Nigel Leaves reviews New Directions in Philosophical Theology: Essays in Honour of Don Cupitt edited by Gavin Hyman Ashgate. 2004. 224 pages. £47.50. ISBN 0754650618 reviews sof 70 March 2005 22 One of the poems in Aileen La Tourette’s collection is entitled Love, and in a sense most of the book is about love: love between lovers, love between generations in the family, a love that can also be sharp as a knife, cold as snow. Another title is Irony, and there is plenty of that too. Both poems are evocations of her mother – ironing, in the case of Irony. Aileen La Tourette senior, to whom many of these poems refer, emerges for the reader as a complex and evidently unforgettable personality. She was a French American Catholic, and it is from that Catholicism that Aileen the younger later emerged, to become a long-time Sea of Faith-er. An image of that abandoned faith is a Lady Well: ‘the stone lid’s cracked, sunken, the old well invisible.’ There is no theologising here: this is a book of poetry. Yet SoF readers – especially those suffering from but enriched by a Catholic upbringing – will pick up the still-visible religious references. These can be shocking, as in Parthenogenesis where the Virgin is compared to parthenogenetic turkeys, or You, where a first sex act reminds the poet of her first communion, where the wafer stuck to her palate:
Communion was a loneliness you learned.
Sex seemed the same, a solitude that burned… knowing you had to transubstantiate the sticky mess back into something huge, or let the devil win and lose your faith… Religion played a bigger part than you could ever guess… Perhaps a typical lapsed-Catholic comment is ‘we can’t face the sacred without the tacky’ from which it follows, as the poet observes elsewhere, ‘love’s not for the squeamish.’ (Indeed a few of these pieces are not for the squeamish either.) Catholic imagery recurs: a small son’s Robin cape is worn ‘solemnly as a priest/ donning a red chasuble for the beginning, Christmas’. In truth La Tourette uses simile and metaphor with prodigality, as though tossing abundant seed corn. Spot no less than five images in four short lines from a poem about rain:
Rain scratches like needles on vinyl, lowers curtains glistening like beads, takes up my quests like a rosary, an abacus of loss too fast for me.
Those lines are from the eponymous Downward Mobility. The message of falling rain is of ‘a million blunt arrows pointing to our downward mobility’. In a note on the cover, the poet explains the phrase as ‘a kind of emotional suppleness’. It is this emotional suppleness which adds strength and texture to the elegiac poems for her deceased parents, the tender ones for young sons. (‘Mothers pulse in us’, she suggests, in ways which make for both upward and downward mobility.) It is the very backbone of the final, powerful piece, The Twins. Here there are two speakers, a man about to jump from a Twin Tower on September 11th, and his wife speaking from elsewhere, ending poignantly ‘we were downwardly mobile, all the time.’ The Twins is one of three substantial sequences of linked sonnets, crafted with great skill. Clearly this is a poet who enjoys strict forms. The unusual ghazal, a form used in Arabic love poetry, is here a vehicle for elegies for her mother. And don’t be misled: when La Tourette employs free verse she is no less a skilful wordsmith. Her sound effects are worth pausing over: internal rhyme, assonance and consonance, words to savour on the tongue:
He played a green weed like a whistle, picked milkweed to feel it trickle, shamrocks to gamble.
More difficult for the reader are Aileen’s characteristic long sentences, which writhe their way like snakes down a board, forcing the reader to leap lines, spaces, stanzas. I counted one sentence which stretches to thirty-one lines (Staking Claims). A reviewer can only advise: take a deep breath, keep head above water, it’s worth the effort.
Is this a distinctively American voice? Not really, but there are of course American references. Aileen was brought up in New Jersey, and in a poem addressed to T.S. Eliot ‘salutes a native of St Louis’.
Like Eliot, she has been many years in England, but is aware of memories: as if I’d packed the Bronx in what my grandmother called a valise, hauled it across the ocean.
Anne Ashworth reviews Downward Mobility by Aileen La Tourette (Headland Publications, 2004, 91pp, GBP7.50, ISBN 1902096843).