I need to be careful… Undoubtedly, there are some good poems in Victoria Kennefick’s “egg / shell”. Let’s start there.
The collection concerns itself with two profoundly serious topics: a woman’s experience of miscarriage, and the dissolving of her marriage when her husband decides to make the transition away from being a man. I cannot imagine what those must have felt like, and in no way wish to diminish or denigrate the nature and dept of those experiences.
But my response is a simple reader’s to a book of poetry, not that personal experience.
In “egg \ shell” the reader is first faced with some sixty pages of poetry (the “egg” part) all on the subject of miscarriage. It’s like being beaten around the head again and again. Not only that, but in order to attempt some distinction between the poems, the poet takes to formatting gimmicks to try and differentiate between them. Indeed, there are pages that contain things that can’t even qualify as poems (at least half a dozen across the whole book). To make sure it wasn’t just my bias, I tried a couple on my poetry group; there was derision.
The overall result? All the good pieces are lost; the reader focusses on their negative reading experience, not the trauma of the poet. This ‘one theme’ collection seems an increasingly regular trope: collections solely about being gay, the death of a father etc. etc. And – for this reader at least – the end result is usually the same.
The approach taken in “egg” is pretty much repeated in the 35 pages of the “shell” poems about her husband, and in the end you are left with a sense that the collection may be more significant as therapy than poetry. I don’t blame Kennefick for writing it. Far from it. Poetry has great healing properties after all. But I do question Carcanet for not being more robust or reader-centric in their editorial process (perhaps they were seduced by the ‘novelty’ of some of the work) and also the Poetry Book Society for having it as a ‘choice’ – though, to be fair, I wouldn’t have read it if it wasn’t – so mission accomplished…
[Be warned, the acknowledgements at the end read like an Oscars’ acceptance speech.]
Ian Gouge - Writer 