Dialogue:
Katie Beswick and Paula Reed Nancarrow
Katie Beswick on Paula Reed Nancarrow’s “Ode to the Mortician’s Good Intentions”
Form and Content/I Respond to Your Poem
Gaps between couplets:
void as death —
as lungs after exhaling,
or speaking for too long.
Couplets for love; for the in and out
of stitches closing corpse mouth;
for the twinning of your father’s
dead body with his live one.
What he was; what he had been.
Spaces and decades.
Couplets for yourself;
for your middle sister.
The mortician, I see now, in that space between couplets. She’s bent over; brush dipped in flesh-coloured pot. No artistry you said. A science. Still, the tools of a maker — the needle; wads of cottonwool; pipes for draining. The movement of a creator, too; adjusting her work on the plinth of a pillow — how else, but with tenderness and concern?
In England, we close caskets
tight. As sealed as our longing;
pulsing under the strained cover
of a smile, or a coffin lid.
Americans do what Americans do;
sanitisation with expensive chemicals;
the veneer of everything always alright.
Not hidden: improved. Made bearable.
Does that seem insulting?
I admire it, honestly.
Discontentment strained
under every English skin.
In the gap between your couplets; my grandmother’s corpse. Its photo, that I took and then deleted from my phone. The purple place on its arms where blood had pooled and settled, like it does after death. The hollows of its cheeks; waxy skin had collapsed into skeleton. And all my dead friends too, in their final mystery.
I have sat in churches, stood
long at humanist burial sites
tried to picture the realness
we are here to bury, or burn.
And in your poem the realness flenses me in the way that literature does. ‘The body’s cavities’ you wrote. And I felt then the point of your poem: how any version of ourselves is impermanent – but also enduring.
Paula Reed Nancarrow on Katie Beswick’s “All My Fears Now Are For My Daughter: A Sestina”
I am also the mother of a daughter, so the title of Katie Beswick’s “All My Fears Now Are For My Daughter: A Sestina” grabbed me immediately. The speaker’s voice and concerns here resonate with the abject endurance and objectification to which working class single mothers in council estates are subjected, a topic Beswick has written about in academia and addressed in performance art. The title implies the persona has endured trauma but is no longer concerned about her own wellbeing. Now she is afraid her daughter may experience the same or worse treatment. A sestina puts pressure on the end words of the first stanza as they cycle through the poem, producing a palpable sense of claustrophobia.
Shifting pronouns blur boundaries and identities. No one has a name. The first stanza introduces the persona, speaking in lyric I; the second stanza may be that persona again, speaking to herself in the second person, about a sexual encounter. Or it may be a description of what the mother imagines the daughter experiencing, the daughter being the “you” the stanza addresses. A “he” is introduced, both desired and menacing. To the mother? to the daughter? If class and gender create personal histories that inexorably repeat themselves, does it even matter?
In the third stanza the mother is back to being the “I” in the poem; the “you” seems to be the daughter. The speaker reflects on that time when she carried her daughter insider her, extending the term of pregnancy by the long years of loneliness, the anticipation, for her darling – a term of endearment that can be maternal or romantic. More blurring. The poem presents giving birth as an extraction; when the daughter is born “they plucked you from me like a jewel from a pit.”
In the fourth stanza, the “he” is burying a body. Is the mother imagining the worst, as mums can do? Or is she reconstructing events in retrospect? It is clear in the fifth stanza that a crime has been committed. This is the only stanza in which the feminine pronoun appears. But “she” is not the daughter; “she” is a random American girlfriend – still living - who confirms “he” committed the crime. If this is a clue to an actual incident the persona’s narrative is based upon, that context, too, is blurred. What rises to the fore instead is the sense of powerless the mother experiences.
The sixth stanza returns to the perpetual waiting that is the speaker’s life, her helplessness in the face of her grief. The envoi both reinforces and resists the narrative presented in the preceding stanzas. The mother is in her living room, playing back old videos. She is standing again, as she did when waiting for her daughter to come home. Now she is waiting for “the big one,” an idiom which, among other things, can mean a heart attack. Yet here is a slim sliver of agency, as she is herself digging the hole in her own heart, giving her daughter a proper burial there, offering her a blessing instead of her fears.
So does the envoi undermine the title or transcend it? Yes. Yes it does. Is this slim sliver a satisfying resolution? No, it is not. Nor do I think it is meant to be. I have deep appreciation for the choices Beswick made, and how the form of the sestina reinforces the emotional and psychological content of the poem. I have equal respect for the questions she leaves with us, and the gaping holes in our systems of human welfare and social justice they expose.
For each issue, ballast asks pairs of poets to read each other’s work and respond in some way. We hope these dialogues will sound the resonances contained within the issue as well as serve to foster a sense of interconnection and community among our authors.
If you’ve been published in a previous issue of ballast and would like to participate in a dialogue, please reach out to our editors at ballastjournal@gmail.com.