World-making

Rachael Allen, Kingdomland

Faber, 80pp, £10.99, ISBN 9780571341115

reviewed by Bethan James

‘Watch the forest burn/ with granular heat’, comes the opening instruction of Kingdomland. This is appropriate to a collection that abounds with stark, singular imagery and sets the tone for a poetry that is as graphic as it is immersive: ‘Watch,’ says Rachael Allen, commanding our attention. Allen’s practice is of world-making, a Kingdomland whose underlying cohesion is disguised to the inattentive reader, appearing at first disorienting and chaotic, disjunctured, often appalling; but the poems of Kingdomland function according to their own logic with a coherency alike the world we are used to but slightly distorted, every axis a little off centre.

The title poem, ‘Kingdomland,’ begins: ‘A dark village sits on the crooked hill./ There is a plot of impassable paths towards it.’ But then, suddenly, inexplicably, we are within the village, somehow having traversed the ‘impassable paths’:


Beside the poor library and the wicker-man,
there’s a man who sells peacock feathers on the roundabout,
they scream all night where they are plucked.
The village is slanted, full of tragedies with slate.

The village becomes more sinister again in the second stanza: a person the speaker loves ‘is jogging into the darkness,’ ‘small white socks bob into the dark like teeth in the mouth/ of a laughing man.’ No landscape, however hostile or tenebrous, is off-limits in Allen’s poetry. By just the third poem we have already transgressed the impassable towards recognition, if not total understanding, of a violent world to which we must bear witness. Later, in the sequence ‘Landscape for a Dead Woman,’ ‘written in memory,’ Allen describes ‘my mouth a spell of light,’ asking, ‘whats going on out there,’ as if our unanswerable questions might illuminate the interminable mysteries of grief; Allen’s poetry is at once the mouth and the darkness that surrounds it, the question that promises revelation and the going on in darkness that refuses such knowledge.

The speaker in ‘Landscape for a Dead Woman’ delivers her sister to an orphanage, away from her family, who ‘murder/ each other in kitchens.’ To believe the kitchen an incongruously domestic locus for murder would be to misapprehend Allen’s particular strain of quotidian perversity; Kingdomland acknowledges the kitchen as the place where meat and knives and labour are all brought into communion and generates poems and situations where these elements combine into a maelstrom of the bloody and the bodily.

Dead animals litter the landscape of the collection — ‘the whale cut in half/ exudes its yellow fat,’ ‘Two bees hang/ around a severed horse’s head/ forgetting they’re supposed to/ pollinate/ flowers instead’ — unsqueamish testaments to Allen’s ability to craft images whose potency lingers long after the poem has ended. The poem ‘Promenade,’ in which the speaker struggles to reify her desire, concludes with a note of resignation as she prostrates herself under its weight: ‘I’ll just lie down,/ my ribs opened up in the old town square/ and let the pigs root through my chest.’ In ‘Promenade’ desire is illicit for what it does to women, which is like a weakness but not exactly; the violence it exposes them to (‘you could push back/ my cuticles with want.’) makes desiring a dangerous currency that Allen takes up throughout Kingdomland. The searing image at the end of ‘Promenade,’ a mess of ribs and snouts, signals the conflation, by the structuring powers of desire, long acknowledged and abused, of women and beasts, flesh human and animal.

‘Lunatic Urbane’ features a man who ‘loved’ the speaker but now ‘serves you pain deep seared/ on a silver dish’ at a table ‘gilded and festooned/ with international meats, . . . each demanding its own sauce.’ This assortment of meats, like the painful conclusions of other women’s desire, each has its own particular taste; different enough, perhaps, for the speaker to engage in the tenuous construction of a possibility that, somehow, her desire will not subject her to the same fate. In ‘Many Bird Roast’ a similar image of ‘one small sparrow in a pigeon in a grouse in a swan’ is carved using a ‘specially designed knife’ that feels like gratuitous cruelty; Allen twists the knife again by the end of the poem when even the white dove and all its symbolism sits in a hutch with a pot of ink that doesn’t make it ‘so much a raven as a plain black dove/ ready to cook.’

Gestation and reproduction are preoccupations of Kingdomland and their treatment is characterised by a refusal of passive endurance of such states. In ‘Prawns of Joe’ we see ‘a burning child on the stove’ and the speaker, who is ‘stuck in the middle of the month (again),’ refuses the instinct to act: ‘No, I watch her burn.’ In ‘’ the speaker gets her (get it?) ‘purple period,’ while another poem ends with a vision of ‘the baby/ making her way towards me/ across the indigo field.’ In ‘Seer’ the speaker is unequivocal: ‘I don’t want her,/ an ingrown ghost, intermittent horror.’

Just as these speakers refuse to be mothers, they often also seem to dislike the categorisation of woman conferred upon them; ‘I didn’t earn any adulthood/ I had it thrust upon me’ says the speaker of ‘Landscape for a Dead Woman.’ In ‘The Girls of Situations,’ a sequence of prose fragments, a speaker is ‘too young to work but still changing beds in the early hours for a holiday cottage,’ enacting mundane tasks of womanhood before her time. But subjection to such an act is not without an equal and opposite act of resistance: ‘I will steal from my own mother to make myself richer, and smoke her old cigarettes to make myself sicker . . . cut anything out of me that starts to grow in there.’ This revolt captures the obstinate conviction of adolescence that one will live differently to her mother, defining herself in opposition to the models of womanhood that she is expected to inherit, nodding to Kingdomland’s recurring themes of genealogy and familial relations. So, in this violence is agency, the possibility of self-definition rather than self-destruction.

The poems in Kingdomland are richly textured: ‘Sand blows into ham sandwiches/ while distemper accumulates at sea,’ and Allen invites us not only to ‘watch,’ but to really believe these experiences. The topography of Kingdomland is varied but always felt, often in the most kinetic of ways: a ‘handprint/ becomes colloidal,’ impressed indelibly upon a body. To read Kingdomland is to gain access to a world whose poems disturb and linger with similar effect, and earns Allen the richly deserved description that appears in the blurb as ‘a writer of rare vision and flare.’
Bethan James is an undergraduate reading English at the University of Oxford