A Perfect Mirror

Pavilion Poetry

by Sarah Corbett

Walking, getting lost, and finding that home is half way between refuge and a place to look out from at the unsettling and unsettled world, are the dominant themes in Sarah Corbett's fifth collection. Written from an intimate knowledge of the countryside of the Calder Valley, many of these poems respond to a landscape as beautiful as it is disquieting, troubled by a warming climate and by violence and loss both public and private. A central sequence - part found poem, part assemblage - draws on the Grasmere Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, poems that question the nature of the visionary, the in-between worlds that this poet claims as her territory; here nature is held up as a mirror where we might see ourselves and our actions reflected. Over all haunts the presence-in-absence of Sylvia Plath, whose burial place the author can see from her bedroom window. Throughout, interior lights - a train on a dark morning, a sudden snowfall, moonlight and starlight, sun on lake water, the
love between a parent and child - attempt to balance the darkness.

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Paperback

First published March 14, 2018

Reviews

[Jenna · Rating 4 out of 5]

This chapbook -- 50ish pages of poetry by a mid-career British poet -- is very beautiful, there are so many lovely phrases I itched to underline as I was reading it: "Eyes [like] bruised pods," "The lamb replete and perfect in its birth sac," "His hand a fat-knuckled mammal / jumping in his trouser pocket," "The moon...ringed with clouds like bruises" (I think the word bruise or some variant of it appears three times in 50 pages). Describing a windy day, Corbett writes: "Anoraks ballooned, my husband / pregnant, a precarious seahorse / on the hired bicycle" -- could there be a more sparkling sentence? There is much of the pastoral here, nostalgic reminiscences about a girlhood in picturesque country villages, etc., although disruptive forces (climate change, Brexit, violence in Syria) are depicted lurking ominously just at the edges of the field of view.

The specter of Sylvia Plath looms heavily over this entire collection, a handful of whose poems are explicitly about Plath: this is, of course, a risky move, since alluding to such an untouchable luminary invites the reader to draw comparisons that could potentially be unflattering to a lesser poet than Corbett. Impressively, though, Corbett manages to hold her own: as if Plath's influence draws out the best in her, she's filled the poem "Sylvia Plath's House" with gorgeous phrases like "Narcissi come petal-fisted, / snub-nosed from the clay" and "The moon / roll[s] like a pill on the cloud's tongue." Other poems name Dorothy Wordsworth, Emily Bronte, Jane Austen, and John Clare as influences, but, given the steely clarity of these poems' unflinching commentary on young dead or injured female bodies ("Swallow Hole," "The Trap"), the autopsy poems of physician-poet Gottfried Benn could just as well have been a major influence. And indeed, quite a few of the poems here are situated in the world of doctors and hospitals, including the one I found most powerful, one of the three prose poems between these covers titled "Praise Song," which testifies to the humaneness/humanity of the "junior doctor...pale, sweating, swaying foot to foot at the tale-end of a double shift [the text says tale, but perhaps it means to say tail?]" who shares an intimate moment with the speaker as, having been delivered of the "fourteen week fetus that was never going to, was never meant to make it," she begs to be "spared...the D and C procedure that recalled that other time, that other loss, the one I had chosen."

[Juliano · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Each morning / a question that never gets answered.” Sarah Corbett’s A Perfect Mirror is deeply submerged in the natural world, its lights and its surfaces for looking, out and back inwards, transparent and reflective. “It is always almost spring and you are / watching, watching, your face / at the window a mask, the mouths / of the bee-houses struck dumb.” “After dark we walked hand / in hand under constellations”. Poems in this collection turn up roadkill, paths, gardens, winter, miscarriage; the influence and works of Marvell, Blake, Rilke; the presence of ‘Sylvia Plath’s House’. There are pieces titled ‘Praise Song’, including one for a junior doctor, one in memory of Jo Cox, one for summer. The poem ‘Sixteen Acres’ ends on “clouds / beasts dispersing across a field / or souls queuing to enter heaven”; ‘The Frozen River’ declares itself: “This is not an environmental poem, this / is nothing more than a dream poem”. ‘Sestina for Rain’ follows rain into dreams, and the final two stanzas of ‘Cycling the Island’ are a whirlwind of emotion steeped in loss and fear, in darkness. The formally playful and diverse titular poem sequence at the book’s centre draws heavily on Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journals, its “perpetual song”; and later ‘Relics’ is concerned with the objects of women writers: Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, Dorothy Wordsworth, Sylvia Plath.