Burning Bright

#6 The Sealey Challenge ‘The Room Between Us’ by Denise Saul (Liverpool University Press, Pavilion series, 2022)

My mother-in-law, Mary, lived with us for the first ten years or so of our marriage at which point, on the birth of our fifth child, she said she’d had enough of the noise of our house and moved to live with her eldest daughter. I only knew Mary post-stroke, as an elderly woman with disabilities of speech and movement. Her aphasia made her creative with language so that there were coded ways in which we all communicated between mind-reading and translation. I offered my support as best I could as a daughter-in-law who disappointed her in many ways (but that’s another story). This is relevant to my reading of Denise Saul’s first collection as her poetry reminds me of the daily detail and necessity of care for our disabled elderly and how this ubiquitous work is invisible not just in our national economic reckonings but in cultural work and literature.

Saul’s poems navigate the experience of a daughter caring for a mother whose words are disappearing, and becoming fixed or unreliable after a stroke:

                    Clopidogrel

I was talking about the doctor or you were. I can't recall who 
spoke first even though I said clopidogrel and you said cabbage.
In the afternoon, you mentioned cardigan and did not budge
from this word.
                                                     [p.12]

These poems also consider how love holds on as the life of a beloved one slips away, ‘sans teeth, sans eyes, sans teeth, sans everything’, as words bind us and fail us.

This is not only a document of witness and love that gives a voice back to her late mother but also a small manifesto, a poetics against the clamour and noise of words. Saul shows us that human communication, and poetry, is not only about words but also about gesture and experiment, breath and the space (or the room) between us, in the spaces where language is silent, where the human spirit still resists:

                    Surrender

I have grown tired of combing mother's unkempt hair.  I do
not know how to plait and the house is in a mess. Rather than
using a comb, I pull my fingers through her hair. I tell mother
to bend her head forward, You have to lean forward if you want
me to comb your hair. Mother tilts her head back because she
does not want to surrender to anyone.
                                                     [p.29]

‘The Room Between Us’ has been well received and endorsed by a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, as with Saul’s two previous pamphlets. It also needs to be widely shared and read by the army of carers and the politicians who ignore them.

To buy the book: https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/books/id/55557/

And here’s a photograph of my late mother-in-law, Mary Rowe