Mother, Nature, Aoife Lyall

Bloodaxe, 2021, £9.95

A Review by Alice Tarbuck

Aoife Lyall is a poet whose first collection demonstrates such clarity of vision and assurance of language that one wonders how readers coped without Mother, Nature before it came along. It ought, really, to be available on the NHS, accessible at any stage of pregnancy parenthood, or grief.

Lyall’s Mother, Nature is an immersive, compulsive text, that offers you a view of motherhood and infant mortality that cannot be looked away from. The candour of Lyall’s work is the key to its impact. The mundane, quotidian aspects of parenthood and grief are writ large, and, through scrupulous attention, turned into moments with resonance far beyond their specificity. In ‘Haunted’, the aftermath of grief must make its home amongst all the busy-ness of living, and this enormous effort splits the text in two:

‘Baby books lie buried        beneath the spare bed
Moved there weeks ago    by well-intentioned mothers while’

Here, things can never be put away neatly – everything is cyclical, appears and reappears, is fallen over, made new and sharp again in discovery. Grief is not the only thing felt new and extraordinary – Lyall also speaks about the extraordinary intimacies of new life: ‘You sleep on my chest/ hands splayed like a sunset’. Lyall’s poems are concerned with transforming the small moments, wrapping them in amber, marking them as important.

However, Lyall’s work is not salvific, and does not aim to transcend from incident to broader moral or social message. Instead, Lyall’s power lies in her refusal to allow grief, pain, and the ordinary business of living to be abstracted. We stay in the moment, are forced to look at the difficult thing, experience grief as durational in line with the poet’s breaths, the poet’s daily routines, the poet’s vocabularies of loss. Instead, these poems ask us what to do with grief, where our empathy can bridge, where care is needed. In ‘Autumn’ for example, Lyall listens to the husky next door howling, and makes a fascinating comparison between forms of loss and forms of memory: ‘Listless I listen, longing for the intensity/ of his grief, the impermanence of his loss’. Human grief is, here, permanent and quiet, and these poems form elegant howls out into the world, vocalising the pain that threatens, but never overwhelms, close attention to form and communication.

The means by which the force of this collection is achieved is a form of skeining, where emotions are woven through patterns of everyday movement, routine, and love. Love, for Lyall, is a tangible, bodily thing, which is borne of daily practice, patience, and perseverance. Passion is transmuted to love of children, the romantic for the domestic which is, in turn, transformed into the romanticism of the everyday. For example, in ‘Soft Spot’, we see the poet’s gaze turn to her spouse, though her address remains direct to her baby, in a form of transmitted love through a central fulcrum:

‘he held you sleeping, thumbing the smell
from your newborn head, easing around
the knots, the soft spot, humming.’

This attention, born of long love and deep knowing, begins with Lyall’s family, her immediate surroundings, but it does not end there. Lyall has a clear eye for landscape, and the comma between Mother and Nature in the title shows the two main preoccupations of the collection. The natural world is solace, play-place, a world not apart from the world of parenting and grief, but a theatre where these are performed, where comfort is found from the more-than-human, and the long cycles of the natural world provide comfort and lesson as to forms of perseverance. In ‘Loch Ness’, Lyall’s attention spreads across the imposing loch, tracing its shape and its personal significance: ‘Grey ebbs and flows reflect/ a sky that has a sun in it/somewhere’. This is, I think, a wonderful way of thinking about the collection: as variegated and quick-changing as the sky or the water of a loch, and similarly full of unexpected depths and shifts. Lyall is a generous, talented poet, and this first collection makes clear her skill and promise.