Catherine Redford began writing after the early death of her partner and is now widely published. The Way the Water Held Me is her debut collection, dedicated to the memory of her partner, Rebecca Marsland, and also for her son and husband.

In his play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Tom Stoppard describes death as “the endless time of never coming back … a gap you can't see, and when the wind blows through it, it makes no sound …"

Catherine Redford’s poems speak powerfully and accessibly into that gap. Her use of image and metaphor gives form to the frightening chaos of grief. In her first poem, ‘Everything that’s said in this room is confidential’, she grapples with the therapeutic metaphors provided by her bereavement counsellor. They twist and turn as she tries them for size. In further poems, she develops her own, turning repeatedly to water and the sea, the title and the final line of her collection. Other resources for metaphors include the materiality of the body, the home, the moon and the illuminated manuscript. Though death and bereavement have inspired poets across centuries, Redford’s contribution fizzes with fresh and deeply moving life. 

Widowed at 35 and, together with her wife, the parent of a baby born through IVF, she is stranded between birth and death. In ‘Night Music’, “their owl calls … echo between rooms” as she is “pulled /from his cot to her bed”. The child is “growing violently”. Her wife is “folding / in like a waning paper moon”. As you read on, Redford’s back story emerges. That of her partner and their relationship similarly appear as in life: “You’d spend all day in the corners of libraries / counting the words in medieval poems” and “we take tea in matching mugs / and smile at each other across the table” (‘Stillness’). The partner’s desk reveals more of what she was about, her notebooks and her pencil case; and Redford tells us “I search her desk once more in the fading hope / of a final letter left for me”. The blank pages in the notebooks are many, as the poem’s final, poignant line tells us (‘Circles’). 

Through these fragments, we come to know the partner, and as well, the nature of Redford’s grief. When people ask her how she’s doing (‘They all ask me how I’m doing’), she says, by way of aside:

 

I’m animal smell    dirt-coated claws   retreating/I find I’m living   underground    they nod   

 ah yes/like a grave    and the worms laugh with me    knowing/ this is far from the truth

 

The related question, of how a woman bereaved of so young a partner should conduct herself, is considered in ‘Performance’ where “the visitors arrive with cake tins / and expectations”.  Queen Victoria and Jackie O are appropriate role models, “but never/ Yoko Ono, /never Courtney Love”.

By way of a companion in loss and grief, Redford reaches out to Mary Shelley, the gothic novelist central to her academic research and writing. Mary’s partner, Percy Bysshe Shelley, was younger still when he drowned in a boating accident in the Mediterranean, an echo of Redford’s frequent use of the sea as a resource for metaphors. Many of these poems are collaged from Mary’s novels and letters, their voices brought together in loss. In ‘I allow Mary Shelley to create another monster’, the two women walk to Hampstead Heath at dawn:

 

     laughing together for a little too long in sisterly conspiracy

     at our shared delusion. We dare each other

     to conjure them back through the mist, 

     mutter incantations over the shadowless waters.

     I make her throw his heart into the centre of the lake

     and she wipes my wife’s texts from my phone.  

 

The notion of bereavement as a journey leading to resolution has been questioned, but we have a sense of Redford’s grief undergoing change towards the end of her collection. ‘Starting again’, however, conveys the painfulness of this process through the imagery of scattering seed over “horse-ploughed rows”. “Sowing this crop / makes me feel like / I’m being buried”, she writes.  Later though, in ‘Waves’, field and sea blend in the lines: “I yield to the undulations, / permit my body to sink and rise and sink, / folding into the field. / Cheek against earth, safe …”

Redford sustains the potency and reach of these bereavement poems throughout her collection. Although her loss is specific, her words speak to loss more broadly, illuminating the unimaginable landscape of bereavement. ‘Widow’s Weeds’ does describe ‘small beats of happiness / easing / through the fractures like weeds”. In the final poem, ‘Her Worldly Goods’, we receive one last glimpse of the lost partner, “her umbrella and swimsuit, her pool pass / in her wallet’s neat archive of cards and receipts.” Yet as many bereaved people discover, not everything can be kept, and the poem describes “Nine black sacks of all she was, / stacked like rubbish in an alley on a Monday morning. // As the charity van pulls off the drive, I cry. I’ve let go / of all the wrong things …”

 

Catherine Redford, The Way the Water Held Me, The Emma Press, £10.99

 

 

Jenny Hockey is a Sheffield poet and retired anthropologist who has received a New Poets award from New Writing North. Her collection, Going to bed with the moon, was published by Oversteps Books. She also reviews regularly for Orbis magazine and, with Carol Komaromy, has published a memoir of family life and war (familyhistoryandwar.com).

jennyhockeypoetry.co.uk