The Last Parent by Anne Stewart. Second Light Publications (East Preston). 2019. 96 pages. £9.95.
This book includes a selection of Anne Stewart’s poetry since 2010 and a sequence of thirty poems on the poet’s role as bereaved daughter, balancing grief and reminiscence with the necessities of administering an estate. It is the juxtaposition of elegiac lyricism with documentary realism which makes this volume such an unusual and valuable exercise for a poet to undertake.
The eponymous sequence has two voices. As the poet explains in ‘Becoming Psychotic’, the bereaved executor has to divide herself, one part being allowed to feel loss, whilst the other must keep itself intact and ‘substitute clubs for hearts’. This latter, the ‘Administrator’, takes the reader through the practical fallout of dealing with a death, the forms, the guidance leaflets, the sequencing of required procedures in what is, as the poet recognises, a relatively simple estate without a house or inheritance tax. (Try one with a subsiding house and ten charities!) Yet the two voices are not so far apart. The Administrator is not an unfeeling bureaucrat but a person holding onto her humanity as she responds to the exigencies and absurdities involved in a death, as for instance, in the poem ‘Don’t Let Companies Get You Down’, where a phone company invoices for £2.12 ‘for producing itself’. The Administrator grows something of a carapace, seeking ‘something griefless’ to get her ‘heartless’ teeth into, but she does not lose her ironic self-awareness: in recouping money owed to the estate, she sees herself as a greedy ‘blackbacked jackal’. Meanwhile ‘the grieving daughter tagging alongside’ also writes, both reminiscences of her parents and meditations on death and renewal in a future less threatened and emotional: ‘soft, unknowing, blind’.
The poet recognises and recreates the element of surrealism and absurdity in death. Amid her practical advice, the Administrator warns in ‘Organise The Funeral and Wake’: ‘make yourself ready…/You’re about to meet the man/he really was’ and this includes everything lurking in her father’s recent past: in wallets, boxes, drawers or disguised safes like baked bean tins and wellingtons. (My father, I found, had stashes of bank notes in even stranger places, including a paraffin heater, luckily too obsolescent for anyone to try and light.) In ‘You’ll have to tell the bank he’s dead’, Stewart’s Administrator recommends looking for passwords ‘underneath the veg box in the fridge’, a suggestive metaphor for the concealed life. In the poem about ‘The First Parent’, the daughter, mourning her mother, remembers her ‘incomprehensible’ schedule of medications, the ‘unnavigable names’ the older woman ‘reeled off as easily/ as all her favourite flavours of ice cream’, knowing their natures and conflicts ‘as well as children knew/their theropods and pterosaurs and seemed to love them’.
It is tempting to privilege the originality of ‘The Last Parent’ sequence in talking of this book, but the rest of the poems deserve consideration and display similar wit and surrealism, with striking metaphors, such as ‘A bed is a light bulb in the night sky’.
Stewart’s work is thoughtful and lyrical, but above all tender , humane and hopeful, indeed remorselessly positive. This is not an easy optimism but one which is torn from negativity and confronting fear. In ‘Making for Home’ the poet rehearses the pitfalls of ‘the dark path’, the frightening dogs, the man fumbling with his clothes, drunken men in packs, but takes the dark path home anyway, ‘listening and ready’ but unwilling to cut her life to fit the what if? ‘embrace of fear’. ‘The Ghost that Dogs’, as one poem has it, lists the signs of ‘that miserable spirit/ inhabiting the word “No’’, from the intellectual who laughs at ignorance, to the parent who calls their child ‘Stupid’: they represent the ‘spirit that writes full stops’. She sets against this ‘the nourishing mother, the sea’s buoyancy, the ‘’Yesses” that prevail’ until the ghost that dogs ‘relents, comes wagging/ “Yes” with its ecstatic tail’.
Kathryn Southworth is the former Vice Principal of Newman University College, Birmingham. She now lives in London. She has recently published her poetry collection Someone was Here (Indigo Dreams, 2018) and a pamphlet Wavelengths, co-authored with Belinda Singleton, (Dempsey and Windle, 2019).