Born in Blackpool, Lancashire, and now living in London, Southworth had a career as an English academic in Midlands universities and then turned to writing poetry in earnest. This is her first collection.
Southworth’s poems engage with histories, stories, the lives of different people, their practices and cultures.
She travels in time and place. Her title suggests endurance and unity with past existences. Someone Was Here is a translation of Inukshuk, an Inuit word which originates from combining inuk (‘person’) and -suk (‘ersatz’, substitute’). Inukshuk are manmade stone landmarks. Many are large, built stone upon stone, needing communal effort to construct. They may have been used once as markers for travel routes, fishing places, camps, hunting grounds, or places of worship.
The explanation on the back of Southworth’s book takes this idea further – that inukshuk is ‘an image of a human presence in the landscape, which represents resolve and hope amidst the challenges and uncertainties of existence.’ Indeed, many inukshuk are human shaped, as in her title poem: in the gothic cromlech, memorial, if not to someone in particular, to the idea of memorial and the inukshuk amid the miles and miles of nothing, a human form, holding out its arms to claim and bless. ‘Jacob and the Angel, 1940’, stimulated by Jacob Epstein’s wonderful statue, shows Southworth at her best. You don’t need to know the statue to enjoy this poem. Southworth takes us into Jacob’s trial: you may not ask its name though you wrestle all night with it..
It is as solid as you; in this alabaster, it has fingernails …
Southworth gives an excellent description of the angel, its legs are ‘thick pillars’, and then moves us effortlessly into modern times by likening the encounter to a ‘five set tennis match/played out to endless deuce in failing light’. You feel Jacob’s pain – ‘chin trapped, your mouth/beneath his nose gasping for air…’ And then Southworth takes us internally, now the struggle is ours: ‘a buried dream, that can’t be shaken off, /… the struggle with the daimon, /every problem, every blockage, /every blind alley.’ There are poems that take inspiration from the Arian baptistry at Ravenna, Paul Nash, Gray’s Elegy, Shakespeare’s sonnet 88, World War One. Southworth celebrates many of our fellow creatures, a humpback whale off Reykjavik, swifts and more. Some poems mark family, ancestors and personal histories, with eloquent poems about grandparents, Uncle Joe’s mintballs, childhood and loss and mortality.
Dispersed, for Alice Southworth, is a gentle 18-line rhymed poem of mourning, ending with a superb couplet, which draws us back to William Blake and suggests some of Southworth’s poetic influences:
The universe will continue to expand; there are more stars already than the grains of sand.
Southworth’s writing is direct and particular, as she questions in ‘ Could I say’: Could I say what I think/I would not be/what I am…’ She deals with profound topics, and yet has a light touch, which means the poems never drift into being judgmental. There is irony too, for example, with a poetic exchange on the Regent’s Canal, or considering her stapler Rapesco.
Her poetic styles are diverse – sometimes free verse, using both long and short lines, internal rhyme and occasionally end rhymes. She has an excellent eye and ear, which gives her writing a vivid quality: ‘See the mugs lined up, the spotted dustpan/and matching sink brush, hand-crafted cat food bowls. /But no food.’ (From ‘This orderly house’.) Unsurprisingly some poems are more successful than others, but Southworth’s poems always reach beyond description, with deeper exploration and often a striking ending. It is, as she says, ‘to find answer/as the dance/finds the dancer.’ (From Messenger). The last poem in the collection brings another dimension.
It celebrates scars and repair. Southworth’s metaphor here is kintsugi (‘golden joinery’), the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery. As a philosophy, kintsugi treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise: ‘the shattered pot/ is not/ discarded/ nor its cracks / invisibly mended/ its brokenness/ is honoured/ bandaged/ with gold’.
In this time of fragmentation and conflict it is refreshing to read this collection celebrating continuity, human connectedness and repair, and managing to achieve that with fresh, engaging, thought-provoking poetry.
Danielle Hope has published 4 collections with Rockingham Press, including Giraffe under a Grey Sky. She is advisory editor of Acumen magazine. daniellehope.org