Presence & absence: Matt Hetherington reviews 'Seams of Repair' by Stephanie Green

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May 26

Seams of Repair by Stephanie Green, Calanthe Press, 2023

"The little things are what is eternal, and the rest, all the rest, is brevity, extreme brevity."
Antonio Porchia ¹

Given the nature of events here and overseas in the last half-decade, it's not too surprising that so much recent literature has been centered around themes of loss, grieving, and healing. Seams of Repair would seem to be part of this tendency, and its title (as well as its cover) points to the power of restoration, where the mending of breakage is reliant on the strength of its craft. It is a work which gently yet repeatedly reminds us that such artfulness is also re-pairing: a joining of two distinct entities, whether they be the parent with child, the lover with the absent partner, or even the author with the necessary reader.

Exactly half of the book's forty pages of poetry contain prose poems, two of which bookend the work with a kind of open negativity: the opening phrase being "Loss can't be measured by numbers", and the final line being "Any conflict or breakdown presents an opportunity, a warning to continue without pause." Here we discover yet again two of the essential tropes of modern poetry: nothingness and infinity. While the last line certainly occurs in the context of playful – though understandably somewhat bitter – irony, the opening line is both essentially correct and dramatic (added to a few lines later by "zero is the only answer you ever get"), but it also contains an assertion the book at times seem appears to question: after all, the word "count" occurs in total five times, and the word "measure" four times.

Continuing this method of accounting for thematic patterns is also a useful way to supply the reader of this review with a sense of both the work's tone and its themes, and it mirrors, I hope, the "ruthless kindness" ('Shredded') that the poet shows towards herself and other beings. It is a vivid, sensual, and undeniably sub-tropical series of poems we encounter here:

all the colours saved,
in case you need them,
some day
..................................- 'Aunties'

yet the most common colours to appear are blue (thirteen times), grey, and white (twelve times each), though "bright" occurs ten times (and "dark" nine). One of the many pleasures of Seams of Repair is the almost obsessive repetitiveness of certain words: forget/forgotten (11); memory/memoires (10); remember/ed/ing (12); loss/lost (10). This is balanced by the superb ordering of the poems, which resist a grouping together of thematic concerns, preferring a mostly wavelike back and forth between presence and absence – and often within the limit of the poem itself. This is a rich and powerful dynamic, as Roland Barthes suggests in A Lover's Discourse:

Absence persists – I must endure it. Hence I will manipulate it: transform the distortion of time into oscillation, produce rhythm, make an entrance onto the stage of language…Absence becomes an active practice, a business (which keeps me from doing anything else)…This staging of language postpones the other's death…'²

The other's death (or absence) is perhaps the core of the book, and in the poet's modest grieving here, we are offered insights which can cause us to re-cognise what we have failed to notice and appreciate in our own lives, and maybe even where we might have been remiss in our love, and the expression of that love. At the same time, loss can also create a dearth of feeling – or alternatively, a feeling so large it can only be one thing: "You feel nothing now, except the touch of time." - 'First Night'. With aching frankness and humility, we are often shown the melancholy, frustration, and lucidity that occurs when the memory of a loved one insists on returning:

..............................................................................................................................................When I read, you crawl slowly along the edge of the page. I brush you off. Sometimes I try to crush you between thumb and forefinger, making a lop-sided zero as if to convince myself everything's ok. But soon you're back again to remind me, scratching in the margins, whispering all the words we said and didn't say.' - ........................................... - 'Edge of Vision'

Yet the gravity of grief is lightened at times by a subtle, knowing levity in pieces such as 'Romans' (a homage to Anita Loos), 'They Won't be Quiet' (in which 'marvellous crones grin into mirrors of unmaking'), and 'Oysters', with its gentle mockery of male oral bluster and sexual inclinations. Significantly, though, among the wise, low-key depictions of everyday living that make up the large part of the work there are arrestingly intense lines such as these: 'The hours you sat there with an idle fishing rod and a pack of cigarettes wishing you had money or love' (Found');

I asked myself,
not for the first time,
how to live'
...............................- 'Leaves of Clay'

When I could do nothing for myself
I could still care for you
...............................- 'Shredded'

For me, these understated cries are the dark yet luminous gold threads of kintsukuroi (referred to in the 'Foreword' and the opening poem) which bind the individual poems, as well as highlighting and strengthening the beauty of the whole work.

¹ Porchia, Antonio. Voices [trans. W.S. Merwin] Port Townsend, WA: Kage-an/Copper Canyon Press, 2003, p. 5.

² Barthes, Roland. A Lover's Discourse: Fragments [trans. Richard Howard.] London: Penguin, 1990, p.16.

- Matt Hetherington

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Matt Hetherington is a writer, music-maker, and moderately immoderate self-moderator. He has been writing poetry for over 30 years, and his sixth collection, Kaleidoscopes, was published by Recent Work Press in September 2020. Current Inspirations are: raw garlic, vinyl played very loud through big black speakers, and the Corpse Pose. www.matthetherington.net