Wells

Jenna Butler

• Publisher: The University of Alberta Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780888645258
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

Jenna Butler draws on her own experiences of her grandmother's disappearance into senile dementia to reassemble a sensual world in longpoem form that positively crackles with imagery and rhythm. Identities and memories flow and flicker as she strings together fragments of narrative into stories that comprise one woman's life. It entwines her disappearing life with that of the persona of the woman's granddaughter through a choreographed confusion of identities: of she's and I's. Few poets could execute this with convincing solemnity, while simultaneously recovering the dignity of the sufferer and her loved ones. Butler does. Poetry lovers, critics and scholars, and readers who crave a deft style charged with honest emotion should read Wells.

Wells

Chapter 1

The north sea speaks carefully around a mouthful of flints.

The beach is a buzzard feast, salted carnage. Miles upon miles of razor clams, caught by the headland, butterfly open under a cacophony of gulls. This is not the image you had held of this place, but it is right, if ironic. Memory has pinioned this beach as a place of calm; a dimly-recalled mother in housedress and cardigan, pockets bulging with hoarded stones, walking through the surf. At home, a telegram she had not allowed you to see, detailing the loss of your older brother at Normandy. Sitting on the beach in wellies and bathing suit, you wondered if she might not walk out into the sea. She was already weighted down with stones; it wouldn’t have been much of a stretch. And she might have done, with greater impact. As it is, you have no recollection of her disappearance from memory. Her image simply filmed over like a dimming eye; sank cleanly and without fuss.

Out from the shelter of the pine woods, the wind along the tide line scours the lungs with unceremonious brutality. Sandwiches and tabbouleh in the beach bag over your shoulder, the smell of mint leaking from the Tupperware. On an ideal day, you’d slip out of your sandals and test the water with false bravado, feet so slim and pale they hurt to look at. Today, though, doing so would be risking excoriation; clams pock the sand like chipped teeth, fragments from a war you knew nothing about.

Chapter 2

You curl into the sand, your hands folded in front of your face. The veins stand haphazard and blue, scuttling crazed like Hadrian’s Wall. Around us, the wind dips and chews; the dunes shift in protest.

Into the holes in your mind, I trail breadcrumbs, poke words like tongue in a smile gone gaptoothed. The paucity of what’s solid. The overgenerous space. Tern. Tideline. Watch you hold for a moment, your face twisted with naming, then slide slack. This, the way of doldrums: sudden, that theft, all forward momentum gone.

I watch you watching terns, lips groping after language.

Becalmed.

Chapter 3

There was an aunt in Battersea who never came out of the war. How easy it was then to lose one woman amidst a whole country dredging itself from the Blitz. Everyone walking wounded. It was not her body but her words that failed, however, petering themselves out in the new Covent Garden Market over parsnips, Darjeeling, Ceylon. She found herself deconstructed word by word until housebound, where only muscle memory told her how to poach fish, and that she did, after all, take sugar with tea. In the back garden, the old Doyenne pear blossomed frantically, its crown alight with bees. She watched as the fruits came, blushing, thrusting their rotund bodies against the window glass. Their scent was peremptory, drifting throughout the house.

You visited her only once before the Home, before the stroke that left body and mind wracked and gone. Early summer, the house rank with the scent of overripe fruit. A stilted lunch in the living room, the plaster peeling from age and damp, and how she ate pears with the tears running down her face.

Chapter 4

You knew that the words were leaving you when your back was turned. They were getting out somehow—subterfuge, disguise, swimming the moat. Bedsheets strung together like semaphore flags from an outside wall. The tricky part was catching them in the act. Bemused rather than angry, you’d a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Wells
• Flight
• Garden
• Home
• Grain
• He
• & She
• Flesh
• Author’s Notes
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author