Living with other people (Corrupted Editions, 2022), ed. Nic Stringer, Fiona Larkin and Michelle Penn. This review was first published in Tears in the Fence 78, August 2023

Corrupted Poets’ anthology Living with other people proposes a range of perspectives to explore what it means to inhabit, and share, physical and emotional spaces, an editorial project which, gathering poems and art on so large a theme, is necessarily ambitious. Framed by Anne Carson’s offer of language as both wounding agent and salve, these are poems that attempt to address fundamental, and perhaps necessary, contradictions of experience, in a world where the old gods are nowhere to be found, and living with others necessarily involves living with oneself.

Motherhood as primal drama persists in this volume, where in Phoebe Stuckes’ poem ‘Saint Wilgefortis’, for example, there is only the lost saint of her childhood who, proposed as a fiction to answer the historically uncomfortable contradiction of women who wish to remain ‘unencumbered’ and childless, turns out never to have existed. Moreover, the poet tells us, ‘If you don't want children, if nothing works/ the way it's supposed to, you're on your own’. In Mary Jean Chang’s searching poem ‘fireworks on the tongue’, the enduring claims of a parent extend into adulthood - a lover even moves out to accommodate the mother’s visit –while the accumulating power of the phrase ‘and yes’ movingly admits to the co-existence of a multiplicity of contradictions:

                        and yes I cried when my mother told me to take

care of her since it has been so long and yes the turbot it was so

moist it was so soft and yes fine dining has forever been a social

lubricant in my family

From another angle, Silje Ree’s photographic sequence, ‘Why do I become a child when I talk to my dad’, seeks to release this tension, while Katie Griffith’s skilful reworking of Plath’s poem ‘Mirror’ in ‘Motherdaughter’ reclaims ground for the adult daughter in a reversal of the dynamic – ‘I am not young, I am old./ Whatever her time, it is over.’ Nevertheless, dark tensions persist, not least in the enduring echoes of Plath’s own meanings, where the thinly-boundaried regions of selfhood are felt in the words themselves, saturated with Plath’s own relationship with proximity and alienation.

Many of the anthology’s poems successfully highlight this contradictory difficulty of maintaining either separation or connection. In the tight dependencies of Mary R Powell’s ‘Folie à deux’, the ambiguity of the ‘folie’ both as psychological condition and as extravagance is suggested with macabre playfulness, ‘As one trembling face goes missing, the other appears/ like a game of tig, in a parcel of silence’. In Mark Russell’s ‘Gluteus Maximus’ it is language which ultimately undoes the erotic tension of Casey and Ash, even though that has already exceeded itself, their ‘uncommonly vigorous sex’ giving way to ‘what is clearly not pleasure’. There are the isolated men of Declan Ryan’s moving poem ‘Bachelors’, whose ‘wives have 'gone out shopping', and will be back/ any time now, these men whose only recreation is the radio’, where language is both defence and euphemism, and in Simon Alderwick's ‘a love story in post-it notes’, the ironic ambiguities of language unfold to both disguise, and reveal, the true extent of disconnection.

By contrast Ella Frear’s poem ‘Soak it All in’ enacts immersion, where even language becomes absorbed, as plums become ‘blams’, and the ‘menage à trois’ created by rain is the final proof of the impossibility of maintaining separation, in spite of a contradictory tension in ‘the feeling that I’ve experienced/ the meadow incorrectly.’ Quirky, inconclusive, the poem portrays a rush of sensations tending always towards union, as in ‘Cold Buffet’, where this pressing energy, with its demands and assaults, extends into the oppressive vividness of Sophie Herxheimer’s salami, ‘the speckled pink discs/ in their insistent skirts of rind’ at odds with the strange acts of resistance by the vegetarians - ‘What is the matter with them?’. Here food, and its rituals, again underpin the relationships that are primary and primal.

The waywardness and vulnerability of the self, led by its desires and contradictory attempts at restraint, is revealed in a diverse range of poems where individuals, atomised, are drawn together while pulling apart, as in Tamsin Hopkins’ poem ‘All the ways I am unapproachable’, in which the poet declares, ‘Dammit, this thing between us is invisible./ I’ll throw a blanket over it, so we can ignore it properly’. In Mary Mulholland’s sonnet ‘After carving leftover turkey’, the possibility of a fatal accident exposes the poet to sudden reversals of feeling:

                                     …and you on the ground,

unmoving, and a part of me starts to compose

your funeral speech. I am falling in love again.

Then you get up.

Marc Chamberlain’s poem ‘Disclosure’ anticipates the tender unreliability of desire balanced by fear, enacting its early hesitations and hopes in the repeated, and fragmented, phrases ‘if when’, ‘if then’, as the poet skilfully creates a series of fragmented steps which ultimately deconstruct their own project:

If when I—Finally bring myself to say—

HIV—If then—When the space is filled

he says ‘Fine’—And smiles and we kiss—

If then when I fall—Out of love anyway—

In ‘Chimp’, SJ Fowler presents other visual disruptions of text, where apertures frame repeated fragments, the glimpse always shifting, subject to reinterpretation.

This strong visual element of Living with other people is also an intrinsic part of its surprise and success, both in the range of poetic forms, and in the direct and indirect conversations arising between artwork and text. ‘The Introvert’s Lament’ by Jennifer Militello, with its confessional tone – ‘One person I mimic. One person I triptych’ – finds a convincing echo in James Knight’s ‘Wait while I put my face on’, a collage of text and image. Astra Papachristodolou’s intricate linguistic and sculptural worm forms, ‘Clogged’, find resonances in Sarah Westcott’s ‘Worms’, with its insistent voice and powerful physicality: ‘Pull us down to damp places/ lover the flesh’.

There are sensitive portraits of the intimate and challenging business of inhabiting of a body subject to illness and mortality, and the crises that disclose us to ourselves. Sarah Westcott’s ‘My father’s trilliums’ questions ‘What rises in his blood now,/ what blooms, steeply’, weaving botanical and medical language with characteristic economy:

        Gleason, sacrum, orchiectomy.

Leaves open,

regal and vascular,

while in the lyrical and elegiac note of Jeffery Sugarman’s poem ‘His Beard in Time of Plague,

for Alan’, the deeply felt substance, and contradictory frailty, of a whole life lived, and lost, is captured in its final lines, where

The nail-moon cuts a rosen-hedge

                           strokes its bristle

                           with faint silver light.

How to ‘Parent this unsound skeletal frame’ (‘Living’, Agnieszka Studzińska), and tolerate its contradictions? How to move beyond the philosophical platitudes of the online yoga teacher, which produce not peace but rage in Georgi Gill’s ‘Becalming induces a sensation of panic which Philocteta would alleviate with yoga’, and language itself threatens to dissolve? A more sure footing, in which life can be both coexistence and transcendence, is established in Aaron Kent’s poem ‘This house is a box in a city of boxes’, mirrored in the evocative end paper images taken from ‘Postcards From Mental States’, a collaborative project between Paul Hawkins and Julia Rose Lewis. In Kent’s poem the physical, even claustrophobic, limits of space quickly give way to a reordering of dimensions. Driving always towards essence, like the house whose eaves are ‘burnt down to a black pearl’, Kent creates the possibility to ‘dream inside individual/ thoughts’, simultaneously giving to language a new capacity to ‘speak inside the flesh of a flower’. Time too can be reordered, and a garden can become ‘a complete infinity passing through windows and spinning stars’, creating an expansive shift of mood for the anthology as a whole.

The singularity of Kent’s ‘black pearl’ containing infinities finds a visual echo in the ‘watchword’ of Derrida’s final interview – he would die seven weeks later from pancreatic cancer – highlighted by Agnesia Studzińska in her collage ‘Living’. Much of Derrida’s interview focuses on the traces that we make and leave, and, creating a kind of aperture in which words, layered and unmoored from their full contexts are left to resonate as singularities – ‘living’, ‘survival’, ‘death’ – Agnieszka Studzińska’s collage acts as a kind of philosophical pivot. Proposing perhaps through its enigmatic fragments overlaid on each other what living amounts to ‘finally’ - life as ‘survival’ and ‘testament’, with words as compass points, it offers an understanding of how dasein, being, might be understood, the ‘heart beats of language inside this body, heart beats/ of lives elsewhere, inheritance and yielding veined, twisting with care.’

The accumulated energy of this anthology, with its careful progression, works with a similar quality of suggestion, allowing for a kind of collage to emerge which examines the dimensions of the worlds we inhabit and cohabit. Words and images act together to successfully expose the ways that we ourselves are multiple and unreliable, desirous of and resistant to the different intimacies by which we might come to know ourselves, and each other, more fully, where finally we might ‘learn to love what makes us’ (‘Living’). It addresses from unexpected angles the problematic question of how, meaningfully, to inhabit the physicality, and mortality, of our animal nature, and brings together an accomplished selection of poets and artists to achieve this.