Pine Island, apparently inspired by a writing exercise, is described as ‘a correspondence, or possibly a litany’ and comprises an intermittent series of letters, written, but never sent, to ‘a person who does or does not exist’. All the letters begin with a date and place and are addressed to ‘Dearest’. The book itself is inscribed ‘for you dearest’.
A tantalising and totally enthralling one-way correspondence. The effect is hypnotic as the reader touches the fringes of the changing seasons and moods. This narrator has a need to write, to let ‘secrets’ slip out, to write into the void. ‘The instinct to confide these hurts is overwhelming,’ she says, compelled to confess her ‘frail hopes and fears.’
Memories, with their deceptions and yearnings, form the basis of the letter/poems. ‘What moments should I hold on to?’ she asks, ‘I am standing in a bowl of light, surrounded by the chorus of birds and the sense of distance. You would not hear me calling from here and sometimes I don’t know what I would say if you could.’
There is a motif of birds in Pine Island. Thoughts and words are described as ‘winged’, they ‘flutter but do not move…It is a kind of seeking, this letter I write each day, trying to piece ideas together, which won’t be held.’
A thread of narrative runs through these letters – elusive and enigmatic references to the writer’s outer life – complexities involving her mother, her sister, her children. I found the passages that talk about her troubled eldest son quite painful to read, the way he is described as ‘spinning through the rooms of the house. Seeking something he could destroy … Once I would have held him and waited for the anger to subside. Gingerbread man, still running, even when gripped in the jaws of the fox… He cannot bear my touch, flinches at my approach.’ Heartbreaking, but the narrator is not asking for pity.
Then there are the operations the fear of cutting, the dread of knives, mastectomies undergone by both the narrator and her sister. Throughout, there is blood and ‘the precision of fear pinning you into place’, the ‘fear of cutting, the dread of knives.’
But it is the narrator’s inner life that is so skilfully depicted by Lucy Sheerman in Pine Island and which enhances the sensation of mystery and unreality. ‘All this story will be a dream soon,’ says the narrator, ‘and you, dear reader, a fellow sleeper.’ There is silence at the heart of the book which allows the writer to make ‘a border all around me but it is filled with gaps. Light and sound seep through.’ And there are shadows too, but ‘so slight as to be imperceptible… I am clinging to the walls of this house.’
Silence, shadows, fear – it is all an alternative to thinking about mortality which ‘weaves around your ankles like an affectionate cat. It’s even there in the sound of the birds.’
These birds, as already mentioned, become a symbol, a recurring motif. Especially so are the wild geese which the narrator sees with an artist friend at Kettle’s Yard – a sight that haunts them like an augury of ‘painful, disorienting hope.’
Here are some of the many mentions of geese in Pine Island:
‘Now each time I hear the sound of geese I take it as a kind of sign.’
‘Ungainly geese cross the Backs … It’s a bitter day, snapping from sunshine back to shade; curls of cold seep into sleeves and collar.’
‘I hear a solitary goose on the river, lost.’
‘Geese on the wing, it is winter breaking apart.’
‘I never imagined I would be gripped by a sense of horror at the augury of birds. It’s not as if the knowledge would have changed what followed, the playing out of a story you belong to, like a nightmare you wait to wake from …There’s a severing that must happen’.
Pine Island is mesmerising. No review can do it justice. Lucy Sheerman is, without doubt, a writer who knows her craft. She compares it to catching rabbits: ‘I only have to wait long enough and I can lure language into an open sack.’
Mandy Pannett 4th February 2024
