NICK’S GIFT
Review by Paul Green
Becky Nuttall’s first collection is a delight to read. The poems range from vivid but unsentimental epiphanies of a sixties childhood to powerful evocations of a seventies adolescence in all its pains, pleasures and revelations. But there’s also razor -sharp contemporary satire and humour in various shades of black.
She explores the tensions and entanglements of family, the mysteries of love and desire, and the chilling rites of death and bereavement. She also presents a gallery of character portraits – a tragicomic thespian, an ancient Egyptian dog, and a paedophile children’s author, who gets the laser treatment he deserves, while the literary critic Cyril Connolly, who once declared that ‘the pram in the hall’ was an enemy of artistic creativity, is firmly put in his place. She moves deftly between classical symbolism and pop-culture references, from the Virgin Mary’s mother to the Crazy World of Arthur Brown…
For religion is a recurrent theme, especially as experienced by a Protestant girl in a Roman Catholic convent school. There’s a consistently subversive take on the iconography of saints and sacraments, a trope that recurs in her surrealist artworks. There’s also a parallel engagement with the challenges of being a woman artist in what has so often been a man’s world.
But what brings this rich material to life on the page is her flair for imagery and the physicality of language. She deploys words with a keen sense of sound and cadence, with precision and economy.
So it’s not surprising that the poems are so effective in performance, emotionally direct while retaining their layering of sub-texts and subtle resonances.
It’s hard to pick favourites but ‘Spaceflight’ stands out, a long poem pulling together many of the strands in the book, both elegy and affirmation for the protagonist of the title poem. ‘We do not care/ that wasted talents/are kept in vases/on the moon’. Becky Nuttall has certainly not wasted her talents. I look forward to her next collection and her return to performance in a post-viral world.
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Once upon a time Paul Green taught at South Devon College and performed with Torquay’s blooze/punk band Riff Power. Now he leads a mostly quiet life on the South Coast. His most recent poetry collection is ‘Shadow Times’ while his speculative fiction novels include ‘The Qliphoth’ and ‘Beneath the Pleasure Zones’. A selection of dramas for radio and stage can be found in ‘Babalon and Other Plays’. For more details re these and other works, you can go to paulgreenwriter.co.uk
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