Remembering the Future
by Janice Dempsey
66 poems, 78 pages
Publisher: VOLE Books
Price: £10.00
ISBN: 978-1-913329976
To order: www.dempseyandwindle.com
Reviewed by Neil Leadbeater Janice Dempsey trained as a fine artist at the Central School of Art, London (now London University of the Arts), and as an art teacher at London University Institute of Education. She taught art for thirty years, with a break in the 1980s living as an expatriate in Brunei and Bangladesh.
She began writing poetry seriously after retiring from her teaching career. In 2013 she published a pamphlet of nonsense verse, ‘Sticky Ends and Squiggles,’ and a collection of poems, ‘How to Make a Dress out of Silence.’ Her book of illustrated poems about her visit to Sorrento and the Italian Amalfi Coast, ‘Loving the Light,’ was also published in 2013. ‘Remembering the Future’ brings new poems together with recently edited versions of a few poems from her earlier books.
The catchy title finds its origins in Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice Through the Looking Glass’: ‘It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,’ said the White Queen.
Glancing down the contents page it soon becomes apparent that Dempsey also has a knack of claiming our attention with some of her poem titles: ‘Amazing Grace at the Supermarket’, ‘Midsummer in the Art Room,’ ‘One of Those (Sci-Fi) Days’ and ‘Doing it Backwards in High Heels’ all made me want to read on.
Throughout this collection, Dempsey’s poetry exudes a sense of wonderment and delight, spiced at times with a good helping of humour. (We will come to another Alice later). Her artistic background comes to the fore with several poems whose titles and subject matter bear artistic connections: ‘Man On Wall by L. S. Lowry,’ ‘ART…….iNNIT’ (A poem based on ‘A Woman Bathing’ by Rembrandt Van Rijn, the entertaining ‘This is not a Room (nor a Magritte)’ and the short poem called ‘After Chagall’s ‘Deux Amoureux au Dessus de la Ville.’’ Some of her poems have a light, ethereal touch about them tinged with a surrealistic turn of phrase. Sometimes her characters take off into the air, rising above rooftops, like Mary Poppins, with a kind of effortless ease.
Her way of seeing things, sometimes from a most inventive angle, become apparent in her observational nature poems, many of which contain some wonderfully memorable lines. In the final stanza of the opening poem, ‘The Water Meadows’ a delicious rhyme in the first line is followed by a telling description of cattle that just seems so fitting for the occasion: ‘a yellow meadow / creatures hidden in a dark stream / the curiosity of cows.’ The deployment of the definite article in the last line, the only time she uses it in the entire poem, lends emphasis and helps the reader to focus specifically on the cattle. In ‘Bird’ she herself becomes the avian creature hearing ‘brown beetles crackling through dry hay’…running ‘straight –leggèd to the hedge / to perch and sing [her] piercing vibrant note’. Again, we note the attention to detail. The use of the grave accent in ‘straight-leggèd’ gives us a hopping sound that is somehow in keeping with the movement of the bird.
Dempsey has a questioning voice, she is interested in everything that is going on around her. In ‘Questions in the Garden’ she asks ‘How do the brambles know / when a storm is coming?’ and ‘At what time of day / do the daisies remember to flower?’ Many seasonal poems are characterised by the weather, in particular, ‘Summer 1976’ in which she recalls a heatwave that took Britain by surprise before climate change was publicly recognised.
There is considerable experimentation with different poetic forms. In among the haibun prose poems and free verse forms, two visual poems caught my attention, ‘The architecture of the poppy’ written in the shape of a poppy stem and ‘Sparkling Wine’ written in the shape of a wine glass.
A zany sense of humour pervades many of her poems. The standout for me was ‘Alice in Officeland’. This is a nonsense poem, a kind of jabberwocky, a playful imitation of language consisting of invented, meaningless words that just keep within the boundaries of sense to enable the reader to follow the storyline. Here are the opening stanzas:
’Twas Friday and the compulads
did clickle on the scribblescreens.
All dunwit were the bossybulls
in shirteys red and green.
The ofterbore had uttered jokes
until the air was buggerblue.
The secreladies gogglegigged
at lunch till half-past two…
Dempsey is also adept at her descriptions of particular places. In ‘Cork Is’ she paints us a living picture in words of the sights and sounds of the city:
‘At Carroll’s Quay the Opera House is wearing a hoarding,
shabby-rich in purple and sooty blue, faces laughing from a mural.
Lorries bear down like minotaurs in a maze of lights and rights of way
as we wait for the green man. In a tidy row up on the street lamp,
gulls wait for you to line them up in your zoom lens, then go.
In the library poets are assembling, murmuring, not all bearded…’
This is a celebration of life lived through several countries: from Ireland and England to Algiers, Sofia, Rome and Kathmandu. Her wide reading of other poets such as Pablo Neruda, Elizabeth Bishop and Emily Dickinson, together with her aesthetic, artistic eye for detail, make this collection sparkle with integrity and wit. |
