There’s A Witch In The Word Machine

Polygon This second collection from Jenni Fagan is bound together by a series of “spells”. Fagan writes of Paris, New York, Detroit and Los Angeles. In an especially powerful poem she also writes of “Bangour Village Hospital”, with its striking opening lines “I was born here / then a little while later I died”. It is an uncompromising poem where the narrating patient says, with a savage irony, “They electrocuted / synaptic transmissions until we were all / forget-me-nots!” It is the longest poem in the collection and serves as a kind of fulcrum for the whole, balancing Fagan’s concern with the shunned and the exorcised. It is also a collection which is frank in marrying properly erotic poetry with an undertow, always, of elegy. Even in an ostensibly “non-lover” poem it is discernible – to quote it in full, “This / world /is/enough/tomakeyourheart/hurt/all/ the time”. I admired Fagan’s first collection, and this shows some interesting developments in her style. There is perhaps less polemic and more caution, shown particularly in her use of parentheses. In “Spell For A Woman In Waiting” the reader encounters a kind of double-stumble of thought: “you can wait / for responses / of all and any kind / he has exes to inform / (perhaps) or (not) / but possibly” and “he will / never (say or not say) / what this is / or will be, or when he’ll / arrive or who will ever know / (it will be nobody).”

Some of the language has become more askance than in her first collection. I was taken by phrases like “the nothing sky” and “the angularity of acceptance”. She must also be the poet who has used the f-word to most dramatic effect. The poem “O.C.D.” is a form of O.C.D. in itself with that word screaming around in an almost hypnotic manner. There is a strange hankering for something numinous. In Fagan’s case it is not conventional Christianity (I don’t believe in Christianity ever being conventional) but there is a yearning in the book. The final poem ends with “to dreamers / to dreaming – they must allhearthis/itistimetorise/weheart beaters… / it has been decreed – stamped / issued by angels / in Paris”.