MIDSUMMER
my boyfriend calls me a clock-watching fuck
what can I say, I learn to love my jailers
he comes over, we eat: fries, chicken, paratha
drink cokes, too tired to mark the day
besides living through it. he leaves around ten
I go to the window, yes
everything is alive again
I could read by natural light
until midnight, if I wanted –
a dog barks
and it sounds like a person, a person calls out hei
and it sounds like a friend of mine,
someone plays music like Abba but in Finnish
sounds like all of their friends are enjoying it with them
a sly breeze creaks the door
recalls the pain in my ankle
life’s symptom
then a pale streak of cloud
that resembles my favourite grandparent drifts by
then a biplane trailing a banner which states:
nothing is certain except this!
someone in my building is cooking
windows open, sugar wafts upwards
I inhale
perhaps pancakes, waffles or French toast
perhaps something delicious and unknown to me
Iona Carmine Roisin
What struck me about this poem on my initial encounter was a kind of first-draft freshness, a sense that the poet is catching the moment as it happens. There is an immediacy and intimacy to the voice of the poem which made me feel I was in the presence of someone talking directly to me.
If that were the end of its appeal, however, I wouldn’t have kept going back to the poem to re-read it, or each time I did, found myself moved by a last line not accidentally poignant. It reminded me of the times I’ve brought a poem like this to a class to look at together, only to have it dismissed as ‘chopped up prose’ or ‘just a notebook entry’. So I wanted to take a closer look at how this poem is working to see if closer scrutiny bore out my instinct that the poem, while informal, is more skilful than it might first appear.
For starters there is the title ‘Midsummer’ with its heightened sense of significance suggestive of ancient ritual, magic even. This is immediately undercut by the boyfriend’s casual insult in the first line that the narrator is ‘a clock-watching fuck’. This jolts us out of any mystical mood the title might have put us in. This is followed by the word ‘jailers’ compounding the sense in the first two stanzas of a depressed existence – the list of the food they consume together is listless – a prosaic, no-frills repast. No celebration of the solstice here. The couple are tired, not experiencing the day but merely ‘living through it.’
In the third stanza, the form shifts with the indented lines, and so too does the mood. Where there were ‘jailers’ there is now a window, and significantly a ‘yes’ at the end of the first line. This shift to a more positive view continues in the following lines where possibilities open up. Another list is presented in the fourth stanza, but how different this one is – instead of the single word flatness of ‘fries, chicken, paratha…cokes’ this list is generative and generous. Three similes follow in quick succession as one sound leads to another, triggering associations and memories. The opening of the mind and the mood is mirrored by the creative opening of the language.
The good times don’t last long – in stanza six the mood shifts again with a reminder of the reality of pain which is described as ‘life’s symptom’. A window might let the world in but a door can also allow a cold wind to cut through. As with the third and fourth stanzas, the use of indentation helps to signal the shift in tone.
However, this restless poem then changes tack again when the positive reasserts itself – there’s the lovely image of a cloud evoking the comforting presence of a ‘favourite grandparent’ and then that bi-plane trailing a message which seems sent from another existence; ‘nothing is certain except this’. I confess this is the one moment which took me slightly outside the world of the poem as I wondered whether any bi-plane has ever been the bearer of such a philosophical message but on balance I go with it, its unlikeliness perhaps a deliberate playfulness on the poet’s part.
In any case I’m soon swept up in the last and loveliest list of the poem when the open window brings in the smell of sweetness, very different from the meal of the first few lines. We’re now in the realm of the possible, the speculative – ‘perhaps’, ‘perhaps’. When the last line lands, its lyricism feels earned to me. It affirms the poem’s sense of possibility that, despite the best efforts of casually abusive partners and dodgy ankles, life can offer things that are ‘delicious and unknown’. It is a bittersweet ending to a bittersweet poem poised between the dark and the light in life. The poet’s use of form, imagery and light control of material has performed a similarly delicate balance throughout – which is not as easy as it looks.
Esther Morgan
IONA CARMINE ROISIN is a British visual artist and poet based in Helsinki.Video works have been screened at festivals internationally and poems have been published in Propel Magazine, Fourteen Poems, Tuli&Savu, Stone of Madness, Iona is a member of the Trans publishing collective Almanac Press and a co-founder of Trans Library Helsinki.
