Tag Archives: Gill McEvoy

The collection begins with a poem called ‘Dairy-Room in the Old Farmhouse’ – an evocative title. However, although the narrator is sampling a ‘slick of yellow cream’ there is little sweetness here. The opening lines are chilling, for the narrator feels ‘pinioned’ by silence ‘as if snakes had risen from its shelves/to turn you into stone’. The next poem ‘Catching the Turkey-Pluckers Bus’, conveys weariness, drudgery and an overhanging sense of death for there are ‘stains of blood’ and feathers trapped in the folds of the workers’ overalls. In the plucking shed itself the routine ‘goes on’ in ‘a flour/of feather and dust’ and the first of several ghosts in this collection rise up soundlessly – ‘the white plumed creatures/that we knew as geese.’

‘In the Butcher’s Shop’ gives us graphic descriptions of a place where dripping blood is like the rain that ‘plops’ against the window glass and bacon is ‘pink as skin’. An image that will stay with me is the ‘smell of sawn bone’ which, like gravel, sticks in the narrator’s throat. Even more shockingly explicit is this how-to instruction in ‘Skinning Rabbits’:

            The steps exact. First, cut off the feet,

            make an incision in the belly,

            peel back the skin – like stripping a tangerine –

            slip out the hind legs,

            ease it over the buttocks,

            up the spine, around the head,

            down the front legs.

            Discard.

            Then gut and clean.

A brutal but practical method. But what illuminates this poem is the tenderness and poignancy in the lines that follow as the skinned 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.

Precise, detailed, clear-eyed writing about a way of life for those who farm the land, such as the one  who can show affection for thirteen years to a pig and her ‘prolific litters’ and still have the necessary detachment, when she has outlived her usefulness, to turn her into bacon and ham, albeit remembering the pleasure of feeling her ‘bristly back’ that he loved to stroke and scratch. (‘Pig’).

I find these eight poems in the earliest part of the collection particularly strong and memorable for their mixture of brutality and compassion. But the next group, which considers the author’s family members with their foibles and idiosyncrasies, is also compelling. My favourite, although it is quite painful to read, is ‘Sunday Lunch’ where the woman in the narrative spends ‘all morning, from the very early hours,’ cooking a delicious lunch for her husband only to have it spurned and her efforts cursed because his inattention to time has caused the food to spoil. ‘In the Garden I Search for You’, a poem that is beautiful in its nostalgia, brings us another ghost, that of the mother ‘pale as the ghost swift moths that dip and rise/rise and dip/over the evening-primrose bed’. 

It is hard to select poems for comment out of Gill McEvoy’s Selected Poems. There is such choice. Two that stand out particularly, for me, are ‘Jade Plant’ and ‘Football, Kuala Lumpur’. Both share the motif of rain but in contrasting ways. In the former poem there is drought, the ‘earth is parched and shrinking’ and a strict hosepipe ban is in place in Britain. The only living thing that is flourishing is a jade plant on a windowsill above the sink. ‘Every leaf’, says the narrator, ‘a reservoir of hoarded wealth’. In Kuala Lumpur the scene is contrasting for ‘Rain loves this place, loves the way/ the open hands of city trees receive it.’ A thousand frogs and barefoot boys with footballs rejoice in ‘floods of water, /spray and steam flying’ and there is laughter from the children and ‘chortling’ from the frogs ‘that leap and spring/in their own games/on every pavement’s edge.’

I deliberately used the word ‘rejoice’ to describe the mood of this poem and although there is sadness and bloodshed throughout the collection and death is ever present, I feel the essence of the book is one of joy, or at least of wonder. A Selected Poems is a special achievement – a distillation of the author’s choice of their most significant poems. I am very glad to read and share these. 

Mandy Pannett 12^th February 2024