The Room Between Us

by Denise Saul

In her debut collection, Denise Saul explores family and identity as she tells the story of a mother’s illness and subsequent aphasia, and a daughter's ongoing role as carer. At the heart of their relationship is an awareness of the inadequacies of language to name painful experiences as together they start to know the world afresh.

Deeply affecting, the book finds a space for both the extraordinary and the ordinary, balancing all that is between. Such betweenness creates a space to explore wider dynamics of power, and the epiphanies and aftershocks of ongoing loss.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction

64 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2022

Reviews

[Tutankhamun18 · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed these 42 pages of poems about being a woman, being a carer, loss, memory loss, disability, vision, sight and caring for an elderly relative. The poems work very well as a collection and one feels like one is getting an almost memoir - very little information is revealed, yet by the end of the book one has the sense of having gained an impression of what the experience was like. It is a memoir of the essence of watching over an elderly relative. Some poems do not fit this theme so clearly and seem somewhat added in for flavour, but this adds to the reading experience.

My four favourites and the most memorable to me poems were: One, The Bride Stripped Bare, Hemianopia and Retrograde.

Highlight sections:

ONE - a reimagining of Lucy, the homo australopithecus afarensis and how she was as a woman and the stories that are held in bones and narratives and the importance of keeping this sacred.

„Step back now and look again at the femur.
Turn the bone upright and it is a glyph, a perfect representation of the number one.
The research team names her part-skeleton
Australopithecus afarensis.
More shovels arrive in the morning.“

THE BRIDE STRIPPED BARE - a fun yet poigant poem about men and the fear and repulsion that they inspire in women yet at the same time drawing women in by comparing them to spiders.

Probably my favourite
„I am afraid of spiders and their desiring soul.
The arachnid blossoms, opens out, blooms whenever its black body spins another web.
This mandala of silk is the undertaker.
Spiders run across the door.
One end of gossamer stretches, drawn not from them but from their not-them.
The bedroom smells of dampness in corners.
Yet, this is the way I notice men:
priest, gendarme, warden, night watchman.“

HEMIANOPIA - very powerful exploration of the affliction/condition of hemianopia but also a poignant mirror to how we perceive reality and make sense of what is real and what is fiction and the extent to which this matters and when this is pathologised.

RETROGRADE - an examination of loss of agency, loss of memory and the ultimate loss of life that comes with watching someone age/die. It is a poem about mourning. It alludes to the beauty of moments, the importance of connection and relationships , the meaningless of life, loss, mourning, reflection and fragile beauty.

„There have been other strange nights, none as dim, when I stood in the rain to watch earthworms break up soil, knowing the earth makes us small.
Over here mercury seemed to move away from us in the beginning, but in truth, it never moved at all.“

[Liv · Rating 3 out of 5]

A poignant and reflective collection that touches on Saul's struggle as a carer for her mother following a stroke and the loss of the relationship and communication.

[Juliano · Rating 5 out of 5]

“A person in a room is affected by the colour of the walls. // The yellowness we see in the garden is not a daffodil.” In Denise Saul’s poetry collection The Room Between Us, the relation of one person to another is mediated by space, as the title perfectly suggests. The opening, titular poem itself opens with the declaration “There you are”, and sets the scene for much of the rest of the collection. The picture it paints is a distinctly domestic one — confined as it is to “a darkened room” and its floor — and a feminine one too, in its soft edges, its “whisper”, its care. The final line precipitates the collection, “now tell me what happened before the fall” alluding to the decline of the addressee, to the search for both logic and story as a means of reverse-engineering the present: as David Byrne asks, “how did I get here?” There is throughout Saul’s work an inversion of domesticity, womanhood in solitude, that mirrors the process by which a daughter comes to be her mother’s carer. “They phoned each other regularly to chat about shoes and hats and loneliness.” Saul frequently returns to the looseness of our personal reality under such intense conditions as the grief over an ongoing loss. “An illusion shows the world as it really is.” “What you leave out is everything. You look away and close your eyes. // This happened and this happened and then this.” Both form and language become a vital means of processing a loved one’s aphasia, poetry incapable of capture or cure, structures unable to hold: “When I look out of the window, / there is the light I cannot keep. / In a house like this, I repeat the names / of those I serve”.

[Hannah Thuraisingam Robbins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tender, episodic, raindrop-like poems that give you a glimpse of grief, love, fatigue, frustration, and sorrow. I re-read The Bride Stripped Bare about five times.

[Charlotte Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

*3.5