Ella Frears’ collection “Shine, Darling” was shortlisted for both the Forward Prize and the T.S. Eliot Prize. It is divided into three sections, the central one (titled Passivity, Electricity, Acclivity) reproducing a work that appeared as a “Goldsmiths Short” pamphlet.
Passivity, Electricity, Acclivity weaves a number of narratives together in a sequence of small pieces, beginning:
"For years after my near-abduction I told my mother I could smell him, still that was easier than explaining that it wasn't so much him I could smell, but something new in me."
The “something new” appears to be the magnetic power of sex appeal, where a woman discovers both that she may become a target and that this can confer power. It is only a “near” abduction because she realises she can escape:
"There was the way, as we walked up the hotel stairs, arm in arm, I shifted my hip so there was room to break free and ran off slowly, laughing, as if it were all a game. That I knew to laugh like that aged ten surprises me."
Older, she shares a flat, where she is stalked by a female flatmate. Then there is a reference to a man dressed as a wizard in a theme-park where she grew up, whose task was to promote the theme-park. His job collapsed when “One day, he picked up a toddler and began to wade into the sea. Who knows what he was trying to do; drown it, baptize it?”. Years later, she sees him again from a bus: “Except his face is made-up like a skull…He looks right into the bus and waves at me.”
Then there is “a handsome older man” she notices staring at her as she works in a bar. He tells her his wife has just left him, and that she looks very like her. She lands up going back to his house out of pity, where “he shares a joke with himself on my body”. She goes to the bathroom and sees a photo of beautiful woman who looks nothing like her.
The woman portrayed in these poems realises she has this power (electricity) but is often curiously passive. As a child, she does not identify the near-abductor when asked, only to find that, later, another girl has been abducted by the same man. When the father of a friend tells her that the friend has committed suicide, she pauses before saying, finally, “I’m sorry”. When she meets the twin sister of the suicide at a party two years later she says nothing about the sister’s death, even though the twin brings the subject up:
"You were the last person she texted she says, hugging me tightly, the first of her friends my dad called. She is high and strokes my hair. I'm so happy to see you, she says, laughing. I miss her so much."
The character’s lack of empathy is consistent with her thoughts on hearing about the death:
"She had texted only a couple of days ago asking if I wanted to meet for a coffee and catch up. I reread the text. I ask myself how I feel, but can't reach anything sub- stantial."
The first and third sections of the collection contain a varied group of poems, many of which were written in the course of residencies. Ella Frears is unusual in that she earned a living over some five years from a sequence of residencies with a variety of organisations, including Tate St Ives, the conservation organisation Back from the Brink, Southampton’s No. 17 Bus and the National Trust. She has said, in the course of an interview with Andrew McMillan, that her technique in these residencies involves the taking of endless notes which she then goes through and, by a lengthy process of editing and eliminating, works into a poem. What interested me in this account was the apparent dissociation of the poem with personal experience. Many poets will take a personal experience as a starting point, a springboard. It is probably impossible to sever the genesis of a poem from the individual psyche of the poet, with all its layers of baggage, but I found myself wondering whether the technique involved here can explain in any part the apparent lack of emotion, or of emotional involvement with other people, that comes across in much of this collection.
Fucking in Cornwall was commended in the National Poetry Competition. It appears on the Poetry Society website as a single block, but in “Shine, Darling” the text is broken into smaller sections of one, two or three lines. This serves to bring out better the alternation between seaside holiday activities of the bucket and spade kind and the speaker’s description of sex – in which, again, the woman is telling the man what to do and the experience she wants to have: “just put your hand up my top”; “Kiss me in a pasty shop with all the ovens on”; “Unlace my shoes in that alley and lift me gently onto the bins”; “I want it like that – like water feeling its way over/an edge”. There is no mention of the man involved.
NPC judge Mark Waldron is quoted on the Poetry Society site as saying: “The seaside has always been a liminal space, clothes are taken off in public, holiday romances are had. This poem effectively captures that sense of occupying both sides of a boundary.” What he does not draw attention to is the attention-seeking title and the absence of emotion. The speaker in the poem is seeking sensation only – because, it appears, she is bored with the seaside environment:
"I've walked around that local museum a hundred times and I've decided that the tiny, stuffed dog, labelled the smallest dog in the world, is a fake."
Feminism combines with iconoclasm in the two poems called Magical Thinking, both of which are about menstruation. In The (Little) Death of the Author the speaker talks about texting to a boy as a thirteen-year-old, saying she’s in the bath, and the sexual frisson of the ensuing exchange. But in The Overwhelming Urge the speaker appears to be concerned both with self-harm as well as seduction. On a country walk:
"He wants to show her something by the metal farm gate. She, nodding, surveys it from a distance, files it under: penis, moonlit."
In the sex that follows the man is a cipher: “For now there’s nothing to do/but finger one another/uncomfortably at the shoreline”.
The final poem in the collection, I Asked Him to Check the Roof, Then Took the Ladder Away, is based on a true incident, following a quarrel Ella Frears had with her boyfriend. After the action described in the title, the speaker entertains friends to dinner, saying that the boyfriend is unwell.
"As the guests left I looked up and realised that there was no moon. Shine, darling. I whispered. And from behind the chimney rose his little head."
It is surprising that they are still living together. The men who appear in the book are either peripheral or menacing. Love is entirely absent.
Of the residency poems, my personal favourites were those dealing with the St Ives Modernist artists Barbara Hepworth, Patrick Heron, Naum Gabo and – last but not least – Alfred Wallis:
"I've left St Ives. But all day I will be thinking of perspective, of lighthouses as jaunty as sailors, of what a sweet, raw talent he was."
If there is tenderness in this collection, this was where I found it.
As you would expect from someone whose website reveals that she has guest lectured at Falmouth University and University East London in Fine Art, and Creative Writing, is a tutor in poetry and creative writing at City Lit and runs workshops for the Poetry School and Spread the Word among others, the techniques and forms used cover the gamut of possibilities: landscape format as well as portrait, quatrains, tercets, couplets, prose poems, blocks of prose divided by slashes, short lines, long lines – not to mention a couple of sestinas. Sometimes I confess to wondering whether there is a degree of fashion involved in some of this, a wish to push the new, rather than focussing on the content.
In a review of “Shine, Darling”, which appeared in the Winter 2020 edition of Poetry Review, Kate Simpson writes: “Ella Frears’ luminous collection, Shine, Darling, is…preoccupied with altered states of being, duplicity and hybridity. Here bodies sizzle and transform as they explore the depths of physical sensation and personal identity in both private and public spaces…Frears’ poems test the limits of power and potential, presenting a slick depiction of female desire tied to a tangible, lived experience”.
Having read and reread Ella Frears’ collection, listened to her interviews with Andrew McMillan as well as with Forward judge Leaf Arbuthnot, and read a number of reviews, I found myself thinking of an occasion many years ago, when I was at an international legal conference. The French chairman of one particular morning session struck me as being particularly brilliant – able to draw connections between apparently unrelated legal principles or cases, and to summarise a complex argument with admirable concision. When I commented on this to one of the other French lawyers present, his response was “Oui, mais c’est creux” – “Yes, but it’s hollow”. Reactions to poetry can never have universal validity, but this reader needs an emotional involvement, an emotional response, that this collection, however brilliant in concept and execution, rarely provides. I have sufficient respect for Ella Frears’ intellect and integrity to understand that this is a deliberate ploy. But I am afraid that the resulting world depicted is, for me, too cold and alien, too remote from my own, to be sympathetic – or, indeed, to encourage me to return.
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Ella Frears’ “Shine, Darling” is published by Offord Road Books.