Поэзия Кэрен Маккарти Вулф: сборник Unsafe исследует границы, насилие и надежду через фото и стихи

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ Rating: 4.5 out of 5. Karen McCarthy Woolf’s Unsafe begins with wire fences and broken glass. A photograph of a punched-in window opens the collection in more ways than one: as well as providing a striking introduction to the violence which the book depicts, it also conveys a sense of fragmentation. The reader enters McCarthy Woolf’s poetry through the gap in the cracked glass, stepping through into a world fraught with cruelty, but still lit up with fragile hope. Unsafe takes the form of a single poem, termed by McCarthy Woolf herself a “fractured photolyric”. Combining photography and poetry, Unsafe moves between a truly epic variety of subject matter, including the rise of social media; the modern pastoral; and the rebellious potential of tattoos. Could the collection have benefited from being more streamlined and thematically focused? Perhaps, but McCarthy Woolf’s effective pairing of poetic style and subject matter keeps the reader continually engaged. Stylistically, McCarthy Woolf’s verse is as wide-ranging as the topics she depicts. At points, her poetic voice slips into the skin of the traditional ode, re-purposing a form typically used for veneration to instead expose violence and disfunction. In other moments, McCarthy Woolf’s poetry shifts into prose – a formal adjustment to match the directness with which the speaker delivers accounts of racist violence. And, at moments of highest intensity, her poems narrow into sharply defined columns of text, capturing a sense of entrapment. This unity of form and subject matter creates an engaging reading experience, bolstering the collection’s emotional impact. In the face of boundaries and barriers, McCarthy Woolf selects tattoos as an image of possibility Across the collection’s thematic twists and turns, McCarthy Woolf’s poetry is connected through its link to John Clare’s ‘The Village Minstrel’, a poem from which Unsafe takes its epigraph. Clare expresses how “with many a loss” the “truth” of “boasted” England is seen. McCarthy Woolf’s work builds on this sentiment, expressing “truth” gleaned through “loss” via her inventive use of negative space. On a line level, Unsafe is fragmentary. Sentences cut short with en dashes and ellipses voice the traumatic consequences of violence through their very voicelessness, implying the inability of language to truly express brutality and oppression. “[A] / space / is a line”, McCarthy Woolf describes: in Unsafe, silence speaks volumes, marking out the losses inflicted by racist violence. As well as responding to and reworking Clare’s poem, McCarthy Woolf’s collection also rewires the pastoral as a poetic genre. Abandoning the idyllic images traditionally associated with ‘England’s green’, McCarthy Woolf paints a grittier picture. Through her vivid descriptive verse and striking black-and-white photography, she places emphasis on moments of fracture and breakage. The landscapes in her photos are battered and faded – meanwhile, descriptions of plants are replaced with starkly artificial “barbed / fences augmented by engineered despair / and steel cages”. Additionally, whilst traditional pastoral verse might emphasise the beauty of flora and fauna, McCarthy Woolf places primary emphasis on the boundaries which police entry to spaces of natural beauty. “[U]noiled metal / at the garden gate,” she describes, “the garden gate / that’s a security gate”. In this image, repetition creates a sense of unrelenting exclusion – of gates opening only onto more gates, and entry which is continually refused. This subtle shifting of focus makes Unsafe endlessly engaging, encouraging the reader to re-examine seemingly familiar images from a new perspective. McCarthy Woolf’s urgent and unrelenting imagery encourages us to look not just at the flowers growing in a garden, but the wall enclosing it In the face of boundaries and barriers, McCarthy Woolf selects tattoos as an image of possibility. Tattooing is introduced as “a way to reclaim agency over the body […] a response to a larger, contemporary land grab”. In this way, McCarthy Woolf powerfully blurs the line between body, environment, and country: “sacred” tattoos become a map of “bloodlines / and demarcated ecologies”. This image is striking, and one of the collection’s most memorable moments. As McCarthy Woolf’s poetry unfolds, the breaking of skin becomes a symbol of disrupted boundaries, recalling again the broken-glass image which opens the collection. Here is another ‘opening’: tattooing practice – McCarthy Woolf suggests – disrupts the boundaries between the present day and history, between human and nature. Another exciting aspect of Unsafe is the collection’s multiplicity. Meaning is plural; blank space gives way to vivid speech; and images refuse to stay still. McCarthy Woolf’s reference to tattoos exemplifies this doubleness: as well as describing bodily art, Unsafe also plays off the musical meaning of tattoos, as “a tapping”. In the collection’s final pages, this second meaning is explored: “music is skin / is music is skin is / a tap tap tapping”, McCarthy Woolf describes. In a collection which details the violence inflicted on the body, this meditation on the potential for bodily expression and agency is even more powerful. The “tap tap tapping” of the tattoo suggests a heartbeat; a repeating rhythm which survives even in the face of violence. Overall, Unsafe boldly writes through the cracks and fracture points in (as Clare describes in McCarthy Woolf’s epitaph) “England, boasted land of liberty”. McCarthy Woolf’s urgent and unrelenting imagery encourages us to look not just at the flowers growing in a garden, but at the wall enclosing it. To listen not just to speech, but to silence – a noiselessness which Unsafe renders powerfully loud. Image Credit: Time Keiser (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)