Lesley Sharpe considers poems of exile and reclamation. This review was first published in The Alchemy Spoon 12, Summer 2024

Marjorie Lofti The Wrong Person to Ask, Bloodaxe Books, £10.99  

Marjorie Lofti’s debut collection portrays lives that find themselves, again and again, on the wrong side of history, compelled to preserve their own stories. These are poems that map the rituals that lead home, the streets and names and foods that shape the singular fragments of language and memory, as in the title poem, which recreates the ‘exact crush/ of pistachio, fine as rubble, not yet dust’. Values are redefined: in ‘Sunflower’ we learn

When she left,

she took nothing but the seeds,

their rattle in the tiny tin better than

money.

Awarded the James Berry Poetry Prize and a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation, the collection shimmers with closeness to gather ‘what remains’. A sequence of two halves, the first part of the collection chronicles the narrator’s experience of Tehran, her own childhood mingled with the stories of family and revolution, exile, worlds where the suitcase ‘holds/ all he owns’ (‘Refuge’). The final poem of the first section, ‘The End of the Road’, creates a haunting sequence to portray a life where ‘every rain-filled hour’ is now

a block of time she has chosen

                        to square and plant her feet

into this world.

At night, however, the subject of the poem worries ‘where her sons will bury/ her body when she is gone’.

            This sense of orientating to the earth underfoot continues to develop in the second part of the collection. Extending the experience of life lived at the margins, and centred on the narrator’s experience of Scotland, her new home, the narrative draws upon images of its islands and coastlines, the long tidal reach of the sea and its mirrored sky, where there is a hope that ‘horizons of imprisonment will shift’, as portrayed in ‘Sea Gooseberry’. A suitable metaphor, the subject of this poem is a creature ‘diffusing/ seawater, barely holding the boundary of self’, while in ‘Sunday on the Luing Sound’, deep water of a quarry cutting is ‘anchoring’ a ring of islands to sea water with similar insubstantial fluidity. There is also the lighthouse keeper of ‘The Last Keeper’ whose rituals hold off darkness and the claims of a perilous sea – a man, who, holding out against change, ‘polishes the silver and trims the wick for old times’ sake’.

            The sense of dislocation and disturbance that pervades the collection from its opening lines arrives, in its final image in the last poem, ‘The Hebridean Crab Apple’, at a question of agency: ‘And what is home if not the choice -/ over and over again – to stay?’ Identifying with the tree’s accidental and singular isolation, the narrator concludes

This I understand: the instinct to cling,

At any cost, to the place you are rooted,

To see another season through, though

The others seed elsewhere.

In this way, the poet’s search for home also becomes an internalised act of resilience, accumulating power through the sequence of poems in this searching collection.