Contemporary hauntings

Reviewing ALMOST, WITH TENDERNESS by Maya Caspari

Maya Caspari is a poet, researcher, and curator, based in London. Her poetry has been published in Ambit, Butcher’s Dog, The Poetry Review, Perverse, Propel and Wasafiri. She has been highly commended in the Forward Prizes, longlisted in the National Poetry Competition, and shortlisted for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award. She is a Lecturer at the University of York.

ALMOST, WITH TENDERNESS strikes me as a story of hauntings – the past over the present, our ancestors with ourselves, and the places we were within the places we are now. Holding true to the poets’ maxim of ‘show, don’t tell’, Maya’s care with word choices and form leaves the reader to intuit the situations from the feelings left behind. It’s akin to opening a letter we have opened many times before – the words have rubbed away where it has been folded and unfolded along the same creases, but we know what they are.

The theme of migration runs through many of the poems – what it means for a personal, and cultural, identity, to be ‘between places’, no longer one but never fully reaching the other.

Two poems, both using a contrapuntal format, make use of ambiguity and multiple ways to read to great effect. Substack isn’t good for laying out poetry, so you’ll have to get hold of a copy of the pamphlet to see how well they work on the page, but here are a couple of snippets:

“Whiteness came to me like cling film / shiny, stretched, stuck / to skin, wrinkling mostly at / contact”

MIXED OTHER

“Who are you? And, what did you do? a man / a place to call its own, a blood, a home, fat-walled / fat-walleted with death”

COMPASS

Family history is another theme Maya handles with a lightness that belies the depth and significance of the events in question. ACCIDENT is a masterclass in the way language betrays the things it refuses to talk about:

“... we do not notice / how our bodies learn / to fold round accident / speak often in accident / don’t speak much about accident” [italics mine]

“... no, / our family’s not / accident only / but accident is part /of what we keep”

In this poem, and OLIVES – an after to Natalie Diaz’s ‘No More Cake Here’ – there is a marked feeling of estrangement, and through this, Maya explores the “subtle dissonance” of pretending things are fine when they are anything but. There is a vivid, dreamlike (almost childlike) imagery:

“There were no real / children at the party. Still, we hung strips of packaging / from the online shops my sister liked, cut into bright abstract/ shapes, or shredded like flaccid mop tendrils from the ceiling”

The forced, bright hilarity is then undercut with the starkness of these lines:

“We did not speak about her husband, or why / she had not been able to come to the party”

Vivid, sensory detail is picked up elsewhere, with elements of the surreal. Maya is very strong with tight, precise images that punch through the static of thought. TV is “a square-cut / drop, a falling hum” (MOTHS). Migrants arrive on a “hot-moaning boat” (ARRIVAL).

SCALES, one of my favourite poems in the collection, recreates the fizzing intensity of girlhood, again with great use of sensory detail:

“& when the doors open / onto break’s slap of Impulse hot / carpet-baked fumes”

The play of power and powerlessness is so skillfully done, I felt myself back there, among the “... eyes / frantic & flushed / with the fresh joy of cruelty”.

ALMOST, WITH TENDERNESS is an assured, intelligent debut pamphlet from a writer who shows her curiosity and her acuity of observation with every word. It is available from Out-Spoken Press.

Maya is also reading in London at Soho Poly Poetry on 9 April, along with Keith Jarrett, Karen McCarthy Woolf, and Zain Rishi (I mean — !). I believe tickets are sold out, but check with Soho Poly/ Hannah Copley in case there is a waiting list. I can’t wait to see this star-studded line up.