Unflinching poet Suzanna Fitzpatrick maps loss and grief
The launch of Suzanna Fitzpatrick’s debut full collection Crippled in London on Tuesday evening came with a trigger warning. The book explores a childhood shadowed by a mother’s chronic illness, culminating in a sequence of poems about death and the grieving process.
Suzanna said that if anyone in the audience who had recently suffered a family loss felt too affected by her poems they were free to leave at any time. No one did.
She began by singing a poignant Irish air, The Maid of Culmore, saying: “It’s about emigration, but I’ve always felt it’s also about bereavement.”
The collection is divided into two sections – the first a series of sonnets that chart her mother’s Multiple Sclerosis:
The first time was in 1974,
On holiday in Greece. I wasn’t born
but know the story well: the sudden slip,
the rocky path. You thought you’d tripped.
(‘Falls’)
Suzanna explained her use of sonnets: “I like to use forms to contain my most difficult emotions.” She then read the whole of the book’s second section, ‘Endgame’, which relates her mother’s final days in hospitals, and her own complicated and continuing feelings afterwards:
As I wake
I yank the chain of grief around my neck,
Remember you are dead. But still
My phone has learnt more quickly. Typing Mum,
predictive text helpfully suggests
death, followed logically by funeral.
(‘XVI, Endgame’)
Suzanna Fitzpatrick is an experienced poet, and is also studying for a poetry MA. This launch took place during a London summer school – it’s a joint Poetry School/Newcastle University course – and the room was thronged with fellow MA students, including me.
Within the ‘Endgame’ section she experiments with different forms and formats, but the urgency of her language is unconcerned with imagery or metaphor. Perhaps some subjects are too big to require such additions:
I am pulled to the ward you died in,
the bay, the bed. But if anyone asks,
who do I say I’m visiting?
(‘XXXIV, Endgame’)
Emotions are close to the surface of the poems throughout this section. There is the final hospital dash, after getting a call while breast-feeding her baby:
Throwing coins into the parking meter
like a gambler, sprinting
through hospital corridors faster
than I ever thought I could run
past shocked stares, almost past a man
who reaches out, why, why, can’t stop,
not recognising my brother, who can’t speak,
can’t answer my breathless questions –
she’s gone, has she gone, am I too late?
I’m too late. A nod
And we clutch each other.
(‘XVIII, Endgame’)
She was supported at the reading by Poetry School tutor Glyn Maxwell, who has been leading the week’s summer school, and who read a moving elegy to his mother, who died in 2023, “which I’ve never read before”.
Tamar Yoseloff, a Poetry School tutor for many years, read poems about her mother - “she is racing towards her destination” – and her father, the latter, ‘London Particular’, influenced by the poetry of place and psychogeography.
The first poet to read was Tessa Foley, popular manager of the Poetry School MA course, and the author of three poetry collections. She said she was missing her home city of Portsmouth during the heatwave. Her final poem was about “strong women”, and has the refrain: “I am both the singer, and the song.”
We needed to have the upstairs windows open at the Devereux pub near the Victoria Embankment because of the weather, even though there was a racket of voices from the courtyard drinkers below. But doesn’t poetry often struggle to make itself heard?
There is also a well-known phrase about “intruding on private grief”. But there was no sense of voyeurism in hearing Suzanne Fitzpatrick’s poems about her mother’s long illness and death, merely empathy. I suspect and hope that writing this book has been therapeutic for her, and that in some ways it may provide comfort for others.
Suzanna Fitzpatrick, Crippled, Red Squirrel Press, £10
