The title of Andy Brown’s new
chapbook from Shearsman might suggest a lyric rurality, but this collection
takes as its subject matter something rarely treated in either poetry or song and
sets it firmly in the urban. Brown’s
topic is disease: disease caused by
water contaminated by human faeces – not quite what the reader might have
expected from the title.
The collection falls into two parts. The longer, first section, is a sequence of
untitled poems grouped together as ‘Watersong’, and deals with the Exeter cholera epidemic of 1832, which killed over 400 people.
This is followed by a short set of poems which address the issues of water and
disease in the twenty-first century.
The ‘Watersong’ sequence is full of
the grisly detail of the realities of cholera, much of it employing a lexis and
register which gives an impression that some of the words might be
incorporations from original texts. We
are given lists of fines for keeping insanitary conditions:
The Widow
Barrier, for a nucence by keeping a mound
of filth and
nastiness beneath her court, amerced 5l.8s…
lists of deaths
On July 24th,
at Bury Lane –
the wife of a journeyman
cordwainer.
Cholera 3 days…
and lists of symptoms
Skin cold and
clammy. Cramps, emaciation.
Abnormal smell.
Intelligence entire.
Vomiting and
purging now profuse.
Jactition.
Diarrhoea.
and we are given stories. The
subject of these poems is not just cholera – it is people. So we hear of the
grave digger who was attacked for carrying a coffin ‘underhand’, and the
surgeon who before sewing up a dissected body ‘strokes the black heart’.
The poems in the sequence have no
titles – they flow into each other in a way that creates a sense of fever and
unreality in the reader – yet even as
they do this, the poems are also
formally distinct. These are poems that fall (sometimes uneasily) into the varied
form of song. They use songlike features such as refrain (‘Sing: Water from the wealthy, private well…’) and chant (‘’Plague. Plague. Plague. Plague…’).
Other poems utilise poetic forms
which have their roots in song. ‘In Bury Fields’, for example, is a rondeau which closely follows and interacts with the
form and structure of John McCrae’s ‘In Flanders Fields’. Most noticeably, six of
the thirteen poems in the main sequence,
including many of the list-poems, are fourteen-liners, each structured in such a way as to invite the
reader to see them through the lens of ‘sonnet’ (a term which, of course, has
its derivation in the Italian ‘little song’).
The subject matter of these sonnets
is, however, far removed from the form’s traditional themes. This tension
between form and subject is both witty
and disturbing, as is the uncertainty engendered in the reader as to whether
these texts are ‘found’ or imagined. One
sonnet is a list of public orders, while several are a series of medical notes:
20th.
10. A.M. fiat pilula
quarta quaque hora sumenda:
Cupri Sulphatis,
gr. ¼
Pulveris Opii, gr. ¼
The final four poems of the
collection, the poems that deal with contemporary cholera deaths and the
present-day attempts to address the problem of contaminated water, have titles.
But they are titles which reflect the continuing problem of naming, and the way
in which this results in an inability to address the central issue. In ‘The
Unnameable Taxonomy’, we are given another list – this time, two pages of jauntily
rhyming euphemisms:
...Room 101, or
Number Two.
Auditing Assets,
Doing the Do,
Taking Some
Weight Off Your Troubled Mind,
Seeing How
Things Turn out Behind…
In the final, unrhymed sonnet of
the pamphlet, ‘The Flying Toilets of Kibera’, Brown moves the form forward into
something more lyrical, and something that more closely relates to the sonnet
as an image-led structured argument: ‘Because the politicians can’t discuss/ toilets
for fear of breaking taboo…’ children such as ‘Kanja (Sanskrit, ‘water born’)’
and ‘Nafula (African, ‘born in the rain’) have to get rid of their faeces into
the reservoir from which they drink. Their names are of the beauty of water,
but their deaths are waiting in its contamination.
The underlying message, made
explicit in these final poems of the collection, is that because society still
shies away from talking about ‘answer[ing] nature’s call’, people are still, nearly
two hundred years after the Exeter epidemic, dying of cholera. Andy Brown, however, is not shying away, he’s ‘singing’ about it. This
is an intelligent and witty collection, which throws the reader into the
gruesome details of an historic tragedy, while at the same time addressing an
important contemporary issue.
Watersong, Andy Brown
Shearsman, 2015
30pp
Review first published at Canto Poetry
