Review: Uncertain Days

Gill McEvoy

32pp, Happenstance Press (2006)

By Tom Jenks

Curious things, publishers’ blurbs.  I have a collection on my shelf whose dust jacket earnestly enjoins me to savour the rhythmic tact of the poems contained therein. What does a tactless rhythm sound like? A Bavarian oompah band striking up outside your window at six o’ clock on a Sunday morning, perhaps? Your guess is as good as mine. The cover of my selected poems of Gerald Manley Hopkins goes on so much about his conversion to Roman Catholicism that I almost feel as if I should have a string of rosary beads and some incense to hand before even daring to try and read it. Often, the best that can be said of a blurb is that says nothing. Uncertain Days, the debut chapbook by Gill McEvoy, is, however, rather different. The cover informs us that the writer, as a young mother, faced the disabling illness and eventual death of her husband, followed by her own struggle with cancer which doctors told her she would not survive. As a statement of what the reader can expect, it pulls no punches.  We are not in for an easy ride.

Many of the manuscripts we receive here at Parameter deal with the darker side of life: death, disease, heartbreak, despair. Nothing wrong with that, you might say, and I would agree. What I would say, however, is that there has to be something more going on for a poem to work. It is not enough to have simply experienced something. The writer must, first and foremost, be a writer, someone who loves and understands the art and craft of writing above all. Writing as therapy, whatever benefits it may afford the writer, is ultimately unrewarding for the reader. The only writing worth having is writing as writing.  Auden said as much, albeit far more eloquently.

Gill McEvoy is most certainly a writer and a very good one at that. Uncertain Days is a strong collection. The tone throughout is clear eyed and controlled. McEvoy eschews philosophising, grand statements and broad brush strokes, choosing instead to get in close and work with the details. McEvoy collects tiny incidents, cherishes and polishes them and then, like a mosaic artist, places each one perfectly to build up a bigger picture. Sunday Lunch is a case in point where the narrator describes cooking

“…the tender beef, the Yorkshire puddings big as puffballs,

the gravy rich with meat juice, roast potatoes,

lightly buttered beans and cabbage”

knowing full well that the person she is cooking for will not want them. In Bread, the dough the poets kneads is wilful and recalcitrant. It closes with the poet finding new strength, the will to mould the dough as she sees fit:

           “I punch it down. It is mine to shape.”

Food recurs throughout the collection. As well as Sunday roast and loaves of bread, we have rabbits, ten of them, dead, presented as a gift. The narrator skins them and then surveys them:

“The limp, moist bodies

lay as innocent and pink as babies after baths.

I could have hugged them up in big warm towels

and sung to them. I knew I’d never eat them.”

We have oranges and apples in the poem of the same name:

“Never put them in a bowl together.

They will breathe each other all night.”

and apples again in the beautiful For Finbar:

“The stars are like apples

crowding the tree…

...bright apples

always out of reach.”

McEvoy’s writing is English in the best sense of the word. It does not aim for the psychotropic pyrotechnics of a Plath or Sexton, but a more private, quieter alchemy. It proceeds via  the particular, the local and the specific and creates a space in which we can arrive at our own conclusions, form our own connections. It is a subtle and deceptively difficult approach.

Her writing is light and delicate, like the feathers that drift through The Plucking Shed and Locked Away and the single feather than adorns the cover, perfectly poised and exquisitely rendered. A single breath might blow it away. Let us all hold our breath and read Gill McEvoy.