reviewed by Keith Jafrate

These are poems of travel and risk and adventure, united by a sensual pleasure that looks somehow at good and bad, fortune and misfortune with the same hungry eye. The result is to place the poet in a kind of innocent position in relation to what she records: somehow her appetite for experience makes even disaster fascinating, and the poems register the slight guilt this creates in her. She becomes the centre of her own poems through memory of childhood or through the pain of lost love, but more often she is accompanist to another’s sadness or disaster, watching with a compassionate bewilderment how others deal with grief or poverty or difficulty, most obviously in a group of poems about Russia. I liked these best, though I liked also any of these poems that played that magical trick that poems can sometimes pull off, of somehow transforming themselves at their close into something else. Sue Butler seems to specialise in this, looking at events and people closely, convincing us with detail which she suddenly adds up into something beyond the quotidian. In the poem ‘Jump,’ which describes the action of long jump concisely, calmly, her friend Freya:

          ………climbs and climbs, demanding lift
          from every sinew until she is flying

          to where the air is thin, into the shimmering
          sky-land of the gods, no hubris intended.

The poem ends, in a lovely sense of suspension:

          I lie on grass, parched,
          waiting for her to land.

Or in ‘Treasure Trove’ she images a kind of glorious relinquishing through giving away a hoard of treasure, stretching out the metaphor in a fairy tale exaggeration, but making it flower into something deeper and somehow harsher at the end:

          My days of wielding rage are done; I am an anvil
          hear how the beaten sing.

How autobiographical this is I neither know nor care: it works, if you want it to, as a poem about loss of friendship or of love and acceptance of this, but its use of images of materialism and of metals associated with the notion of ‘the beaten’ give it a kind of hardness that implies, perhaps, sharper, more material kinds of loss and pain. Sue Butler creates this interesting ambivalence frequently through this book, mixing her actions and reactions into the peculiar predicaments of others she comes across on her various journeys. Often love or passion cause this mixture, and I guess I would say that the poems suggest that love and passion are the most important social cement. Many of the people she shows us are enduring lives full of deprivation that only relationships with others can contextualise, and she seems to suggest that the poverty and crumbling political and social structures she witnesses in Russia can only be endured through passion, whether it be for poetry, for cooking or for one another. Hard to disagree with that.
          But actually I do a little bit, because it seems to me that the poems arrange their details in such a way that they can sometimes become atmospheric lists rather than actual observations, and as a result they can feel a little detached. This creates a kind of tension with the energy on which these poems rely heavily, their rhythmical and accumulative impetus of images, and I’m not sure if this is a positive depth of ambiguity or simply an over-development in one area compensating for a lack of depth in another. Her lyrical skill is obvious, but it left me a little hungry for other skills, closer observation that went deeper than the atmospheric, beyond the single noun or series of nouns used as social or cultural indicators, into, perhaps, a reality which feels less composed. Composition, through far-flung visual comparisons and images of painting and painters, is a concern that runs under much of the work, but it brings with it a certain slight tweeness, a certain formality that contradicts some of the big emotions washing about here. In the poem ‘Rhino Horn,’ the point is, I think, that the real fossil horn in question, kept at night in a wardrobe by a certain Sergei, who I assume is an archaeologist, somehow symbolises a strange mixture of devotion and deprivation to be found in contemporary Russians. Not bad for a quite light-hearted and humorous poem. Here’s Sergei described:

          Beneath his beard are cheekbones
          for which Calvin Klein would kill
          and when eventually he speaks
          it is with the compassion
          the son of god would use
          if her were Georgian and hung over.

This is obviously witty, neat stuff, but it is also cultural shorthand, a way of getting round the problem of trying to describe a face, or a voice, in terms that make it recognisable and unique. Elsewhere, in ‘Making Marks,’ a poem about a political leader who murders his own wife but has the murder concealed, we find a mason working on her monument:

          Towards dawn he rolls a reefer,
          lets hemp smoke fill his lungs.
          His coughing wakes the dead
          woman’ sister, who fell asleep
          hours ago.

These are known as details are they not? Actually, I would say they are fictions, selective in the extreme, invented to create a particular atmosphere, in the ‘almost filmic’ style of many of these poems that Tamar Yoseloff praises on the book’s cover. This is where I sense a certain very decided slant to the book, that it reveals an extremely selected reality, a reality arranged to play to the strengths of the observing poet, rather than a reality the poet finds irresistible or overwhelming, and this sort of undercuts the passion and compassion I have praised above. It calls into question the genuineness of the things described if there is a suspicion that the 'reality' of, say, Russia as expressed in the poems, is in fact a staged reality, a fiction, infected by the poet's tastes and attitudes as much as by what she perceived. By which I mean it calls into question the veracity, the reality, of her own responses. I can’t tell if this aspect of Sue Butler’s work is a superficiality she will never overcome, or evidence of an attempt in progress to work closer and closer to the deep forces of people’s lives through a concentration of detail. The problem seems to hinge around the way reality is proposed to us through the work: is it observed or is it composed? Is this an important philosophical question, or is it simply that Sue Butler can’t describe, can’t ‘see’ poetically, anything other than the vivid but limited world her poetry creates and explains? There are beautiful and magical moments in these poems, but in the end, for me, they feel a little too disengaged, a little too self-conscious, a little too full of the arrangements of the filmmaker-poet, hungry for 'significant' material.