Susan Utting
REVIEWS
South
Review by D A Prince
Houses Without Walls
by Susan Utting
Susan Utting's fourth book is a collection of vibrant poems, alive with colour and movement. Its title comes from a traditional nursery rhyme, and Utting uses this to show that what really makes a house is the brilliant clarity of memory. Walls themselves may vanish as buildings decay but memory still holds the lovers, neighbours, noises, furnishings, colours, smells. City life presses on these poems, linking them, threading a personal history running from childhood through to the rented rooms and dance rhythms of adult life. They are packed with detail, giving substance to relationships that dissolve or break up, whether through the inevitability of ageing her mother) or separations (the lovers who inhabit the variously crowded rooms and damp basements). Noise, Great West Road catches the variety of London living –
we were snug,
huggermug with West Indian weddings,
chiropractors and washing-line underwear
thieves; with paraffin stoves that caught fire,
– the lines driven on with supple rhymes and half-rhymes, and with lists capturing the crowded rhythms of lives where casual fights erupt at any time. Dance, especially Spanish dance, becomes a metaphor for the erotic: in Spanish for love a woman is overtaken by 'metal-tipped heel clicks, delicate toetaps', until she is 'castanetting loose change in her pocket', adding a mantilla, a scarlet shawl. In The Colour-blind artist, art and music meet – 'Sometimes, when he painted, he could hear red/ in a minor key, distinct from green's harmonic fifth' – another way of reaching into the intensity of life.
A brief biographical note tells us that Susan Utting is currently Creative Writing Fellow in the
School of English and American Literature at the University of Reading. I bet she's good. These poems,
packed with energy, are not only exhilarating to read but also a spur to writing: a generous collection
from a full- blooded writer.
The North
Review by Sally Baker
Susan Utting's Houses Without Walls celebrates the minutiae of daily life, turning everyday objects into potent memories. She writes about distance and relationships, bones, snow, candles and bedsits. These a re dignified and graceful poems with plenty of domestic detail to create strong images, but emotionally spare enough to allow us to feel, even when surrounded by clutter. Her assured style comfortably tackles past, present and future, ageing and dreams. There are images linking the domestic with the romantic, and a hint of fairytale, as in 'My Mother's House':
My mother's wardrobe's full of ball-gowns,
sandwiches and biscuit barrels full of instant coffee,
there's granulated sugar in her dancing shoes...
'My Mother's House' describes the increasing confusion in an elderly woman's mind through a series of surreal settings. These poems are full of familiar and memorable objects -biscuit barrels and wineglasses, handbags, slippers; but what resonates is what goes on between people, the language of interaction. Even with dramatic subject matter she maintains a sense of calm, as in 'Noise, Delaunay’s Road' where the title is notable by its absence:
and I am taking down fine wedding china, gold-rimmed
white, from off the shelves in the backroom wash-house,
unconverted scullery till the old cracked lino's covered
with a beach of rocks and tiny gravel chips
The poems towards the end of the book document a relationship breakdown. A series of haikus carry messages from a long-distance lover, providing the bridge to the unsentimental 'Go On To The End' and the poignant 'Marks Left':
and the mark that was there
when I took off the ring I never took off, that I still
have ,that I don't want;
that I can't lose.
These are reflective, well-ordered poems with a freshness of detail and an original, theatrical slant on
life. They shine torches into unlit rooms, onto past lives, picking out the details of patterned carpets,
worn armchairs, and the ghosts who occupy the space.