The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
POEM OF THE WEEK
Self-isolating in its single occupancy home, the mollusc feels like a fitting mascot for the past year. We meet dozens of the critters in Elizabeth-Jane Burnett’s second poetry collection Of Sea – clams and cockles, mud snails and whelks.
It’s a fine example of a minigenre that has flourished lately: closely observed nature poetry about tiny, briny beasts. In The Stone Age, Jen Hadfield celebrates the limpet and the nudibranch; Suzannah V Evans’s Marine Objects gives voice to a barnacle; Isabel Galleymore’s Significant Other offers a quite unforgettable insight into the sex-life of the slipper limpet.
Let’s call them the Rockpool School. What these poets have in common is a self-contained intensity: a Rockpool School poem is usually brief, short-lined and intricate, each concise stanza shining like a polished shell.
This week’s poem is actually a pair of poems: a diptych of triolets from Of Sea. Or, as Burnett playfully calls them, “sea-olets”. A late medieval French form, the triolet is defined by its tight patterns. Of its eight rhymed lines, three are exact repetitions of earlier ones. Triolets have fallen almost completely out of fashion – almost nobody bothers, aside from Wendy Cope – which might partly be due to the fact that they are so difficult to write well.
But in these beautiful, lightfooted poems, Burnett makes the triolet’s strictures feel liberating, by returning to the form’s origins: song and dance. Her lines chime and echo, resounding with assonance (“tiny spirals”, “homes that hold”) and lilting alliteration.
This tiny, spiralling form proves the perfect match for a world of tiny, spiral-shelled sea creatures. Ignore whatever the radio DJs tell you: this year’s big dance is the whelk waltz. Tristram Fane Saunders
SUN
Songs are homes that hold us in the
swell, in waltz of whelk, in tiny spirals
flung, they steady us, bright anchors for the
cells.
Songs are homes that hold us in the
swell when we lack a centre there are bells to bring us back, in level beats of sun, songs are homes that hold us in the
swell in waltz of whelk, in tiny spirals
flung.
ECHO
Songs are homes made on the move,
they dwell in us and we in them, as moons
guiding the cells songs are homes made on the move,
they dwell in wings, in limbless shimmerings, in shells
of dark, of dunes songs are homes made on the move,
they dwell in us and we in them, as moons.
Of Sea (Penned in the Margins) is out on May 15
Eddowes, the author and campaigner for miscarriages of justice, tried to ghost her memoir. Masked men came into his home and beat him, giving him a stern warning to back off. So frightened was he that he burnt the manuscript.
By 1976, schooled by Sid Vicious, Mariella was wearing a spiky punk wig and swastika armband while she stripped in Soho. The police were watching her second-floor flat because men from the so-called “Hungarian Circle” of international criminals were frequenting the address. The gang originated in West Germany. Its 50 or so members engaged in multi-millionpound frauds involving fake Nazi gold, fake jewels, forged bank documents and fake paintings. The subsequent trial was one of the biggest to come before the Central Criminal Court in its history.
Then, on 9 May 1983, Mariella made herself a bowl of milk pudding. Several hours later she was found face down in it. The official version is that she died of a Temazepam overdose. “Very hard to die of an overdose,” one of her friends told me, “when she’d been taking them for 20-odd years.”
The conspiracy narratives that sweep through Mariella’s life stem not from a specific historical development – such as Watergate, the Kennedy assassination, or even the Cold War – but from the larger sense of diminished human agency, a feeling that individuals cannot effect meaningful social action. “At this moment in history,” wrote RD Laing in 1967, “we are The Culture of Paranoia... all caught in the hell of frenetic passivity.”
Mariella was bizarre, sometimes grotesque, and liked to shock. She died, abject and alone, stewing in her story, drowning in a confection she created to offset feelings of powerlessness. But I can hear a yearning, edgy, ambitious young woman who wanted to get out of wherever she was.
Can Mariella be trusted? Investigative journalists tread carefully when dealing with her allegations; Tom Mangold, for instance, described her as a “fantasist”. Mariella’s need for the spotlight was certainly urgent and relentless. She was capable of saying or doing anything to get it. But in all that she said or did there is a painful truth emerging. Unusually for a woman of her generation, she is quite candid in chronicling the abuse and exploitation that robbed her of her childhood.
Some might think she is a strange choice for a biographer. But I have always found the misdeeds of history’s vanquished more endearing than the achievements of its victors. She was a difficult woman before being a difficult woman was allowed. She knew many of the preeminent men of her time, although they tried their hardest not to admit it. But Mariella would not put up with marginalisation, and she would not shut up. Not even the FBI, the CIA or the British secret services could keep this woman quiet.
Mariella Novotny departed this world leaving scant traces behind. Based on the historian’s premise – absence of evidence is not evidence of absence – I kept trucking on. I met a retired burglar who showed me papers he swore he had extracted from Mariella’s flat: an Adidas holdall, filled with desk diaries and loose sheets. I met an erstwhile Soho stripper who had introduced Mariella to the peep shows and strip joints of the demimonde. Finally, my uncle revealed the role Mariella had played in my grandfather’s criminal enterprise. Even though she brought him down, he was fascinated by her. “She liked to make an effect, make a splash,” he told me, “she’d run and hide. That’s why she liked Soho. Round here, everyone keeps schtum. It’s the perfect cover.”
The deeper I got into Mariella’s story, the further I got from any sense of knowing her. If her dance was macabre, at least I did not look away. I stayed with her to the end to bring her back into the story of a certain kind of world that existed in the embers of the 20th century.
She touches me in a way that her radical female contemporaries, the likes of Germaine Greer and Rosie Boycott, cannot. She rubbed shoulders with them but she lacked the education and emotional resources to shape a clear vision. She was conflicted in what she wanted to achieve, and attempted to use men’s language to talk about what women knew. In a time when women were struggling to break free of the virgin/whore mould, she aimed high by using low tactics. In 1981, she told the News of the World: “I kept a diary of all my appointments in the UN building. Believe me, it’s dynamite. It’s now in the hands of the CIA.” Her trump card was sex, and she played it to the bitter end.