Jacob Silkstone" />
  • ABOUT
  • PRINT
  • PRAISE
  • SUBSCRIBE
  • OPENINGS
  • SUBMISSIONS
  • CONTACT
The Missing Slate - For the discerning reader
  • HOME
  • Magazine
  • In This Issue
  • Literature
    • Billy Luck
      Billy Luck
    • To the Depths
      To the Depths
    • Dearly Departed
      Dearly Departed
    • Fiction
    • Poetry
  • Arts AND Culture
    • Tramontane
      Tramontane
    • Blade Runner 2049
      Blade Runner 2049
    • Loving Vincent
      Loving Vincent
    • The Critics
      • FILM
      • BOOKS
      • TELEVISION
    • SPOTLIGHT
    • SPECIAL FEATURES
  • ESSAYS
    • A SHEvolution is Coming in Saudi Arabia
      A SHEvolution is Coming in Saudi Arabia
    • Paxi: A New Business Empowering Women in Pakistan
      Paxi: A New Business Empowering Women in Pakistan
    • Nature and Self
      Nature and Self
    • ARTICLES
    • COMMENTARY
    • Narrative Nonfiction
  • CONTESTS
    • Pushcart Prize 2017 Nominations
      Pushcart Prize 2017 Nominations
    • Pushcart Prize 2016 Nominations
      Pushcart Prize 2016 Nominations
    • Pushcart Prize 2015 Nominations
      Pushcart Prize 2015 Nominations
    • PUSHCART 2013
    • PUSHCART 2014
Alone in Babel, Arts & CultureMay 4, 2015

Kissing Angles

 Cover image © Dead Ink Books

Cover image © Dead Ink Books

Reviewed by Jacob Silkstone

—Sarah Fletcher, Kissing Angles (Dead Ink Books, 2015)

Early in Donna Tartt’s ‘The Goldfinch’, Theo and his mother shelter from the New York rain in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Theo is ushered away from the ‘Art One-oh-one stuff’, towards ‘a particularly haunting still life’ by Adriaen Coorte. “Whenever you see flies or insects in a still life—a wilted petal, a black spot on the apple—,” explains Theo’s mother, “the painter is giving you a secret message. He’s telling you that living things don’t last—it’s all temporary. Death in life…. Maybe you don’t see it at first with all the beauty and bloom, the little speck of rot. But if you look closer—there it is.”

Sarah Fletcher has discussed her admiration for these ‘vanitas paintings by the Dutch masters’, and her first pamphlet, ‘Kissing Angles’, is haunted by the wilted petals amidst the beauty and bloom. At the centre of the pamphlet, a poem called ‘The Liebling’ narrates the story of a young couple: ‘The night we met, he took me dancing/ I was a page on fire, fully lit… and kissed him in the spotlight.’

The woman narrating the poem is quickly revealed to be Eva Braun; her dance partner is, of course, Hitler. She leaves the dancefloor with her ‘ballerina shoes’ soaked in her own blood:

…when I lifted my feet from
my slippers, they were bloodied: raw
as fresh-skinned fish from all my twirling
as we slid across the armoured floor.

This interest in reshaping and reclaiming narratives — finding voices for women who have been silenced by history — owes a little to Carol Ann Duffy: ‘The Matador’ and ‘Kraut Girl’ wouldn’t be out of a place in a darker rewrite of ‘The World’s Wife’, while ‘the thrashing, the feeling/ of being below the surface, the grabbing’ in ‘Lads’ recalls ‘Little Red Cap’ clinging until dawn to the wolf’s ‘thrashing fur’.

Occupying the space behind the lines more prominently, the familiar compound ghost of Plath and Hughes makes its presence felt in scattered images (in the drunken imagination of the matador, the wet clothes on the washing line become crows — a transformation which works for the ear as well as the eye), and in the pamphlet’s juxtaposition of beauty and violence.

The palette of these poems is dominated by reds and blacks (recalling, again, those vanitas paintings): the ‘widow-black linen’ to which the matador confesses his fear of death; the ‘Bible-black conviction’ (a hyphenated adjective on loan from Dylan Thomas) of the kiss in the final line of ‘The Judgement’; the ‘flapper-black’ worn by the speaker in the collection’s opening poem, ‘Visions of My Lover Dressed in Drag’; then the red follicles rising ‘like a fresh love bite’ after Kraut Girl’s head is forcibly shaved; Eva Braun’s red fur coat (and blood-soaked ballerina shoes); the apron, ‘white and red,/ like a roadkilled dove’ in ‘The Belle of New Orleans’.

‘Kissing Angles’ drips with blood and dark water — many of the poems have a bold and unsettlingly raw sensuality. ‘Lads’ presents a skilfully-sketched caricature of public schooled rugger-and-rowing ‘boys named Ollie… left to rehearse/ their deaths-by-water nightly/ with a girl they will call Easy’. In ‘Beach Combing’, ‘endless kissing feels like treading water’, and in ‘The Wrestler and the Sailor’s Daughter’, the wrestler ‘arches on her like a wave/ and, like a wave, above her, breaks.’

‘Kissing Angles’ drips with blood and dark water — many of the poems have a bold and unsettlingly raw sensuality.
In the hands of most other poets, some of this imagery would risk seeming overwrought or portentous, but Sarah Fletcher shows a sureness of touch and timing in alternating the pamphlet’s light and dark sides: it’s interesting to note that the title phrase comes from the poem that’s perhaps least characteristic of the collection as a whole, ‘Woman, 30, Seeks Orlando Bloom’ (the speaker wants Orlando to teach her, ‘please… which kissing angles/ are best for photos’).

Rather like a Shakespearian soliloquy, ‘… Orlando Bloom’ signals its moment of resolution with a jauntily-turned couplet:

…you must admit: we fit.
Orlando Bloom, come quick.

(It seems fair to suggest that similarities between Shakespeare’s soliloquies and ‘Woman, 30, Seeks Orlando Bloom’ begin and end there.)

A brief glance at the final lines of ‘…Orlando Bloom’ and the preceding poem, ‘A Villanelle with Two Endings’, should highlight both Fletcher’s versatility and the success of the light/dark tonal contrast in ‘Kissing Angles’.

‘A Villanelle with Two Endings’ works to undermine the children’s book simplicity of its own full rhymes (‘sing/ring/bring/spring’) and deliberate clichés (‘The sky is always blue’), and the dramatic darkening in tone between the light of the first line, ‘You hold my hand, and hold our child’s too’, and the gloom of the last, ‘The bleeding will subside. I leave the room’ is carefully controlled. The central rhymes of each stanza follow a steadily descending path from pleasure to pain: ‘We married in the spring… And in our garden, birds will always sing’, in the first two stanzas, turn into a ‘sting’ of pain in the fifth and ‘I snap like a string’ in the fifth and sixth.

Perhaps another poet would have lingered on pleasure a little longer — there’s a faint suggestion that pain is to be preferred to happiness as a subject for poetry — but the double villanelle is successfully complemented by the dark wit of ‘…Orlando Bloom’:

And I just know your world is better
than my own: where my husband leaves stickers
in the dinner’s aubergines and I am left
to peel the barcodes off with my front teeth…

Handling both tone and form so deftly so requires a great deal of talent, and — as Robert Peake points out in a recent piece for the Huffington Post —  Sarah Fletcher is that favourite cliché of the reviewer: ‘one to watch’. But one to watch with concentrated attention to what seem at first to be minor details: like those vanitas still lifes, ‘Kissing Angles’ holds most for those who look longest.

Tags

book reviewsjacob silkstoneSarah Fletcher

Share on

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Pinterest
  • Google +
  • LinkedIn
  • Email
Previous articleWhatever Happened to Verse Drama?
Next articleKamau: A tribute from St. Lucia

You may also like

Pacific Islander Climate Change Poetry

Spotlight Artist: Scheherezade Junejo

Nobody Killed Her

Ad

In the Magazine

A Word from the Editor

Don’t cry like a girl. Be a (wo)man.

Why holding up the women in our lives can help build a nation, in place of tearing it down.

Literature

This House is an African House

"This house is an African house./ This your body is an African woman’s body..." By Kadija Sesay.

Literature

Shoots

"Sapling legs bend smoothly, power foot in place,/ her back, parallel to solid ground,/ makes her torso a table of support..." By Kadija Sesay.

Literature

A Dry Season Doctor in West Africa

"She presses her toes together. I will never marry, she says. Jamais dans cette vie! Where can I find a man like you?" By...

In the Issue

Property of a Sorceress

"She died under mango trees, under kola nut/ and avocado trees, her nose pressed to their roots,/ her hands buried in dead leaves, her...

Literature

What Took Us to War

"What took us to war has again begun,/ and what took us to war/ has opened its wide mouth/ again to confuse us." By...

Literature

Sometimes, I Close My Eyes

"sometimes, this is the way of the world,/ the simple, ordinary world, where things are/ sometimes too ordinary to matter. Sometimes,/ I close my...

Literature

Quarter to War

"The footfalls fading from the streets/ The trees departing from the avenues/ The sweat evaporating from the skin..." By Jumoke Verissimo.

Literature

Transgendered

"Lagos is a chronicle of liquid geographies/ Swimming on every tongue..." By Jumoke Verissimo.

Fiction

Sketches of my Mother

"The mother of my memories was elegant. She would not step out of the house without her trademark red lipstick and perfect hair. She...

Fiction

The Way of Meat

"Every day—any day—any one of us could be picked out for any reason, and we would be... We’d part like hair, pushing into the...

Fiction

Between Two Worlds

"Ursula spotted the three black students immediately. Everyone did. They could not be missed because they kept to themselves and apart from the rest...."...

Essays

Talking Gender

"In fact it is often through the uninformed use of such words that language becomes a tool in perpetuating sexism and violence against women...

Essays

Unmasking Female Circumcision

"Though the origins of the practice are unknown, many medical historians believe that FGM dates back to at least 2,000 years." Gimel Samera looks...

Essays

Not Just A Phase

"...in the workplace, a person can practically be forced out of their job by discrimination, taking numerous days off for fear of their physical...

Essays

The Birth of Bigotry

"The psychology of prejudice demands that we are each our own moral police". Maria Amir on the roots of bigotry and intolerance.

Fiction

The Score

"The person on the floor was unmistakeably dead. It looked like a woman; she couldn’t be sure yet..." By Hawa Jande Golakai.

More Stories

Skeletons with Music

“Then you married the bloke from Brown, severed ties, didn’t invite me to your wedding—afraid I’d stick my hand up your bodice…” Weekend Poem, by Eleanor Levine.

Back to top
One last love letter...

April 24, 2021

It has taken us some time and patience to come to this decision. TMS would not have seen the success that it did without our readers and the tireless team that ran the magazine for the better part of eight years.

But… all good things must come to an end, especially when we look at the ever-expanding art and literary landscape in Pakistan, the country of the magazine’s birth.

We are amazed and proud of what the next generation of creators are working with, the themes they are featuring, and their inclusivity in the diversity of voices they are publishing. When TMS began, this was the world we envisioned…

Though the magazine has closed and our submissions shuttered, this website will remain open for the foreseeable future as an archive of the great work we published and the astounding collection of diverse voices we were privileged to feature.

If, however, someone is interested in picking up the baton, please email Maryam Piracha, the editor, at maryamp@themissingslate.com.

Farewell, fam! It’s been quite a ride.

Read previous post:
Author of the Month: Zoltán Böszörményi

"I could not give a clear resolution. I did not intend to do so. I did not consider myself a...

Close