over under fed
by Amy Marguerite
Amy Marguerite’s collection 'over under fed' doesn’t lack for words and doesn’t lack for excitement, but reading it leaves me thinking that all the words have been collected together at the bottom of a slide, each of them landing at random in a heap. We enter it at our own risk and from whatever angle we just happen to be standing at at the moment. All I can take away from it is a sense that all of the words were written to express the immediacy of pain and that nothing else matters, even how the pain is expressed.
The individual poems all seem to come to similar degrees of anguish. In particular, a six-poem series of discharge notes seems to describe past pain over relationships (and names names), focusing on how everything still hurts. discharge notes (ii) reads:
a few years ago i decided i’d write
a list of all the women i owe my life to
even the women who have hurt me
a lot like claudia. it was overwhelming
not to write to carry so i deleted the
phone note wrote a letter to claudia
instead. gratefulness is so sore you can’t
ever expect anyone to feel how they made you
feel especially if they’ve never almost
been dead. jean didn’t recognise my sister
at the shop said you must have gone
to school with amy but she looks so much
like me even i see it now the way i
still have a problem with things that just
keep mattering like buying normal coke.
jean’s gone home now anorexia went
when I buried the tube in the ground
doing well and gemma died that day (p 24)
The blurb describes, ‘a hunger for a charged, combustible life of dreams and elation’, and this poem (quoted complete) is to me a fair example of this hunger in action, stream of consciousness in several streams, all coming together in a switch to a different topic.
Words are our way of nailing down facts, and words are our way of expressing what is beyond words. I’d argue these as descriptions of prose and of poetry (and all the stages in between) – but I can’t fit these poems in. I feel that they need more shape. And I know perfectly well that this may be their strength, even though this reader feels left with an excess of raw material and the regret that there isn’t more structure to contain it.
by Amy Marguerite
Amy Marguerite’s collection 'over under fed' doesn’t lack for words and doesn’t lack for excitement, but reading it leaves me thinking that all the words have been collected together at the bottom of a slide, each of them landing at random in a heap. We enter it at our own risk and from whatever angle we just happen to be standing at at the moment. All I can take away from it is a sense that all of the words were written to express the immediacy of pain and that nothing else matters, even how the pain is expressed.
The individual poems all seem to come to similar degrees of anguish. In particular, a six-poem series of discharge notes seems to describe past pain over relationships (and names names), focusing on how everything still hurts. discharge notes (ii) reads:
a few years ago i decided i’d write
a list of all the women i owe my life to
even the women who have hurt me
a lot like claudia. it was overwhelming
not to write to carry so i deleted the
phone note wrote a letter to claudia
instead. gratefulness is so sore you can’t
ever expect anyone to feel how they made you
feel especially if they’ve never almost
been dead. jean didn’t recognise my sister
at the shop said you must have gone
to school with amy but she looks so much
like me even i see it now the way i
still have a problem with things that just
keep mattering like buying normal coke.
jean’s gone home now anorexia went
when I buried the tube in the ground
doing well and gemma died that day (p 24)
The blurb describes, ‘a hunger for a charged, combustible life of dreams and elation’, and this poem (quoted complete) is to me a fair example of this hunger in action, stream of consciousness in several streams, all coming together in a switch to a different topic.
Words are our way of nailing down facts, and words are our way of expressing what is beyond words. I’d argue these as descriptions of prose and of poetry (and all the stages in between) – but I can’t fit these poems in. I feel that they need more shape. And I know perfectly well that this may be their strength, even though this reader feels left with an excess of raw material and the regret that there isn’t more structure to contain it.
Review by Mary Cresswell
Title: over under fed
Author: Amy Marguerite
Publisher: Auckland University Press
ISBN: 9781776711642
RRP: $24.99
Available: bookshops
Author: Amy Marguerite
Publisher: Auckland University Press
ISBN: 9781776711642
RRP: $24.99
Available: bookshops
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