Jane Griffiths reviews Spirit Brides by Togara Muzanenhamo

Togara Muzanenhamo’s first collection draws on an extraordinarily diverse series of cultures and geographies, moving almost seamlessly from his Zimbabwe childhood to Holland, Belgium, France and England, as well as into frighteningly featureless countries of political parable. The effect is disconcerting, as the readeris compelled constantly to reassess his or her sense of perspective – the more so, because the poems are not grouped by location. Places disappear from view and reappear as in a kaleidoscope, with Zimbabwe serving as a leitmotif, constantly resurfacing.

It is clear that these dislocations are deliberate, reflecting Muzanenhomo’s view of the often violent unpredictability of the world. In this collection, events come out of the blue. The first part of the prose poem ‘Nationalist Archives’ suggests an idyll (‘Autumn brings a strange sense of warmth to the old buildings, the windows filled with early evening light’) but ends in vividly realized grotesque, as the woman at the window ‘stares vacantly across the darkening street remembering her mother: naked, headless and pregnant … She tried to lift her mother – holding both ankles, and after struggling for a while – realised the absurdity of it all: a scrawny teenager on her own – her mother’s body resembling a wheelbarrow, her missing head the missing wheel.’Conversely, although the man driving his nephew and niece at well over 100 mph in ‘Excursion’ is clearly courting disaster, this too is a poem of the unexpected: the family arrives safely home, ‘the German car rolling into the garage as safe as warm honey twirling into a jam jar.’ Muzanenhamo so consistently undermines expectations that he seems to have internalized the old saying: ‘When you hear something, that’s nothing. When you hear nothing, that’s the Indian.’

The resulting sense of disorientation is heightened by Muzanenhamo’s disturbingly unidiomatic turns of phrase. When he writes of ‘the anthill / where brother and I climb and call Land’s End’ the anacoluthon gives the impression of reading a work in a non-native tongue; when the brilliantly evocative ‘This is how water flies, whole shapes of liquid light, hovering, descending, pulling up and taking to air’ concludes: ‘gracefully, without any immediate organic strain’, the sudden flatness suggests a work in translation. The effect is jarring. Yet these moments can also be oddly effective, drawing attention to the opacity of language, and suggesting thatthe difficulty of translating the world into words matches the difficulty of making any kind of sense of it.What Muzanenhomo says to a former girlfriend in ‘Photographer’ might be said of him as well: ‘You were awkward, struggling through the world – trying to keep pace with every moving thing. Trying to stop the world.’

His attempts to make sense of what is experienced as essentially incoherent are visible at every level of the work, not only at the local level of the language, but in the poems that work by juxtaposition of incompatible viewpoints, and in the frequent shifts from poetry to prose or from parable to particular detail and back again. The first impression on reading the collection is that it would benefit from strong editorial intervention – yet in obliging the reader to share the poet’s work of interpretation, it becomes hauntingly memorable. In a stunning line in one of several poems that commemorate his brother, Muzanenhomo writes that: ‘We were the past of our own futures, the things that don’t go away.’ The collection as a whole is a record of precisely those things – and an attempt to order them that is too honest to be tidy-minded.

Spirit Brides, 71pp. Carcanet. £7.95. ISBN 1 85754 852 3

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.