Guillemot Press, the publisher of Uneasy Pieces, describes the work as ‘a score composed in uncanny spaces and around silence.’ I find this a perfect description of the way the pieces are orchestrated with subtle rhythms, recurring motifs and a sense of the implicit and understated conveyed in fragments, pauses and a sense of the half remembered.
The idea of a musical score is enhanced by the structure. There is a Prelude and a Coda, twelve numbered and named pieces of different lengths, and several passages which are set out with the typographical symbol denoting a paragraph but which I prefer to interpret as intervals. Some of the pieces suggest a thematic sequence, others appear non-consecutive, linear only in layout.
The poems in Uneasy Pieces are written in the form of prose. There are small, incomplete narratives within each one – vignettes, snapshots, moments caught and held in time. What I find most compelling about the collection is the strangeness of it all – a pervading atmosphere of silence, shadows and the unknown. The Prelude sets the tone with its title ‘Somnus’ – the personification of Sleep, brother of Death and the son of Night. We are in the darkness of the Underworld where the sun can never enter. Somnus, says Ovid, had 1000 sons, the Somnia – shapes who appear in dreams mimicking many forms, human, beastlike or inanimate. Later in the collection the sons of Somnus reappear briefly, mentioned as a possible ‘shorthand for multitudes’ which ‘proliferate as meanings do in dreams.’
An uncanny, scary atmosphere. But what I think is the most mysterious element in the poems is the passage about ‘Blots’ which seem to be ‘secret signs’ inscribed by the pen, hints and suggestions open, like dreams, to countless interpretations. Then there is the concept of ‘Mise en abyme’ – an infinitely recurring sequence of mirroring. In ‘Uneasy Pieces’, the narrator says, there are ‘letters within letters with each of my messages to you folded inside the previous one until the words get so small it would be better to say nothing at all.’
Uneasy Pieces is a melodious, lyrical collection of poems, inspiring in their craft and cadences. One example that appeals to me concerns ‘the artisan of light’ whose role is ‘to bluff the passing hours, to cast doubt upon edges … to diffuse truth … the room grows dustier when dust cannot be seen, the room grows older as shadows sag into corners, for what is a shadow if not the dirt left to us as light thins and what is filth but the torn and cast-off skin of things.’
Juxtapositions are frequently unexpected and startling. In the middle of a list of Christmas images – mulled wine and chandeliers, snow angels and mistletoe – we are suddenly presented with hares that ‘hang upside down from hooks in the butcher’s. Snowfall, which ‘sometimes looks purple, yellow, blue like the bruise upon the arm you cannot move’, reveals ‘the pale architecture of Liege’ when it’s seen ‘through dirty windows at dawn.’ The third poem ‘Michel’ concerns someone whose name ‘means red heart in another language’. This same Michel, we are told, has had ‘someone else’s heart inside him for eleven years.’
I love the whole collection of Uneasy Pieces with each individual poem perfectly crafted like a cameo. They belong together, each ‘movement’ enhancing the whole, but if I had to choose one piece as most memorable, I would select ‘Unorthodox’, the sixth poem in the sequence, for its tender depiction of gradual loss of memory. An earlier reference to two volumes of the Oxford Shorter Dictionary that the protagonist would stand on and ‘solve any problem’ that life presented, becomes extra poignant when, at the end of the poem, everything is packed away in boxes and given away as no longer useful or wanted. Included are ‘both volumes of the Shorter English’.
Uneasy Pieces by Nancy Campbell is beautifully produced by Guillemot Press. A small book but one to treasure.
Mandy Pannett 3rd December 2023
