Melancholy reigns
Elizabeth Morton renders her often grim subject matter with style and skill.
‘ There is a black horse that rides through all my poems,” writes Elizabeth Morton in Tropes. Indeed there is.
In her second collection, This is your real name, there is much melancholy, sorrow and loneliness. The opening poem, Untouch, suggests a search for identity against crushing conformity: “They said write it anonymously… they said swallow your name.” Elsewhere, there is huge alienation felt in a supermarket aisle ( On hold), failing connections ( Lines), anxiety about health ( Mole), death by severe allergy ( Peanut) and a strong sense that life and love are somewhere else in Where we go: “I press a conch shell/to my ear and hear the/ happiness of other people’s lives.”
Morton paints desolate landscapes, sometimes almost post-apocalyptic, sometimes with American imagery.
Men booze away their loneliness in an American bar (Sissy as an elephant) and inspirational clichés are turned inside out in Since: “Since time heals/nobody who may be bleeding out …/… since what doesn’t kill you,/can still f--- up your life.”
But here’s the miracle of poetry: what is grim can still be lively and readable. Morton’s dramatic sense and talent with imagery produce many poetic standouts.
The male-centred Maze shows great technical skill in harnessing a mythological tale to a psychological state. Its ending is brilliant. Another that should go straight into the anthologies is Stranding, in which imagery links human relationships to our earliest emergence as a species.
In poetry, style and ideas are intertwined, and the style here is terrific.
“I press a conch shell/ to my ear and hear the/ happiness of other people’s lives.”