Driftwood Lyric
Liz Berry, The Home Child
Chatto & Windus, 128pp, £14.99, ISBN 9781784742683
reviewed by Ben Philipps
From 1860 to 1960, over one hundred thousand British children were forcibly emigrated to Canada in order to work as indentured labourers and domestic servants. Known, with extraordinarily callous irony, as Home Children, they were for the most part children of poverty and deprivation, whose families were considered by the patrician philanthropists overseeing the programme to be unable to care for them. Yet as Liz Berry notes in the introduction to her compelling new book of poetry, The Home Child, altruism was at best one motivating factor among others: one agency director argued that the migration scheme ought really to be overseen by the Department of Natural Resources. There was also a useful shedding of potentially troublesome elements in British society, as well as an inarticulate sense that any form of demographic expansion into the colonies was no bad thing.
The Home Child tells the story of Eliza Showell, a semi-fictionalised version of Berry’s great-aunt. The historical Eliza was sent to Cape Breton under the Home Child scheme in 1908, where she spent the rest of her life. In Berry’s retelling, the specific blend of fact and imagination is kept intriguingly hidden: she writes, with what seems like deliberate vagueness, that ‘some true facts’ are recounted in the book. Still, behind the poet’s blurring of provenance lies serious research. The book comes with a bibliography, including references to archives in Birmingham and Nova Scotia. If history slips into fiction and back again, so too is Berry interested in hybridity of genre. Its blurb describes The Home Child as a ‘novel in verse’, a designation that might mean any number of things. Berry’s chosen form, as in her three previous publications, is the lyric; here, individual poems link into an overarching narrative. (‘A novel of verses’ might be a more accurate if uglier way of putting it.) Tension between lyric and novelistic modes allows for the natural proliferation of voices and perspectives — a variety which might, in a conventional (prose) novel, be too attention-grabbingly experimental. Sometimes Eliza herself speaks, or is at least heard speaking through poetic form. In ‘Black Ribbon’, ‘the floor is air’: the metaphor floats ambiguously between the different precisions of childhood experience and literary craft. Elsewhere, Berry, in novelist garb, takes over – as in ‘Forerunners, Premonition’, where ‘Eliza sits upright in bed, sweating’.
But the most interesting voices in the book are those less expected. There are two poems called ‘They Say’ and two called ‘The Word’, in which lines beat with the plural gasp of rumour:
Gossip is an apt register for a book finding its language at the boundary between fact and fiction. At other points, the arbitrations of poetic form comment on those of bureaucracy. In ‘Children’s Emigration Homes Case Report / Eliza Showell, November 1907’, a ‘Girl 12 was living / with her two brothers’: the pause at the line-break is filled with all the possible consequents to a girl who ‘was living’. One poem is called ‘Suki’, featuring reminiscences in the voice of the chronically ill wife of Eliza’s employer-guardians in Cape Breton. It’s a rare moment of reprieve and insight into a character other than Eliza, a break of pure invention: otherwise, the book centres on its titular figure, her awful journey to and treatment in Canada, and a tragically brief flash of romance with a fellow Home Child, Daniel. The book ends with an older Eliza’s monologue — ‘I want to tell you about him now’ — and then two monochrome photographs of the real Eliza and her real grave. The effect is unsettling. Eliza Showell, the real person and Home Child, haggard, squints at the camera, standing in a field in a black hat, scarf, and overcoat. Behind her, aspens and firs, more fields. Here is history staring out at us, at the end of a book which, for all its basis in fact, has swerved away from the historical into the realm of literature. Somehow, Eliza’s gaze feels monitory.
For all its variety of speakers, The Home Child is still recognisably Berry’s creation. In her previous books — both full-length and pamphlets — she forged a poetic idiom rooted in the language of her native Black Country. Her 2014 debut collection was actually called Black Country, and married dialect with tropes from the storehouse of lyric past: ‘we’m winged when we gaze at you / jimmucking the breeze’. The introduction of regional forms — ‘Bright and black as a seam of coal’, as Berry writes in The Home Child — into poems figures a pride of origin which in turn reinvigorates language, grounding it in history and the actual. Only occasionally does it feel a bit like a crutch, a bell rung for easy instant vividity. One poem begins ‘Ower Father / who art in wum’, a transformation buying its colour a little cheaply. (Black Country’s Lady Ratcatcher, announcing herself in dialect as a native of Bilston, made her first appearance in Berry’s debut pamphlet the patron saint of schoolgirls (2010) — where she was from Bow.) For the most part, however, Berry’s poetical reclamation of the language of her region represents a continued claim for the poetry of real speech, the speech of the historically marginal — and conversely a shot in the arm for an often homogenous contemporary poetic diction. A poem in The Home Child is simply titled ‘The Owd Words’, and chews on the matter of language, its tactile, tangible presence: ‘words like a kiss, a pit, / a fruit-stone in my throat’. The build-up of ‘t’ sounds, the glottal reassemblage of ‘fruit-stone’ in ‘throat’, define the power of the ‘owd words’ as bodily and emotional together.
Berry’s work is throughout invested in the latent politics of poetry. The Home Child is dedicated to ‘Eliza and all those who journey like her’, and its reimagining of a historical story is laced with present force. In the dreamlike prose poem ‘Snow Globe’, ‘Somewhere, somewhere we choose not to look’: the willed ignorance — or systematic delusion — that enabled the Home Children programme is today mirrored by the panoply of false, cruel, and evasive statements made about refugees arriving in Britain. A country which simply dispatched those its society had failed now turns its back, and worse, on others seeking safety and compassion. Berry’s poem ‘Malagawatch’ talks of ‘driftwood borne by the ocean’: her book attunes itself to those who drift, those whose story is dislocation and obscurity, recovering a fractured beauty from true horror.
The Home Child tells the story of Eliza Showell, a semi-fictionalised version of Berry’s great-aunt. The historical Eliza was sent to Cape Breton under the Home Child scheme in 1908, where she spent the rest of her life. In Berry’s retelling, the specific blend of fact and imagination is kept intriguingly hidden: she writes, with what seems like deliberate vagueness, that ‘some true facts’ are recounted in the book. Still, behind the poet’s blurring of provenance lies serious research. The book comes with a bibliography, including references to archives in Birmingham and Nova Scotia. If history slips into fiction and back again, so too is Berry interested in hybridity of genre. Its blurb describes The Home Child as a ‘novel in verse’, a designation that might mean any number of things. Berry’s chosen form, as in her three previous publications, is the lyric; here, individual poems link into an overarching narrative. (‘A novel of verses’ might be a more accurate if uglier way of putting it.) Tension between lyric and novelistic modes allows for the natural proliferation of voices and perspectives — a variety which might, in a conventional (prose) novel, be too attention-grabbingly experimental. Sometimes Eliza herself speaks, or is at least heard speaking through poetic form. In ‘Black Ribbon’, ‘the floor is air’: the metaphor floats ambiguously between the different precisions of childhood experience and literary craft. Elsewhere, Berry, in novelist garb, takes over – as in ‘Forerunners, Premonition’, where ‘Eliza sits upright in bed, sweating’.
But the most interesting voices in the book are those less expected. There are two poems called ‘They Say’ and two called ‘The Word’, in which lines beat with the plural gasp of rumour:
a girl is coming to McPhail’s farm
a girl a girl is coming to the farm a Home girl
a girl is coming to the farm yes to the farm
Gossip is an apt register for a book finding its language at the boundary between fact and fiction. At other points, the arbitrations of poetic form comment on those of bureaucracy. In ‘Children’s Emigration Homes Case Report / Eliza Showell, November 1907’, a ‘Girl 12 was living / with her two brothers’: the pause at the line-break is filled with all the possible consequents to a girl who ‘was living’. One poem is called ‘Suki’, featuring reminiscences in the voice of the chronically ill wife of Eliza’s employer-guardians in Cape Breton. It’s a rare moment of reprieve and insight into a character other than Eliza, a break of pure invention: otherwise, the book centres on its titular figure, her awful journey to and treatment in Canada, and a tragically brief flash of romance with a fellow Home Child, Daniel. The book ends with an older Eliza’s monologue — ‘I want to tell you about him now’ — and then two monochrome photographs of the real Eliza and her real grave. The effect is unsettling. Eliza Showell, the real person and Home Child, haggard, squints at the camera, standing in a field in a black hat, scarf, and overcoat. Behind her, aspens and firs, more fields. Here is history staring out at us, at the end of a book which, for all its basis in fact, has swerved away from the historical into the realm of literature. Somehow, Eliza’s gaze feels monitory.
For all its variety of speakers, The Home Child is still recognisably Berry’s creation. In her previous books — both full-length and pamphlets — she forged a poetic idiom rooted in the language of her native Black Country. Her 2014 debut collection was actually called Black Country, and married dialect with tropes from the storehouse of lyric past: ‘we’m winged when we gaze at you / jimmucking the breeze’. The introduction of regional forms — ‘Bright and black as a seam of coal’, as Berry writes in The Home Child — into poems figures a pride of origin which in turn reinvigorates language, grounding it in history and the actual. Only occasionally does it feel a bit like a crutch, a bell rung for easy instant vividity. One poem begins ‘Ower Father / who art in wum’, a transformation buying its colour a little cheaply. (Black Country’s Lady Ratcatcher, announcing herself in dialect as a native of Bilston, made her first appearance in Berry’s debut pamphlet the patron saint of schoolgirls (2010) — where she was from Bow.) For the most part, however, Berry’s poetical reclamation of the language of her region represents a continued claim for the poetry of real speech, the speech of the historically marginal — and conversely a shot in the arm for an often homogenous contemporary poetic diction. A poem in The Home Child is simply titled ‘The Owd Words’, and chews on the matter of language, its tactile, tangible presence: ‘words like a kiss, a pit, / a fruit-stone in my throat’. The build-up of ‘t’ sounds, the glottal reassemblage of ‘fruit-stone’ in ‘throat’, define the power of the ‘owd words’ as bodily and emotional together.
Berry’s work is throughout invested in the latent politics of poetry. The Home Child is dedicated to ‘Eliza and all those who journey like her’, and its reimagining of a historical story is laced with present force. In the dreamlike prose poem ‘Snow Globe’, ‘Somewhere, somewhere we choose not to look’: the willed ignorance — or systematic delusion — that enabled the Home Children programme is today mirrored by the panoply of false, cruel, and evasive statements made about refugees arriving in Britain. A country which simply dispatched those its society had failed now turns its back, and worse, on others seeking safety and compassion. Berry’s poem ‘Malagawatch’ talks of ‘driftwood borne by the ocean’: her book attunes itself to those who drift, those whose story is dislocation and obscurity, recovering a fractured beauty from true horror.