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Review of Mood Indigo - Martin Malone - the High Window - June 2016

I suppose it is now fair to describe Wendy Klein as 'multi-garlanded' after two previous collections with Cinammon and a slew of competition wins in recent years. Certainly, her name comes with some guarantee of quality and her third collection doesn't disappoint. Indeed, having read both Cuba in the Blood (2009) and played some small part in its follow-up Anything in Turquoise (2013) I feel well placed to pronounce this her best work yet. To be blunt, I'm not a fan of the book's cover. All the greater triumph then that the poetry within reveals Klein to be a poet in ever greater command of her craft and constituency. Structurally and thematically, Mood Indigo is divided into four sequences - 'Legacy', 'Seen from Below', 'What Paradise Means' and 'The Missed Chance of Salvation' - which exponentially open out from the tight, almost claustrophobic, female domesticity of the grandmother-dominated first part, through some wonderful childhood explorations of the poet's father as 'Seen from Below' then out into the wider vistas of 'What Paradise Means' and 'The Missed Chance of Salvation'. Klein's poetry achieves remarkable things simply by holding its nerve. There is a certain sniffiness in contemporary poetry - of which I've been guilty myself - about such a domestic and unfussy approach evident here in the earlier phases in particular, especially when the overall mood tends towards the sentimental. But when the valedictory sentiment is as unapologetic and sustained as this, and when the effects are created so artfully, then poetry like this is a bold reminder of what can yet be produced from such familiar and traditional ingredients. Perhaps this is one of the book's great achievements: an authentic renewal of the poetic powers of sentimentality on a scene awash with inferior versions of it.

The first half of the book sustains a genuinely affecting momentum of skilfully constructed early memories vivid with detail and poignant vignettes of family life. Everywhere are linguistically and emotionally precise portrayals of an early childhood spent within the predominantly female world of two omnipresent and strong grandmothers. The second poem 'Pairings' is a sensuous and knowing sonnet that skilfully carries the weight of its own suggestion, as a grandmother ingenuously lays down her blueprint for a perfect marriage in terms here 'reported' by her grand-daughter with a knowing sexuality: 'Now roll the gold-melt crumble inside your mouth; / your eyes close slowly as the earth moves.' At this stage, grandfathers and other male figures exist very much in the background, distanced by the denotative pronouns that mark off the male from this semi-private world of mothers, grandmothers, aunts and female cousins. The signifiers are overwhelmingly female and domestic: household items, the preparation of food, mothering of the very young and favourite recipes. However, the verse unapologetically celebrates the power of this environment, is totally at ease with its domesticity and, reminds us, in 'Original Recipe', that 'Women fly when me aren't looking'. In some respects, I was put in mind of the late and much-lamented Linda Chase, with whom Klein shares a not altogether dissimilar background and culture.

The Sequence 'Seen from Below' is an utterly compelling, sharp-eyed and tender celebration of the poet's developing relationship with her father and, in a sense, his agency for her growth into young adulthood. 'Mood Indigo', Klein's wonderful title poem, mimics the reader's own sense of being granted privileged access to a compelling family and their equally fascinating socio-cultural moment: a world boasting of 1950's New York, Broadway chorus lines, Greenwich Village, Harlem dance halls and the company of figures like Ivy Anderson, Duke Ellington, Lena Horne and Billie Holliday. Here are its opening lines:

 

When I am too old to tickle, your fathering falters,
and at a loss for what to do next, you tell me tales
about your dancing days …

 

 

 

and soon the reader is also carried along in a sequence of poems ringing with lived experience, as opposed to the merely researched period set-piece. I found myself being surprised as well as impressed by the manner in which Klein manages to re-invest a somewhat tired compositional staple like looking at a family photograph with new vibrancy and worth; there are five here and none of them ring false, such is the authenticity of rendition and sympathy of vision. Her American origins and peripatetic lifestyle bring a touch of the exotic to an English reader: at times, for example, the poems have an almost Steinbeckian quality, particularly in the father sequence. I am particularly fond of 'Who-am-I Blues which is a beautifully empathetic rendition - by a female poet - of her father's mid-life crisis of male identity:

 

 

 

        My father turns his face to the California sun
        as if waiting for grace to drop from the sky onto
        the paper plate she hands him…

 

 

 

There is such an emotionally supple and generous reading of one's own father, offered here as elsewhere, with a true poet's eye for telling detail. And this sequence gradually opens out into a retrospective understanding of her father in true situ with the poet's mother: 'Counterpoint' picks up the tune from 'Pairings' in candidly sketching out how imperfect couples grow to accommodate one another within a flawed relationship and the constraints of domesticity.

 

 

My own first inkling that Wendy Klein's poetry has undergone an impressive step change came with her Havant Prize-winning poem 'The people of Sahel consider rain'. This poem, and others in the book's second half, reveal a poet truly hitting her stride across a range of subject matters and form, reaping the harvest of her many years' striving to hone her craft. 'The Way They Danced at Zalango' is an utterly chilling depiction of the mass suicide of the Greek women of Soulis fleeing in the face of a Turkish army in 1803. 'Friar Mendel's Children' is equally masterful and archly sexy. Everywhere great lines are to be found: the sort of stuff that sets a poetry collection ringing in the memory. I sensed a new found confidence bordering upon chutzpah (surely a Klein family word) that allows her to leap into poems with some cracking first lines like:

 

 

         A woman who's painting her toenails red in April
         is not resigned to the moment;
         she's thinking ahead
         to summer
         ('Red Toenails in April')

 

 

 

or 'My dead mother is writing to your dead mother' from the earlier 'In Black and White'. The long poem 'Below the Bancal' is a genuine tour de force sketching out, as it does, the tenuous immortalities of poor people momentarily captured on film shortly before occupational tragedy strikes to see off another peasant Icarus. And the book's closing sequence elegantly models how a poet can gracefully face the sense of looming mortality that accompanies ageing and those significant moments in the body's inexorable decline from the youth portrayed so vividly in the earlier poems. This is no insignificant gift for a book of poetry to bestow. There is, then, a valedictory air to this collection which serves it well, thanks mainly to the poet's great skill, but which troubles the reader with the uneasy notion that a poet at the height of her powers is saying goodbye at some level. This would be a huge shame. In the words of the song, then, Wendy: don't go, stick around and laugh a while, yeah?

To Read Brian Docherty's Review in London Grip click here

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