Hearing Eye (London 2022). Pbk 72 pages £9.
Martina Thomson died in 2013, aged 88, leaving many unpublished poems. This book has been put together as an act of love by members of the poetry workshop she attended led by Jane Duran, and by Hearing Eye which published Thomson’s previous pamphlet and translation.
Thomson came late to poetry. Born in Berlin, she and her family moved to England where she trained at RADA, married the writer and tv producer David Thomson and became an art therapist and potter. Art, especially still life, stone and clay, represent an equipoise to which the writing aspires: as the epigraph to the frontispiece says, ‘Let words so settle down’. Memory, too, settles down in the sensitive and skilful way in which these poems have been selected and ordered, bookended by ‘Lilac’ and ‘Lilac Corner’ where the scent of lilac recalls the child who buried her bakelite dolls from Nazi trespass.
In the poem ‘Tristanstrasse’ Thomson recalls the rattle of milk-cart over cobbles, a sound replaced by the click of black boots in the street and the disruption of innocent lives. Milk is a leitmotif. Recollection of the name ‘Jim Galt’ brings back evacuee holidays in the Cotswolds. The poet evokes the sights and smells of the dairy farm as if in a painting: the men who worked it, the colours for which there are ‘a hundred and seventy names’ and the landscape imagined as a canvass or a cloth she wants to lay on her face for ‘the comfort’ of such a memory of innocence. It is the milk which especially embodies that quality, from ‘the solemnity of place’, the spare whiteness of the dairy and its cool air, to the ‘mothering smell at dawn and at dusk’. Similarly evocative is the poem Thomson dedicates to her grandmother, ‘Zucker und Zimt’, where the making of Apfelstrudel is ‘the work of a master’ artist, the warm dough held in the hands ‘as a potter holds clay’, the kneading ‘a rock-a-bye motion’, the scalloped edges ‘growing pearly, precious, a baby-skin, see-through’.
Physicality is celebrated as much as personality in the poems about Thomson’s family. In ‘Sundays’ she remembers the ritual of bath and shower, her mother’s breasts ‘apples’, her aunt’s ‘pears’ and her father’s sex covered by a floating flannel he refused to remove when she asked: ‘but he was easy in the bathroom, sang his Russian songs and teased me and I liked it’. Places, too, are personal icons, like the thrill of Paris in 1955, where the poet is high on the smell of Gauloises and garlic: ‘Living and breathing was exultation, all was seductive’. At the other end of life, the exultation is different but no less. So in ‘Walking with my Son Ben on Hampstead Heath’ the pair have not managed to climb the hill but ‘when we’d walked around the pond, it was a circle made’. Such achievements, like the ordinary rituals of living, are not trivial. ‘A Western Woman’s First Things’ enumerates the small gestures and rituals of getting up each morning in meticulous detail, with the deliberation required by an elderly woman.
Life aspires to the condition of art. ‘In Praise of Stillness’ describes a room where the occupant’s absence ‘laid a patina on clutter’, making peace out of chaos, turning ‘mess into still life’: ‘I step into a classic composition’. Whether it be her mother’s book-binding, her own pottery, Paul Nash or Chagall, the achievement of craft is a quickening that is both mental and physical. It cannot be rationalised and is instinctive, a ‘stirring in the wrist’, something recognised when seen. In entering into Thomson’s poetry, we embrace experience, evoked through her life story and through the precision and clarity of her language. The last two poems take us from advancing years and decrepitude where the poet has ‘stepped into an alien body, like a “cutout from the camps”‘, back through the childhood lilac orchard and the transcendence of white blossoms that seem ‘like paradise’. It is a story both of loss and celebration.
The editors Jane Duran and Sue MacIntyre have done Thomson and the reader an immense service in their loving and skilful arrangement of this volume. Hearing Eye, too, must be commended for the high production values of an altogether lovely book.
Kathryn Southworth is a former vice-principal of Newman University College in Birmingham. Recent publications are her poetry collection Someone was Here (Indigo Dreams, Beaworthy, 2018) and her pamphlet, A Pure Bead, a sequence on Virginia Woolf (Paekakariki Press, London 2021).