Vaudevillian Sleaze
Abigail Parry, Jinx
Bloodaxe, 96pp, £9.95, ISBN 9781780372341
reviewed by Stephanie Sy-Quia
Photography is a recurring source of anxiety in Abigail Parry’s debut collection. Throughout, it is configured as a life-taking or violent act (it is, after all, an activity betrayed by the words we use for it: we take or capture pictures; we shoot our subjects), and it occasions an Angela Carter-like bloody chamber, in the form of a darkroom. Entitled ‘Red-rooms’, the grisly contents of the darkroom are the expected ‘exes, dressed in lace’ of the Bluebeard story, but also the moniker for memories unwanted and unbidden, which can ambush: ‘You never know a red-room till you’re in one.’
Red rooms returns in ‘Arterial’, which won Parry the Ballymaloe Poetry Prize in 2016. Here they are red-blooded pump rooms, made of muscle, ‘through which the blood is pushed in roughly rhythmic // stops and starts’, and can ‘[forget] to function’ at the rising of certain memories, brought on by photographs. Parry’s bloody chambers are those of ventricle and atrium, through which all recollection must pass (and indeed, the etymology of ‘to recall’ is from the Latin revocare, to pass back through the chambers of the heart).
And then, before we know it, we’ve been made to duck and dive back to the bloody chamber of Bluebeard’s skeleton closet again. ‘I didn’t get the ending’, Parry concludes in ‘Red-rooms’, ‘till I watched the setting sun / play its mayday up the white walls of my bedroom’. This is a twofold riff on the refrain in Perrault’s version of the fairy tale. The protagonist, whom Bluebeard has given a moment to say her prayers before he kills her, asks her sister (who is standing on the castle rooftop) what she can see (‘Anne, my sister Anne, what can you see coming?’). Anne replies ‘Je ne vois rien que le soleil qui poudroie, et l'herbe qui verdoie’ - an archaic French construction which translates as ‘I see only the sun which is sparkling and the grass which is greening’. Anne is keeping watch for their brothers, who have promised the protagonist a visit that day. The hope is that Anne can give them a distress or Mayday (from the French m’aidez, help me) signal from the ramparts in time to rescue them both. In keeping with common fairy tale formulae, this exchange is repeated three times. Anne can only see the grass getting greener and the late afternoon sun sparkling, until the brothers do appear, see the signal, kill Bluebeard, and save the day.
Parry’s take on Perrault, meanwhile, features a speaker whose setting sun provides their own rescue. It is the slow rescue of time, which answers each desperate, heartbroken Mayday one day’s ending at a time. It is a rescue of refrain and routine, with the power to transform painful memory into little more than cautionary tale. It can grant safe passage through the red rooms of the heart, when ambushed with the evidence of former selves:
Causing all this heartache is a carousel of trickster figures: men whose sinister nature is heightened by the rambunctious rhymes with which they bounce in and out of the collection:
The simplicity of the rhyme scheme does not mean innocence, as we might expect it to. Combined with the acceleration, what emerges is an air of timeless folksong. As such, Parry’s poems call upon the power exercised by such songs. Like the cradleside prophecy, the rule of three, or the triumphalist jinx! of the collection’s title, this arcane register of refrain, ritual exchange, and speech acts holds most sway over the innocent and uninitiated, and is a deft mode through which to explore the bitter yearnings for what comes after the unlocked room and the bitten apple. It is the twinning of the fairytale with fin-de-siècle cynicism that is this collection’s great strength. There is an all-knowing vaudevillian sleaze to these poems: they beckon us with the suggestive wink of the fairground fortune-teller and the accompanying sleight of hand, though none of the tricks Parry pulls are cheap. To read her work is to enter into a series of private rooms, upholstered in red velvet plush, and to emerge, blinking, back into the grey light of day.
Red rooms returns in ‘Arterial’, which won Parry the Ballymaloe Poetry Prize in 2016. Here they are red-blooded pump rooms, made of muscle, ‘through which the blood is pushed in roughly rhythmic // stops and starts’, and can ‘[forget] to function’ at the rising of certain memories, brought on by photographs. Parry’s bloody chambers are those of ventricle and atrium, through which all recollection must pass (and indeed, the etymology of ‘to recall’ is from the Latin revocare, to pass back through the chambers of the heart).
And then, before we know it, we’ve been made to duck and dive back to the bloody chamber of Bluebeard’s skeleton closet again. ‘I didn’t get the ending’, Parry concludes in ‘Red-rooms’, ‘till I watched the setting sun / play its mayday up the white walls of my bedroom’. This is a twofold riff on the refrain in Perrault’s version of the fairy tale. The protagonist, whom Bluebeard has given a moment to say her prayers before he kills her, asks her sister (who is standing on the castle rooftop) what she can see (‘Anne, my sister Anne, what can you see coming?’). Anne replies ‘Je ne vois rien que le soleil qui poudroie, et l'herbe qui verdoie’ - an archaic French construction which translates as ‘I see only the sun which is sparkling and the grass which is greening’. Anne is keeping watch for their brothers, who have promised the protagonist a visit that day. The hope is that Anne can give them a distress or Mayday (from the French m’aidez, help me) signal from the ramparts in time to rescue them both. In keeping with common fairy tale formulae, this exchange is repeated three times. Anne can only see the grass getting greener and the late afternoon sun sparkling, until the brothers do appear, see the signal, kill Bluebeard, and save the day.
Parry’s take on Perrault, meanwhile, features a speaker whose setting sun provides their own rescue. It is the slow rescue of time, which answers each desperate, heartbroken Mayday one day’s ending at a time. It is a rescue of refrain and routine, with the power to transform painful memory into little more than cautionary tale. It can grant safe passage through the red rooms of the heart, when ambushed with the evidence of former selves:
‘I have the photographs: we grin and grin
and so we might
when the bell will never ring, when our glasses
remain full, with betrayal
and other monsters tucked up tight
in the stony bluff of other people’s lives.
. . . we strike our stupid poses, bare our teeth.
We’re stuck there now. Our smiles are hard like flint.’
Causing all this heartache is a carousel of trickster figures: men whose sinister nature is heightened by the rambunctious rhymes with which they bounce in and out of the collection:
‘Sworn bachelor
and dandy-man
about-the-town.
Snook-cocker, fancy-
man, catch him if you can man.
[. . .]
Two-face, double-crosser, table-talker, crook.
Player, faker, heart-breaker, ladies’ man, I’m hooked.’
The simplicity of the rhyme scheme does not mean innocence, as we might expect it to. Combined with the acceleration, what emerges is an air of timeless folksong. As such, Parry’s poems call upon the power exercised by such songs. Like the cradleside prophecy, the rule of three, or the triumphalist jinx! of the collection’s title, this arcane register of refrain, ritual exchange, and speech acts holds most sway over the innocent and uninitiated, and is a deft mode through which to explore the bitter yearnings for what comes after the unlocked room and the bitten apple. It is the twinning of the fairytale with fin-de-siècle cynicism that is this collection’s great strength. There is an all-knowing vaudevillian sleaze to these poems: they beckon us with the suggestive wink of the fairground fortune-teller and the accompanying sleight of hand, though none of the tricks Parry pulls are cheap. To read her work is to enter into a series of private rooms, upholstered in red velvet plush, and to emerge, blinking, back into the grey light of day.