An established figure on the East Midlands literary scene as one half (with Birgit Friedrich) of the poetry collective Dandelions, Caroline Stancer makes her publishing debut with Full Body Reclaim, a handsomely produced pamphlet in Five Leaves’ New Poetry series.
Whereas many first volumes hint at a voice beginning to find itself, or something taking shape that points towards the promise of the future (“Critics, hold your fire,” as Vernon Scannell put it: “the best is yet to come”), what we have here is more like a showreel: a confident demonstration of Stancer’s talent and capabilities. It’s an immersive and energising read that leaves you hoping a full length collection is just round the corner.
Traits which may prove to be her trademarks abound. There’s a facility with opening lines where quirkiness and robust turns of phrase play off each other:
The things of this world are my friends -
consider the silent generosity of pylons.
[‘Help!’]
I was left with fear, in deposits,
as if I was a set of shelves.
or the deadlocked vault of a bank.
[‘Room’]
Walk here on the narrow edge of morning. Let singing
be released in each footfall …
[‘Gifts’]There’s an attention to technique and a flair for the longer line, both demonstrated to impressive effect in the sestina ‘Gone’, which circles the reader through a melancholy but ultimately redemptive bolero of linguistic elegance, formalist precision and hard-won emotional truths. Similarly, in ‘A-Z gratitude list’, she takes the hackneyed abecedarium form and uses it expansively and with no small degree of wit to create a poem that flexes itself free of its strictures.
There’s an effortlessness with that most potentially problematic of forms, the prose poem – particularly in ‘Your body’ and ‘There but for the grace of God’. Understanding – be it lived experience or utterly convincing imaginative sympathy – is stamped through these pieces.
There is an affinity with the natural world. A triptych of poems on flowers – ‘Rose’, ‘Bluebell’ and ‘Daffodil’ – simultaneously occupy a modern idiom and evoke the close observation of John Clare.
And there are poems of relationships and the shoddy way that women are treated, Stancer directing a quiet, controlled fury at gaslighters, mansplainers and chauvinists.
When I speak in public I imagine you striding up
to the front five minutes or an hour late shouting me down.
Now I move freely but it’s risky to take up so much space
[‘Who do you think you are?’]All of these poems, I should add, account for a little under half of the pamphlet. I’ll leave the rest of it for the discerning reader to discover. For all that it clocks in at a slender 39 pages including acknowledgements, there is something TARDIS-like about Full Body Reclaim: wide-ranging in its subject matter, heartfelt in its aesthetic, and assured in its craftsmanship, it seems a bigger volume than it is.
Neil Fulwood