Tag Archives: Sylvia Plath

In this vibrant debut pamphlet, Ellora Sutton excavates grief to discover the beautiful, the ugly, the playful and the startling. One could argue that mourning is much-explored terrain in poetry, covered by poets throughout the ages, from Shakespeare to Emily Berry in her acclaimed 2017 collection Stranger, Baby yet Sutton’s pamphlet brings new truths about grief and its countless ‘shades’ to the table.

Sutton’s imagery is bold and striking. The pamphlet opens with the visceral: ‘Darling – / if I could, I’d dislocate my jaw like one of those snakes / and float my soul out to you’, and with the speaker crying ‘molten gold’. Later, there is a dead badger ‘spangled with flies’, an empty pickled onion crisp packet ‘squeezed until (it is) a dead rat’, a portrait of loss as ‘a passport with a corner cut’, a woman in the moon tucked up like ‘a sweet red adzuki bean’, a radio that forecasts rain ‘before demonstrating / beautifully / with Mozart’. This confidence in use of imagery and metaphor – the ability to convincingly declare that a horse ‘melts / to a Greek chorus on the bank’ – is enthralling. 

The narrative arc moves unapologetically from mythology and folklore to ekphrasis responding to the work of the Old Masters, Van Gogh and Georgia O’Keefe. Perhaps this mirrors the mercurial state of grief; the dysregulation of emotions following a loss, and the suddenness of a shift from one feeling to another. In ‘The Five Stages of Grief’, the Kubler-Ross module is translated from clinical to visual, with each stanza conveying a stage of grief. Even if one is not familiar with the five stages of grief – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance – each stanza reveals each stage through concrete imagery as clearly as if the stages were named: the second stanza refers to an unsatiated urge ‘to punch walls’ in which the speaker’s ‘knuckles / do not bloom to corsages’. The final is ambiguous as to whether or not acceptance is relieving: whilst the stanza begins with the sun, how ‘The syrup of it / still warms me / through the cobwebs / and glass’, it ends with the horizon as a ‘scab’. Religion is tackled in ‘Flying Ants’, in which ‘the sunrise (is) the absolute beginning, / and sunset an utter myth’, and a girl watching the ants fly is ‘still as an idol’ and ‘a prehistoric monument to a deity, long defunct and bored with her reams of pointless forever’. Perhaps we are all flying ants in ‘the yawning drain-mouth of late afternoon’, and to the ages, our lives are as fleeting.

Dedicated to the memory of Sutton’s mother, the work communes with women throughout time. In ‘I Became the Wolf’, the Bible meets fairy tale when Little Red Riding Hood ‘sheds’ her cloak and remembers ‘before the wood’, ‘a woman naked in a forest / with an apple and a fig leaf’. Both stories reflect that ‘A girl, by nature, is a wild thing’. Witchcraft becomes a feature in ‘Ghazal for a Black Cat’, where ‘Fireworks refract dreams onto dustbin lids, / and it is all just fish to her, black cat’, and in ‘Coven / Transfiguration’, where characters ‘skin hares for their eyes / and feet’, and ‘The love is violet strong’. Much like in Julia Copus’s poem ‘The Great Unburned’ from her 2019 collection Girlhood, witchcraft is a symbol of female empowerment. All the Shades of Grief is both a celebration of and an elegy for female relationships, from the romantic, such as in ‘I Fall in Love with the Women in Paintings’, to the maternal in ‘Orbuculum’ where the speaker writes ‘I carry the weight of my mother on my chest’, and each breast is ‘a crystal ball’. The pamphlet engages with Sylvia Plath, whose influence is palpable throughout, not least in those that mention her by name – ‘On Sylvia Plath’s 87^th Birthday’, ‘the moon is a gravestone with half the name keyed off’ and the ‘yew tree, / nursing the light like a horse breaking hot air, / is a boot print on the neck of the dark’, and ‘the wind howls red hair’. This weaving of Plath’s images is an echoing conversation between two grievers.

This pamphlet allows that grief, and its emotions are not to be avoided, but rather acknowledged, processed, and where possible, embraced: that ‘Tears are not snares around throats but dances / honest dances’. This is fresh, evocative work.

Olivia Tuck 7^th June 2021