Patrick Macfarlane reviews Misappropriations by Jasmine Donahaye

It is difficult to read Donahaye’s debut collection (short-listed for the Jerwood Aldeburgh first collection prize) without acquiring a tremulous awareness of one’s own physicality. Her experience of the world is almost exclusively through touch, from ‘Goya’s cronus’ who ‘holds the slim body of the boy like a baguette’, to soldiers ‘lipping cigarettes from green packs’. Even her metaphors are intensely sensuous: in ‘Going Home’, she speaks of ‘the cold, sweaty trickle / of [her] sins’, and describes ‘those stiff / domestic efforts’ as ‘the slight, fleshy petals’ of a cyclamen in ‘Ulpan, Israel’. At points this focus takes on a violent edge, most obviously in the book’s last section, ‘Natural Processes’, but also in those poems set in the Middle East.

Donahaye was born in England of Jewish parents, and has lived in California and mid-Wales. These influences are felt throughout the collection, and help put her work into a wider moral context. In poems such as ‘Return’, however, the narrator’s alienation from events in Israel appears to leave her confused about her identity. Rather like the title of the book, ‘Return’ itself may be interpreted as an examination of the philosophy of Jewish immigration: Donahaye stresses the ‘Ethiopian’ identity of the newcomers, with their their ‘white robes’ and ‘possessions l[ying] in white sacks’, they seem incongruous among the ‘M16s’, ‘tarmac’ and ‘immigration clerks’. She concludes the poem with an ambiguous couplet referring to the ceremony of atonement in Lev. 16: ‘the first theft: our hands hot and sticky with goat’s blood; / the second, our land heavy with yours’. As an address to the pre-1948 inhabitants of Palestine, this appears to cast an air of foreboding on the scene, intimating that there can be no security for Israelis while their land is burdened by its previous occupants’ claims. It also reinforces Donahaye’s connection between violence and birth, with the penultimate line containing the possiblity of referring to a birth (possibly Israel’s own), or a death.

This idea finds its most affecting expression in  ‘Termination’, a harrowing and almost delirious account of abortion that is intertwined with Celtic myth and rituals. Compound nouns shock: a Jack Russell is ‘eager / for this butcher crotch’; the haunting image of the Mari Lwyd – a mare’s skull used as a ritualistic costume during Welsh New Year’s celebrations – appears several times, seemingly as an analogy for an empty womb. Its ‘ribboned jaws’ are carnivalistic, conflating jaunty decoration and the stuff of horror films. In contrast to the rest of the poems in ‘Misappropriations’, ‘Termination’s italicised text moves the reader seamlessly from one voice to the next, from the observed to the intimate:  ‘the rush hour traffic sweeps by / look at me leaking blood standing / in the gutter – wish I were dead’.

Many of Donahaye’s other poems reflect her close relationship with horses, including the uncharacteristically pacific ‘First Love’. It is a piece tinged with existential sadness, but the narrator’s hopeless post-lapsarian plea to her former self (‘Horse-crazy girl, don’t turn away… / to the fuzzed bodies of boys’) fails to overshadow the touching relationship with her animal. ‘Stay in love with your horse,’ she writes, ‘with the smell of dust, of manure, / of yellow maize you taste secretly’.

Other horses bring her ‘No Blessing’: here, she juxtaposes their sterile environment and swelled stomachs to give a tableau as frozen as the creature in ‘First Love’ is living. In the latter it ‘nudges [her] new breasts / …and blows through [its] nose’, much as James Wright’s ponies ‘nuzzle [his] left hand’ in ‘A Blessing’. In Donahaye’s work, instead, it is the ‘young men… from the slaughterhouse’ who inspire her to think that she might ‘break / Into blossom’. But these sentiments come with a morbid caveat: as in much of her work, she portrays sex as destructive to the female. Though she wants ‘what is not [her] to transform [her], she sees the transformation embodied in the ‘pregnant, sway back ponies’, in the way that ‘in [man’s] wake / the tender surfaces that have been so alive / become ordinary again, and we sag / back into our old weight’ (‘To Ovulation’). She talks of Mother-love in the same breath as ‘axes’ and ‘rolling cars’; a baby coos ‘inside the stove that is the hearth… which is empty of love’.

Donahaye’s poetry is not for the faint-hearted. ‘Sexually frank’, according to her publisher’, the tag cannot prepare the reader for her explicit descriptions of birth and post-natal depression. She is both coherent and self-contradictory, condemnatory of both women being pressed into the role of child-producer, and of ‘the latex the safety keepers have wrapped us in’. She seems terrified of the relationship between mother and child, but proclaims that humans should ‘run [their] tongues into the wet crevices and curves, the salty / angles, the armpits and groins, the mouths, the oiled / curl of ears’.

Misappropriations reads like an autopsy report for modern intimacy. Donahaye’s narrators are forced to consider their status as human beings: physically united by circumstance, they maintain tenuous relationships in the world of words: man and woman, mother and child, Palestinian and Israeli, pressed up against each other in reluctant society.

Jasmine Donahaye, Misappropriations, Parthian, £7.99, ISBN: 1-902638-95-6

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.