire’s botanical and ecological preoccupations, Michael Longley. The ‘thumbprints of lichen / embroidering the graves’; the ‘Sheets, winding-sheets, underthings, handkerchiefs’ woven from the cotton fields that ‘stretch further than an ocean’: these are irresistibly reminiscent of Longley’s quilting and embroidering motifs in his book The Weather in Japan (2000), which he claimed emerged as ‘a big patchwork’. One could say the same of Maguire’s collection too. At times this is its virtue, at others its weakness. These are poems spilling over into one another, poems that work on an accretion of images, of which the instances quoted above are only a small sample. At its best, a ‘magical thread’ holds together Maguire’s preoccupations – with the body, the landscape (including the political landscape), the planet itself – and the poems can generate a powerful cumulative effect.

At the same time, Maguire worries in more than one poem about what she calls, in ‘To Damme and Back’, ‘slow accretions of silt’ bringing things to a standstill. She habitually praises instead the free-flowing, the ‘poem of water’, the ‘element that slides across borders / as boundaries are eroded by the fluency of tongues’ (‘From Dublin to Ramallah’). Ironically, then, the risk of the poems is that their level of intertextuality can also cause (to adapt the image) a silting up of the verse, a counter-movement to the one she applauds. While the recurrent motifs of the poems, and their often instantly recognisable diction (her Heaneyesque word-hoard) may be deliberately evocative of those ‘slow accretions’, the poems sometimes run aground on their own excess. Maguire is a highly descriptive poet, and one who, like the early Heaney, tries to render those descriptions sensuous and tangible. ‘Field Capacity’, for instance, should strike a few chords with earlier forms of poetic field work:

The plump loam easy with wetness –
late March, the unwrung sponge of soil
balanced by a long winter’s rain,
then opened with thaw.

I take the springy lawn in my stride,
an ash sapling tucked under each arm.
A circle described in the turf, the grassy lid
lifted, then dig –

and the packed earth comes nicely,
fresh on the spade…

‘Landscape, with Dead Sea’, also, with adjective piled upon adjective, is typical of the style, with its ‘deep, barren waters’: ‘I harvest’, she writes, the dark, sybaritic mud – / worked into my flesh, its granular / astringency erodes my dead skin…’. (Bog poems for a new age perhaps?)

As these poems suggest, Maguire sometimes uses a lot of words, and she sometimes sounds a lot like other people: MacNeice (‘I give you the Liffey in spate’; ‘all we grasp is stuff’); Plath (‘The moon…bone-cold, alone, eternal night at her disposal’); Hughes (the vixen ‘slips // under the light paling fence / and is / gone’). In a collection as intertextually aware as this one, the allusions are not necessarily unstrategic, the forms are often accomplished, and her themes are socially and ethically admirable. Her interest in translation, and the dynamic interplay between different cultural perspectives that underpins her poetry, bring valuable insights to bear on the contemporary social and political scene. Those things don’t automatically, of course, make for outstanding poetry. In reading this collection it is easy to applaud its political sentiments (among Maguire’s concerns are the plight of the Middle East, the War on Terror, the suffering of immigrants, ecological damage); yet the sentiments are perhaps not always matched by a necessary distinctiveness of voice and tone, by poems that leap from the page with the urgency of their subject.

That said, The Pomegranates of Kandahar contains poems which show why Maguire is so often lavishly praised. The numerous poems in 2 line, or 3 or 4 short-line stanzas, might lead us back to the later Plath, but not necessarily at the expense of Maguire’s own voice and idiom. In Plath’s ‘Fever 103°’ for instance, ‘flush on flush’, the ‘pure acetylene / Virgin / Attended by roses’ find their echo in Maguire’s ‘Psoriasis’, a brief, sparse and effective poem with ‘this roseate / plague…shedding its bastard pollen / in my sheets’, but the echo also takes us somewhere new. Maguire can handle beautifully crafted stanzaic shapes with assurance, and with an exceptional sensitivity to shifting vowel sounds, as in ‘My Father’s Piano’, ‘Carved from the seasoned hearts of rosewood – / the fine grain veined black…’ Or in ‘Passages’, the scattered echoes, rhymes and half rhymes make for an almost invisible pattering that transforms the poem into its own kind of musical passage: ‘The swallows / left weeks ago, / with no notice: // one afternoon / the skies / were abandoned…’.

Sometimes less is more – particularly on the descriptive front. Maguire occasionally succumbs to the temptation to overplay the dramatic, as in ‘Petersburg’: ‘one thousand molten windows / scarlet with the agonies of sunset’. But in poems such as the title (war) poem ‘The Pomegranates of Kandahar’, or ‘Aden’, short and precise lines can be far more effective though their suggestively sinister hints: ‘the ceiling fan / ticking itself / right down // to a standstill…’. It is the richness and sensuality of her writing which is most often praised, and yet Maguire seems to me at her best when she avoids an accumulation of words in favour of the taut density of meaning captured in a poem such as ‘Wolves are Massing on the Steppes of Kazakhstan’:

cattle
stagger in their sheds

[…]

wide-eyed in lamplight
they buck and bruise.

Under Stalin
culls worked like clockwork –

wolves skinned from their pelts
were hung out to dry…

[…]

Now fences are mended
bolts shot home

and the shotgun propped
by the bed

is oiled and loaded.
But sleep, sleep is fitful

as the wolf packs mass
on the steppes of Kazakhstan.

The precision of the writing here doesn’t need to call in adjectival reinforcements to give it depth. Without forcing the connection, the link between Stalinist purges and culling of wolves is ever-present; their victimisation is there in the literal-turned-metaphorical ‘hung out to dry’; the same goes for the unnerving pun in ‘bolts shot home’. Who is the hunter here, who the hunted? The poem is guided by a magical thread perhaps; but we don’t need to see it and the drama plays under the surface. At moments like this, Sarah Maguire’s voice is one we would not be without.

Sarah Maguire, The Pomegranates of Kandahar, Chatto & Windus, £9.00

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.