Marilyn Longstaff lives in Darlington and is a member of Vane Women writing collective. In 2003, she received a Northern Promise Award from New Writing North, and her third poetry book Raiment (Smokestack) was selected by New Writing North’s Read Regional in 2012. Her other collections are Puritan Games, Sitting among the Hoppers, Articles of War  and The Museum of Spare Parts. Her recent collection Being Gemini was published by Smokestack Books last year.

She was born under the sign of Gemini, and a theme of this collection is that there are two sides to everything  – from lockdowns, ageing and deafness, to politics and bereavement.

On the one hand, she lost her religious faith at 17, despite, or because of, her father's stern role as a Salvation Army officer: “Home is a place she can't go back to.” (‘The Officer's Daughter’). On the other hand, she had always wanted to walk across the Pyrenees, down to Santiago de Compostela. But, of course, by its very nature, this is no walk in the park. Apart from the heat, ice and insects, “I am beset by pilgrims - / their enforced jollity, / shallow kindnesses.” (‘Camino’).

This latter poem’s a good example of her no-nonsense and often humorous poetic style. In ‘Falleter’ she imagines herself as Eve, but “even nakedness was dull / in the land of pure pleasure.” It’s certainly a good thing that a poet born with the initials MCC in deference to her father’s passion for cricket is blessed with a sense of humour (‘MCC learns a lesson from cricket’). For life has not been without its blows and griefs. There is her deafness:

 

     He mentions how he loves to walk

     under an umbrella in the rain, how its drumming

     gives him so much pleasure; he doesn’t get the irony,

     how much she yearns for this, and the beating

     of a downpour on her night-time window pane.

                                                                (‘Sound Bank’)

 

There are imagination’s compensations: “In my night time silent world/ I hear the history of my home // the scratch of Saxon burial / and rattle of passing cart ” (‘On Removing Her Hearing Aids’).

Within this collection there is also a sequence of moving poems about the poet’s twin grandsons, born at 22 weeks. One survived, with “no weight of expectation”, the other died after four days: “Surviving twin, / identical brother: // we look at him, / we see the other.” (‘Due Date’). She measures the death and the continuing survival by full moons. And she remembers the loss when a little boy is paddling for the first time at Scarborough:

 

     studying the photograph

     captured on his mother’s phone

     seeing the other – mirror image

     reflected in the water – imagining,

     remembering his twin brother.

                                      (‘Reflections’)

The wide range of other poems in this collection include ‘Pit Brow Lasses’ – women who worked in the mines; the welfare state bounty enjoyed by baby-boomers in their youth (‘Dinosaurs’); a room of her own “in a landlocked town” (‘Refuge’); memories of working in a meat pie factory (‘Walls Pie Factory, Hyde’); and falling asleep in front of the telly (C/Old’).

The cover of the collection, details from Brechtian Gestures: Marilyn, 2022, by Fiona Crangle, has two images of the poet in repose – one apparently downcast, the other seeing the funny side of things. It’s a reflection of the collection’s title, Being Gemini. As Marilyn Longstaff rather self-deprecating puts it: “So here I am, as ever  split down the middle / neither one thing nor  the other.”  I would take a more positive view. It’s perfectly possible to see two sides of a situation – and in Marilyn Longstaff’s poems, side by side, are humour and humanity.

 

Marilyn Longstaff, Being Gemini, Smokestack, £7.99