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I watch our starveling Tom steering

his long shadow between the table legs. I smile. I was

a young girl once and moved like a cat’s shadow.

 

And:

 

… They called me fox, for the teaseled

burlesque of my redbrown hair. They called him bear,

he carried a razorblade under his nail…

 

There’s also the beguiling line: ‘He was in my/ brain, my blood, like spring’s green treatment.’ ‘And I will consider the yellow dog’ is subtitled ‘After Christopher Smart’ referring to the 18th century poet who was for a time sent to a mental asylum for perceived ‘religious mania’ and who ended his days tragically in a debtors’ prison. It begins intriguingly:

 

And Smart saw God concentric in his cat.

Smart’s cat, artificing faith from cyclone

volition. There is no God in you, yellow

dog. Your breath is our daily quicksand

 

There’s a particularly beautiful poetic flourish about midway in the poem:

 

… And I will

consider your eyes, their hazel light

a gulp of fire, those firewater eyes,

holding now a numb depth down,

and milkier flickering monthly.

 

There are some curious phrasings throughout possibly evoking the period: ‘Our frank amaze at your hardy/ smarts!’ The poem closes on the resonant: ‘A yellow dog comes only/ once and is hisself: brilliant, final and entire.’ ‘A ghost in our house’ is a hauntingly sublime meditation on poverty:

 

I don’t know why. But I do know this:

when you’ve been hungry then nothing

is ever enough.

 

Hunger remembers, hunger records,

like tape, like stone. In the dark our

hungers mushroom, become a fungus

in the lung.

 

The chiming of ‘hungers’, ‘fungus’ and ‘lung’ is particularly effective. This powerful poem closes on a lingering image:

 

At the upmost top of the stairs on

the landing, what’s left of you is standing

like a darker patch of dark.

 

I’ve often thought Lock’s poetry has much in common with Sylvia Plath’s in terms of mood, tone and imageries, so a Lockian nod to Plath is perhaps inevitable, certainly it is necessary, and comes in the form of “Daddy’, indeed’ subtitled ‘After Sylvia Plath’—and it certainly is consciously composed in Plathian style with disturbingly visceral images:

 

A male muse should remain buried.

You rise like a red velvet curtain. You

rise to thread that fat part of your smile

through a curved hook. Your smile, most

unmentionable worm. Brocade of skin.

Your mouth has been a shrine I fringe

with fire, or feed with coal. There’s smoke

enough to swell a chimney. You are not

dead. The wardrobe isn’t closed, and no

cold shirts yearn for you. I am milking

my long fingers. I take off my gloves

with my teeth…

 

It’s difficult to think of many other, or even any other, contemporary female poets who can pull this kind of Plathian mood piece off so uncannily as Lock:

 

                      … A male muse should

remain among the inveterate-earthed

with mud under his tongue. You rise

to retrieve your fist from the wall.

Your body is soft. You sustained

your softness like an injury. You have

no discipline. You have pinned your

discipline to your children. To the Irish.

To your Irish child. To your Mormon Christ.

 

‘Dear Comrade’ is equally visceral as its immediate predecessor, and Plathian:

 

                                                                             … Or

for coffee’s unprincipled liquorice spree. Our tongues

will turn the loamy earth like spades. We know where to

go: away from all the wet brains running their frictionless

mouths; the carbon-neutral haircuts, declaiming their cold

idea. Ours is an afternoon’s bruised republic: a creaking

stair, the crooning French, a semi-coherence of weather,

words. Where poems come, these cannibal colossi, eat

the flesh that falls from me. Art, in carnivorous mufti, puts

out a pristine polar light, as finite as a trial…

 

I love the phrase ‘bruised republic’. A little further on we get: 'pure as a Medici pearl. We do not see the world the way they do,/ want parables and tangerines; velvet lapels, the gold auratic/ swell of holy things'. The poem closes on a coldly poetic note: '… God save us,/ from the petty spiral of hindsight; from forgetting/ under London skies, to count out each shivering,/ ostracised star'. ‘True Confessions of a Catholic Schoolgirl’ is composed in longer lines: '… Mine is a mood/ you might take tweezers to; my mood resisting spring’s green peek-a-boo,/ with cats alive in the redolent hedges. Despair’s a kind of clockwork lust'. In ‘The Miracle of the Rose’ there’s something almost Neoplatonist in the opening line: ‘I want you to buy me a rose so perfect/ it is a logo of a rose.’ ‘Happiness’ is sublimely lyrical with some more beautiful images: ‘the paschal stink of churches; is beauty as a Byzantine rite’, ‘a skyline bandaged with factories’, ‘love’s low wattage on a leafy day’, while the phrase ‘anxious gallop’ is less serene and in many ways describes Lock’s style.

 

‘Drink with friends’ gifts us some more beguiling images such as ‘tallowy arms’. There’s a Plathian tone in the acidy imagery: 'God is sieved through drink,

her thoughts are chemical plankton, phosphorescing,/ strobing, sifted, drifting, gone'. And the closing passage is particularly Plathian, wrought with glorious alliteration, assonance and sibilance:

​

Here is the gilded Papal slug

of Goldschläger, its slick cowlicks of fire

dancing in her head. Here is her face,

flat and grubby as a used nicotine patch.

And here is her stung knuckle, a reliquary,

gnawed white.

 

In ‘On trauma’ we get the following flourish: '… The scurried/ burlesque of suburbia, preternatural nets atwitch for/ the kid who kept to himself, his melon-head pranked/ open: unpopular, ginger, and they didn’t mean it'. There are occasions when Lockian images are oblique: ‘Behold: the skull/ exhibits its cracked-spinel eye!’ Lock is particularly skilled with consonance which she uses whether consciously or not to frequent cutting, spikey effect, as at the start of ‘Rock bottom’:

 

He walked out over the estuary, like King

Cnut contradicting the tide. He walked until

the numb pearlescent light spread from his

waist like a grey soutane.

 

A ‘soutane’ for the uninitiated a type of cassock worn by Roman Catholic priests. It soon becomes clear that this is someone walking into the sea and about to drown themselves: ‘He walked with/ his hands at his sides, his white cuffs/ trailing like paper boats’, and:

 

                                         … He stepped

into vanishing, knelt without solemnity

or fervour, was met by a velvety purring

dark. And this is how I picture him,

marbled, cosseted and drowsing, on a bed

of blue anemones. His smile a lustring

relic, eyes like sunken stars.

 

Lock’s choice of enjambments is interesting here, particularly ‘purring/ dark.’ In ‘On guillotines’ Lock has more aphorisms aplenty—this nicely alliterative one: 'What am I afraid of?/ The woman next door, her Mersey perm; men/ in general, ridicule and malnutrition'. There’s never an ounce of complacency in Lock’s poetry, but always the sense of a poet constantly in pursuit of surprising turns of phrase: 'He inflates himself/ like a blood pressure cuff; he’s brown and bones/ as a peat bog sacrifice. Make another cup of tea'. The Plathian aspects to Lock’s poetry are almost always counterbalanced with a wry sense of humour: 'His ee-i-ad-i-oh banging

a gong in my knotty gourd. I could lose the plot. But/ mine is a sapling madness, bends and does not break'. This poem closes on a deft internal rhyme: 'Peers of the Realm,/ their padlocked luck, their lack of a clue, their big/ ideas: they’re coming for me. After that they’ll be/ coming for you'. 

​

In ‘Children of the Night’ there’s a stunning musical trope: ‘I finger my playlist louder; bite down on a payload of miniature bliss,/ sugar steeped in sweet hibiscus ‘sinthe. Apéritif, I let it rock and fold/ me.’ There’s an equally striking passage which has all the painterly Grand Guignol of a Goya painting:

 

… Camden, a dithering grammar of knives; repertoire

of wounds and juices. I am at home here, my hunger is at home. I

chew my tongue. He’s looming again, blue gummed and smudgy-

goth, Grimaldi with emetic mouth, black lipstick on…

 

The g- and m-alliterations here—‘Camden’, ‘grammar’, ‘hunger’, ‘looming’, ‘gummed’, ‘smudgy-goth’, ‘Grimaldi’, ‘emetic mouth’—are palpable. And how true and yet seldom cited in poetry is the following contemporaneous trope: ‘Weekends are worst, the worst, a hotwire in the head, and eff all on the telly.’ This poem—excuse the pun—comes to a climax in a visceral and explicitly depicted sex scene laced with adolescent lust and Catholic guilt:

 

                                                … I pick him up in clubland,

flaunted and scoring; beckon him back with a breath that smells

of wet cement; with a breath that smells of spent matches, ethanol

and atropine. He doesn’t notice, and I must feed, skimpily fetish

in leather and lace. Gorgeous short-changeling, up fer it. I can

taste hairspray, aftershave and high alarm. I run my tongue

across my teeth, and test his fine raised veins like braille. He falls

back, acutely climaxed, shipwrecked on a daybed, preened in his

own mildewed pearls. His eyes are wide, his skin is cold. I roll

him over, wipe my mouth along my sleeve. Blood’s red pheromone

loose in the room. My dress is Gideon Bible Black. I belong to this

place. Forever, amen.

 

The title poem, ‘Contains Mild Peril’, contains—to paraphrase Walt Whitman—multitudes in the form of various mainly female figures from mythology and history which serve as a series of leitmotivs—they include consumptive Pre-Raphaelite artist, poet and model Elizabeth ‘Lizzie’ Siddal (who died at 32, probably by suicide), the ‘bathtub Ophelia’ for Millais’ iconic Ophelia, Madonna, and Medusa, but also male figures such as Caliban, Minotaur, Lorca and Ian Curtis. I particularly like the second section:

 

Wednesday’s Child is sputtering out her permafrosted consonants. Today I am thin Lizzy Siddal. I put

on my Dama, and then I am stark and raving. This mask deals in absolutes. Pretentious moi is a red

head, an orthodox whore with a starry crush of penetrative pronouns. Pretentious moi has ninety-nine

names, is drenched in her own extrovert suppleness, pale and protein-free in party clothes. This is not

poetry. Bitch is a bathtub Ophelia in her no frills wickedness, a thrift of flowers. Bitch is a bindweed

bombshell, crass as a Poor Clare, utterly ignorant, porous with mercy. This mask is all things to all men.

It weights the face like your heaviest thought.

 

In the third verse, the iconic Joy Division lead singer, lyricist and suicide, Ian Curtis, is described imaginatively as ‘an analogue Lorca’, while ‘my whole head is a sad Calaca stiff with marigolds’ calls to mind the intoxicated decadent imageries of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, as do the subsequent lines:

 

Yes, my mask is a louche señora, bright with rude hauteur, ideal for when the jaw clamps shut like a

music box and all speech is self-harm. My mask is a mask for when you are dead. My mask is a mask for

when your fingers refuse the piano. My mask is hardnosed, mechanically explicit, absolutely tasteless. A

mask to mean my short-lived lusts, sealing my face shut like an evidence bag.

 

The theme of masks is an interesting one—how many of them do we consciously or unconsciously don in our daily lives? It seeps into the fourth and final section:

 

I am Caliban and there is no mask just a life that I wear like a bag on my head. Minotaur, whose

thoughts are jutting horns, whose long face is its own scold’s bridle. When I am Caliban spirits of the air

surround me like wasps around a litter bin. Girl as a grimacing fakir, anorexic and pig-headed with

penitence. When I am Caliban I am wider than flood defences with nobody loves me. I eat worms. I

comb the crackbaby tangles from my beehive hair and pioneer new stress positions, squatting under

bridges. When I am Caliban I am too ugly for even sunlight. My face should be shut up in an attic. My

face is a speaking clock. My face is a fifteen certificate.

 

In ‘A tiny band of glittering stones’ Lock sums up her hand-to-mouth upbringing memorably thus: ‘the bitten lip, the free school meal, the dawning of a navy bruise.’ There’s similar imagery in ‘Valery in Zombieland’: ‘skin that lilac-blue beneath the same/ old battered platinum aura, a staticky snowblind blonde’—this is another Goyaesque urban Grand Guignol engorged with ghoulish images:

 

                    … I walk with you, into these dank, inoperable

streets where Hawley’s punters grunt their knuckle-sucking

music. It’s raining, shattered glasses curry incandescence

on the pavement, the whole of Camden buzzing with a lairy

electricity. The Marathon’s disbanded and staggered into

headlights, irregular and legless, they puke their rumbled guts.

Girls go by, tricked out for drunk dysphoric kabuki in

Islington clubs…

 

The k-alliterations are particularly effective here: ‘dank’, ‘knuckle-sucking’, ‘puke’, ‘tricked’, ‘kabuki’—and in the subsequent line: 'Dreadlocks selling one love lollies, preposterous/ with THC. Anarcho-crust-patch vanguard on the bridge, old/ friends we duck'. ‘Gentry’ is laid out on the page a little more like a conventional poem, with shorter lines—but of course, this being Lock, it’s anything but, threaded as it is with strikingly imaginative similes: 'On my walk/ to work are cars crushed into/ walls like faces buried in pillows'—and: 'Here/ is a cat with a hookah tail./ Here are tattoos and childbirth;/ other people’s palsied photons/ fastened to a screen'. This poem also gifts the image ‘alky dark’. In ‘Loneliness of the long distance runner’ (named after the iconic 1962 kitchen sink film written by Alan Sillitoe and starring Tom Courtenay) we’re treated to the phrase ‘prefab taboo’.

 

‘My dear Maurice’ is preceded by two quotes about T.S. Eliot’s first wife Vivienne Haigh Wood who has been historically characterised as mentally unstable, and who sadly ended her days in an asylum, but who was an unsung poetic collaborator of her husband’s particularly regarding certain passages in his Modernist tour de force The Waste Land. The first quote is rather typically judgemental and dismissive from Virginia Woolf, while the second is a much more compassionate summation by Vivienne’s brother Maurice. In this poem Lock ventriloquises a(n internal?) monologue by Vivienne, and one instantly gets an uncanny sense of period and atmosphere:

 

                     … April yet again; a season of caprice and pale

Jacquard is soon to be upon us. I shall not stir. I will remain

Immaculate—one must. Mother said that beauty is a white,

unyielding power that stiffens girls like frost… I froze when spoken to, a spider

stunned by torchlight. Now, I think of you, at eight years old,

a cruelly scrutinising god, you burnt the slow blue beetle up …

 

So uncanny is the verisimilitude of this speaker that one senses a kind of poetic mediumship. This poem is a sort of feminist deconstruction of the Eliotic mythology surrounding Vivienne, and is welcome for it since one senses she was harshly treated: ‘women whose sickness is militancy, who swing their arms/ like soldiers, whose lunacy is a uniform? Is this your love?’ This is a mesmerising poem seamed with aphorism:

 

                                                     … I seem to dream,

suspended in decorous torpor; casting these unvaried

shadows on the orange carpet. I seem to dream, amassing

my inertias like a sundial; lichens climb my embonpoint.

My apathy is eveningwear. And yet—the mind remains,

obstreperous and pure, a child’s fist curled tight inside.

 

Lock’s vocabulary is not so much commodious as sprawling and I’m grateful to her for introducing me to the wonderful word ‘embonpoint’ which means the plumpest part of one’s body. The poem closes on a lasting image of breakdown and disintegration which not only well evokes Vivienne’s sufferings and decline, but also at once summons to mind the misunderstood and tormented anti-heroines of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, and John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman, and the hoary ‘hysteria’ and ‘madwoman in the attic’ motif deployed in a patriarchal psychiatric past with the indirect effect of further oppressing the female psyche and grossly misunderstanding premenstrual and menopausal pathologies: 'I don’t remember well; sometimes I see a river,/ blue and gold, the bright and tattered fabric I am remnant of'. 

 

‘Sister Cathy’ is a meditation on the caprices of a Roman Catholic upbringing. It gifts the wonderful phrase ‘the chaperoned-real’. There’s a domestic play on Christ’s resurrected aura: ‘And Christ, on gas-mark seven, bluest flame,/ a terrible burn, a solipsistic only-child.’ Lock’s own very particular kind of belief is fascinatingly expressed: 'It’s not a blind/ obedience I loved, it’s holding every doubt in turn up to/ an inward jewellers’ loupe; it’s faith in faceted beholding'. The poem closes on a mental blossoming, a heartfelt expression of natural faith, which carries the cadence of subtly emplaced internal rhymes:

 

… And should I speak? And how to say? I did not do

enough. Until one day – – – the early spring has bunched

my upstart mouth with flowers. I entertain the ardent shoots;

the bowl I have become inviting rain.

 

The mysterious even opaque ‘Francis’ is a Plathian lyric piece with shades of Edvard Munch: ‘The immobilised mouth melts into/ its own scream. A scream without edges, my mouth.’ ‘Poem in which I attempt to explain my process’ is brilliantly alliterative tirade against faith sacrifices:

 

                                        … Poem in which the old

cripple’s Bombyx fists are burst on the low corner

of a tea table, where funerals are manners, ramekins,

napkins, and a picture of the Late Pope. Poem in

which I cannot sleep, wear faith like a verdict, blacken

the blackest Friday in recorded history. Poem in which

Belfast beams her paranoid telemetry, in which there

is no past, only history. Poem in which my suicide-

cousin gave everything away to the stupid utopian

ponzis of God and his chronically bothered Christian

Science…

 

The phrases ‘ponzis of God’ is particularly potent. ‘Saint Hellier’ sports some of Lock’s most beautiful descriptions: 'the pastel drawings dragged/ their skewed perspective over the eye; their colours mumbled:/ weak coffee and commiseration, Styrofoam and dandruff'. A little further in we get ‘brow-beaten flowers’; and there’s a stunning image which recalls Eliot: 'Beyond the main reception,/ figures, smoking, paced out against the grey and early/ day like cockle-pickers'. While ‘Caffeine, like a finger in a hinge’ also stands out. ‘On incantation’ is an apt title since Lock’s poems are often like incantations; again there are arresting phrases aplenty: ‘cull my love like a captured flag’, ‘a rank lacquer of sweat’, ‘You belong to me, just me, just come, with olive branches,/ smoking roses’. Some tropes hit home contemporaneously: 'I fix grit-coffee, watch the news: riots, obesities,/ the ingrown godless poor who are always with us'. 

 

‘Citizen Pit Pull’ gifts the following memorable trope: ‘Here he comes, my Citizen Pit Bull,/ attacking the slow handclaps of Liberal Democrats’—wonderful assonance. In ‘Jonah’ Lock writes candidly: ‘… his mouth a spectacle/ of inkjet orchidity. He said I kissed as if/ I was licking an envelope’—and the following verses are particularly potent in terms of sense impressions and o- and e-assonance, m-alliteration and sibilance:

 

He sought me out. He sought me out

among my books and bed sheets, clamant

masturbator who always called at the wrong

moment; groaning, gaunt and grainy

as footage of Roswell, peevish and smutty

and smelling of hash, of wet cement.

 

I saw him last in the dank grotto

of his Blackrock squat, bent low

like blowing glass; one of seven

skellybone boys in dirt and shreds

of denim, delicate and fidgeting.

He hit me up for a tenner.

 

The incantatory quality comes into play in the Icelandic ‘Sailing from Jökulmær’:

 

… so I brought you gruff ancestors, wrapped like baby

teeth in paper napkins, packed between the flannelettes in thermal snug. I gathered

all the arrowheads, all trinkets, charms and thunderstones…

 

One assumes this is about the poet visiting Iceland judging by the Icelandic term in the title, which apparently means something like ‘young woman of the glacier’, and by the images such ‘ice and basalt’ and ‘black sand’:

 

… I have brought back to you: grim thimble of black sand, a photograph: these people were your people,

lean and fearful pilgrims; upright dynasties that split their bows on slick green rock. … I offered you

their wassail and their isinglass; their offal and their crochet lace. Their god, a cramped mistaking sworn

to in the dark. You did not see yourself in them. I handed you their church instead, an off-white spire, a

pallid tusk. I showed you stained glass, paschal musk. I had smuggled their Christ through customs as a

splinter under my nail. … I told you of my husband’s hands, the headland’s feral gloom, and morning’s

caustic coffee taste… impression cast in plaster of his every skittish kiss. You are unmoved. I fashioned

you an amulet from Jólakötturinn’s teeth, and scooped the stars like mushrooms in my skirt… But you

would not remember, corpsey green and violet lights astray, askew, and wandering. The thin black ice,

salt cod with every single thing. … Out there beyond the car park, London harps her asphalt theme…

You spit words like a sailor still. These fragments of perfected spleen.

 

This poem is presented on the page as a chunk of prose and Lock is a poet who can do this since her linguistic engagement is so heightened, so figurative and image-rich, the effect is still that of pure poetry (once again one is reminded of the aphorismic prose of Iain Sinclair). The opaqueness of Lock’s poetry often means I’m compelled more to focus on the poetic language and less so on the narratives or identities of any ventriloquised monologists, so for ‘Matthew in Heaven’ I don’t pretend to know whom exactly this poem addresses nor to speculate but look instead to the abundance of yet more arresting phrases, as in the opening trope: 'I see him still: a cat creates itself anew from oblong/ shadows under cars'. For me, this line immediately calls to mind Harold Monro’s ‘Milk for the Cat’:

 

She nestles over the shining rim,

Buries her chin in the creamy sea;

Her tail hangs loose; each drowsy paw

Is doubled under each bending knee.

 

A long, dim ecstasy holds her life;

Her world is an infinite shapeless white,

Till her tongue has curled the last holy drop,

Then she sinks back into the night,

 

Draws and dips her body to heap

Her sleepy nerves in the great arm-chair…

 

And also T.S. Eliot’s feline personification of the London fog near the start of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’:

 

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,

The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes

Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,

Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,

Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,

Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,

And seeing that it was a soft October night,

Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

 

It then occurs to me that literary criticism, or at least my form of it, can often be a kind of stream-of-consciousness exercise where numerous associations, synchronicities, connections, serendipities and so on are drawn together from various sources—but I’d not call this stream-of-criticism for the obvious misinterpretations. I haven’t the foggiest, for instance, about the following image and what it alludes to, but can at least admire the image in itself: ‘His long white opera gloves are waving,/ wavering, silky seabed parasites’—and, again, I can simply applaud the following imaginative description:

 

… A fist will eclipse

a crooked tooth, the window brittle into

butterflies. Men will thunder down South

London streets like centaurs in Ben Sherman

shirts…

 

I often take this kind of Keatsian Negative Capability approach to poetry criticism since my main concern in this medium is the use of language, image, metaphor and so on, and much less so on narratives (indeed, if I was particularly interested in narratives I’d probably be reading and reviewing novels instead). ‘The accidental death of a plagiarist’ is a ventriloquised monologue which seems to take a hyper-empathic polemical tilt on the vexatious issue of alleged plagiarism:

 

I think you want me to suffer;

sit in, night after night, swigging

the caustic miso of my own

repentant tears; surviving on scraps

and surpassingly snubbed, I become

meagre and suave, in love

with my own vaulting contrition.

 

If anything one detects that Lock probably there are, essentially, much more important things to be harping on about these days than perceived literary infelicities and one is also reminded of T.S. Eliot’s controversial take on such issues in his essay ‘Philip Massinger’ (21920): ‘Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.’ There’s also the more fundamental point that no writer or poet owns the words they use (unless they write in neologisms) and thus we are all to some extent borrowers of words (though this could be seen as philosophical hair-splitting). The tone of Lock’s poem is a teasing sarcasm which makes for witty reading: 'Ouch!/ Subsisting on the charity of dolts,/ jostled by the lukewarm cruelty

of Guardian readers, assistant eds'. Nonetheless, one senses that the issue of plagiarism is here being used as a metaphor for some broader existential point:

​

What more do you want? Should I

slash something to prove it? Should I cry

Wolf! Wolf! Wolf! or The sky is falling down!

Oh, please forgive me, I shall wither and die.

 

If ‘A backward dark’ is Lock’s pocket Bell Jar then it’s completely her own as one would expect from a poet of her powers, one senses it’s a first person recollection of mental health struggles—poets perhaps more than other artists are often afflicted thus—and possibly some time is spent under psychiatric supervision, whether as inpatient or outpatient:

 

They said they could not help me, professional obsessives in glum and underfunded rooms I crawled to

and then back, by ugly alleyways and flats, breathing in an air of eager menace; psychotic riposte, urine

and homicidal shoplift. Inside, a dead, dry plant with crispy bacon leaves, expired medication.

 

Typically, there’s some stunning imagery in this haunting poem: 'My mirror is a study in malnourishment. I drop my untidy shadow by the bed like crumpled clothes'. True to her Catholic socialism Lock’s sympathies and empathies are always with the outcast: 'Evicted, unemployable, people like me shouldn’t aim too high. It’s Friday and the blackly estimated self is slipping'. There’s a hint here that the poet might have received ECT: 'I wish this pain electric, to exit via the fingertips in sparks. But it does not, it is a dull and stumbling blow, the cold slap of another wave'. Having once provided poetry workshops on an acute psychiatric ward, an experience which led me to write an epic poem and poem sequence on mental illness and psychiatric treatment, Captive Dragons/ The Shadow Thorns, I can certainly relate, from conscientious witness, to the descriptions of that last excerpted line perfectly describing the blunted effect that ECT seemed to have on inpatients. The poem closes on a bitter image: ‘I grew like a twisted tooth, with dirt at the crown and rot at the root.’

 

In ‘What it is’ we get the striking tropes ‘ringtone pneumatics drilling the front of your skull like baroque and switchy birdsong’ and ‘permissive fizz of their white wine is a shuddering pulse in the sinuses’—the latter trope relating, I think, to some kind of stilted academic soirée. In ‘The difference between’ Lock deploys more imaginative turns of phrase to great effect, as in the following passage: 'Yes, this is really happening. I mope my morning cup,/ wallow in music: the mad glitching skirl of our breadline/ braggadocio; feral euphorias, fanfare of aggro'. Note the equally great use of g-alliteration with ‘braggadocio’/’aggro’. There’s flavour of Lock’s Irish gypsy/traveller roots in the following trope: 'But oh, there are jigs, love, and then there are reels./ And somewhere between the thumped gut of the bodhrán,/ the twitterpated squeak of the fiddle'. 

 

A visit to a hospital is put under Lock’s poetic microscope in ‘Visiting Prometheus’. The poet isn’t sure how to get to it: ‘I ask the girls with salted earth complexions, the drizzle-/witted men outside of Wetherspoons’. It seems this may be a psychiatric hospital as the poet speaks of a ‘flightless spiral down into depression’s praline velvet dark’—displaying sumptuous p-alliteration; and: ‘Somebody said you lived without/ fear. But all your eerie pleasures curdled into vertigo’. Nuances in terminology provoke a possibly sardonic response from the poet: ‘Your doctors are true/ poets, finesse their fine distinctions: strength is not the same as health’. There’s a ghoulish passive-aggressive Plathian image: ‘I’ll lie, I’ll say it’s fine, and feed you fruit so soft it comes/ apart in your mouth like a child’s sigh’.

 

‘The seven habits of highly affective people’ is a meditation on otherness and neurodivergence. Early on it gifts a great aphorism: ‘And work, the self-inflicted ethic no one holds me to’—a glorious poke in the eye for our work-obsessed society. And, as ever, it’s aphorism aplenty: 'Poetry/ helps less than coffee, truth be known. There’s pleasure in refusing/ things: the crummy lusts of undergrads, a bowl of indiscriminate meat'. Lock’s self-perceived neurodivergence is alluded to in the following trope: 'I can see myself for my/ remedial breed; I can see myself, recalcitrant and aspy, and striking/ a match on my noseblown sleeve'. (For the uninitiated, ‘aspy’ is an informal abbreviation for Asperger’s). There’s a great phrase for the arduousness of the pen: ‘the onion chopping work of writing down’—we get a similar gustatory and gastronomic image with ‘in some dim bar where they are slicing hemispheres of lime’. Lock has a deep sense of empathy with those who are othered in society, the outcast, the psychiatrically afflicted (something I can relate to strongly myself): 'Those days I have the tryptamine affinities I build with bus stop loonies,/ acid mascots, disappointed ponytails; a tribe of brush-sucking obsessives/ spoiling for dystopia on locked wards in plastic sandals'. Near to the poem’s close Lock declares evocatively: ‘I am still me, despite the stale fertility of sink estates’. In the similarly themed ‘Special needs’ Lock expresses her otherness in gustatory images: 'Your nights are gorged on gulyás and pampushki; black bread in low/ light on a low sofa, low fire on a low-moaning flame. This is home, the peasant/ compulsion I rattle my pans with'. The long assonances of ‘low’, ‘sofa’, ‘moaning’, ‘home’ give a sense of slowness and torpor. The poem’s soporific closing lines—'A Bombay/ Sapphire sort of moon, the inundated eye is sifting sparks. I go down like a lead/ balloon. Your bossy kiss. Our pit bull barks'—continue this o-assonance: ‘sort’, ‘moon’, ‘down’, ‘balloon’, ‘bossy’.

 

‘The very last poem in the Book of Last Things’ contains some striking descriptive phrases such as ‘herringbone boys in porkpie hats’, ‘ashveloped in cigarette shelter’, ‘the bible is a catalogue of baby names’, ‘the mothers misfiring a nightmare into Catholic guilt and tinnitus’, ‘a decked wife is a shining lamp in the rare good giddy-up of the pub’, ‘spongiform forgetfulness’ etc. Note another Lockian portmanteau, ‘ashveloped’.

 

‘Us too’ is Lock’s counterpoint to the Me Too phenomenon. She caustically describes ‘women in acrylic skin and slit up skirts and circus stilts,/ preening their screams in a nightclub queue’ and a ‘young girl, sucking a hardboiled silence, cut right down to her tight pink passing-/sacred’. The poet sees herself ‘undoing my smile like the top button of a shantung blouse’. Aphorisms abound—‘Pain is our roseate intercourse’—and arresting turns of phrase—' a busted spring in my empty belly’. There follows a scene which is particularly disturbing and seems to describe an experience of oral rape: ‘He grabs me by my sleeves;/ he drags me past the sagging wrecks of blackened bandstands, wind-distorted/ portacabins. I’m on my knees beneath the beer-gut of an old pavilion. The reek/ of fish and week old fat. He leaves my mouth a smashed mess of slang and teeth./ Woke up on the wrong side of the war: I’ll school you, you pikey caant’. This visceral scene is then contrasted with a reflective verse in which the poet appears to be remembering a long lost friend with such pet-names of ‘ba-lamb’ and ‘bestie’. The term ‘benediction’ surfaces; then a more specific reminiscence of Roman Catholic ritual:

 

… How we adored the Paschal musk and chorus

of Compline; the way the lady Saints inclined their heads, girding a devious grace in

groups like school-gate gossips, how they might blow a scented mercy you could

treasure like a kiss.

 

A little further on we are treated to a Plathian—or Sextonian—flourish of imagery:

 

… Four and twenty blackbirds baked

inside this grief, this keening extremis. No prestige grief we plump like pillows on

a sickbed, but something with yellowy incisors, stripping the meat from a glistered

phrase.

 

The word ‘glistered’, with its near homophonic chiming of ‘blistered’, is a fairly typical Lockian choice over more common and pedestrian words like ‘sparkle’ or ‘glitter’. The image of ‘yellowy incisors’ would seem to evoke the sharp yellow beaks of the ‘blackbirds’ mentioned earlier. There is Lockian candour again about her psychical struggles, dosed as so many young people are today on the supplements of antidepressants: ‘My mouth was a glass/ house, gathering stones, stoned and phobic on Seroxat and Sertraline’ (I’ve been on exactly the same sequence of medication). School is a daily soul-purgatory, evoked here with olfactory sense impressions—the most potent and mnemonic of the senses: ‘I’d smell/ the lino, chalk dust, desks: dirty grey, and barnacled with chewing gum’. One of the teachers is sibilantly described in ghoulish detail: 'Mr B is bad breath and soiled ambition. His face swims like a boiled shirt, his skin/ the white of unsigned plaster casts; he has the long front teeth of a talking horse'. A veritable miasmic Houyhnhnm. The line ‘Social worker measures out her well worn spite in meticulous inches’ could almost describe a character from a Ken Loach or Mike Leigh film; the description goes on, with a super-perceptiveness which sees the Lockian become the poetic- Sherlockian: ‘Her smile is frowsy industry, coastal erosion, and economic stalemate’.

 

‘X (mouth)’ is a curious puzzle box of a poem, almost slightly cryptic, it calls to mind the mystique of Jeremy Reed’s poems:

 

… You are

conjurework and hoodoo, a bestowing and a banishment.

Science fiction, fascist ballot; the error and the choice.

…

…Pornography or

Christogram. You magnify, you capture, you’re a sinister

fork in the cause. A blackmailer’s signature. …

… You are nexus and crisis,

the indication and the absence. Being both sanctum and any

racy fact…

 

The o-assonance is particularly marked here: ‘conjurework’, ‘hoodoo’, ‘bestowing’, ‘ballot’, ‘error’, ‘Pornography’, ‘fork’.

 

The final section of Contains Mild Peril is a long sequence of poems under the umbrella title ‘dead / sea’. There are some excellent phrases throughout the darkly titled ‘music for suicide’: ‘marbly seaside dark’, ‘a bed of velvet devastations’, and the strangely constructed ‘your dead slum the current trailing furs like film stars’. In ‘a brief history of the intoxicants industry in ireland and the americas’ we get the Sextonian phrase ‘white bird adrift in a damaged brain that cries to god’, and the following elusive trope: 'and i’ve no use for crows. mangan, dragging his iambic/ backwards through a hedge, slapping the dust from his genius'. Once again, quite cryptic. In ‘everything happens for a reason’ there are plenty of image-rich aphorisms: 'a hurt so thick that you could stand your teaspoons up in it. weekends of clammy pique, bowing from the waist behind the yellow curtains'. We also get phrases like ‘grenfell graffiti’ and the wonderfully assonantal ‘gutless pubs’. But it’s as ever the aphorisms which really pack a punch, as in ‘your worst thought was a desert and you walked out like a mystic and were gone’ and ‘i am like london. cumaean, an unsuccessful suicide’. In ‘martyn / sybil’ there’s an Eliotic feel to 'the dead will take root anywhere, surging again through the curdled mortar of pre-war houses, out into our dingy gardens, our small, obstreperous palates of stone'. There’s a striking phrase in ‘when the day is a blue lingering’. A subtle and perhaps serendipitous use of internal semi-rhyme in the following: 'bittering your innards in off-licence vinegar, insisting on the stinging cider piss that kisses you goodnight forever'. This poem is lit with similes but being Lockian they gift us highly imaginative if not even faintly surreal comparisons: ‘picking their scabs like delicate red and black brooches’, ‘opening an awkward scream like a wet umbrella’, and ‘the man who dragged an abject blanket like a baby brother, sucked the salt from flint to stave off hunger’. Lock’s images are always imaginative: ‘the whole world gold through penny-toffee cellophane’, the Eliotic ‘running amok in jesuit plimsolls’, and the strange ‘all alone in my in my flat ampulla’. This poem also contains what seems to be an allusion to the myth of Orpheus:

 

… they found his whistling head: large, and forced between two rocks. the head was singing like a kettle.

the head was white and bloated, made from spit and paper. a nest, an egg, a lantern.

 

The title ‘of marat, etc.’ appears to allude to the French Revolution radical and champion of the sans-culottes, Jean-Paul Marat, who was assassinated in his bathtub. The poem is oblique but grabs our attention with lines like ‘their glow agrees a milky grief that trails its sleeves through snow’, and images such as ‘obedient porcelain teacup bone’ and the assonantal ‘warped hormonal loom of you’. ‘micheál / osiris’ would seem to be a monody to a long lost friend or possibly ex-lover. It begins with a nod to the famous opening of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, ‘April is the cruellest month’:

 

april conjures insult into symptom. i have often hated spring; this garden in its slow,

perishable dominion. mulo, there are stale raisins on your grave; the black canal has set your

bones like tar.

 

Eliot’s ‘strong brown god’, the river of ‘The Dry Salvages’ (Four Quartets) is replaced here by Lock’s ‘black canal’. The term ‘mulo’ is apparently Romani for ‘dead man’. The poem continues in figurative vein, the following passage closing on a typically unexpected Lockian simile: 'your eyes have met their lustering fate in moonlight; decay coerces pallid iridescence from the fine/ curve of your jaw. rib bone, hip bone, shoulder blade, vertebrae like delicate cufflinks'. A poetic archaeology. Lock finds therianthropic imagery aplenty in Egyptian mythology:

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i used to believe in the one true god, and with misguided gaze would offer my eyes to the stars. But you,

my lover, are myth-mettled: osiris, bird masked for wran jag, adolescent demigod, all wingspan, antlers,

and blasted sight. … i will wander the earth in tedious hysteria, while you go grinning in a jackal-headed

graceland. a crocodile cohort follows you…

 

This process of poetic mourning leads to an explosion of imageries and memories all laced with a residue of Roman Catholicism:

 

lover, i had searched for you, among the juiceless tubers, bulbs like little shrunken heads. i sought you

out within the cushiony lungs of churches; ransacked all the wet black earth with clumsy, panting

greed. my need was such i rubbed the brasses smooth. on my knees in nightclubs, graveyards,

supermarkets. … i did not find you sleeping in the long, clerical shadow of a sundial, where once we

sucked the soft grey thumbs of mushrooms to see god. i did not find you in the gold tooth of that prison

snitch, or the nicotine pinch of his thin fingers as he witlessly plucked the lapel of my lagerfeld suit. i

did not find you, orchidaceous in the botanical garden…

 

There are some great Lockian phrases such as ‘listing in the shipwrecked kitchenettes of unplumbed houses’; and some striking herbaceous descriptions:

 

pulled up those witchy fingers interlocked in secret charms to bring down chimneys: mandrake roots

like sickly grasping infants. … tormentil and tansy, pennyroyal and yarrow. … my gender-swapped

ophelia, the worse for weeds, a crown of gothic corals for your head, and i could weep. here’s violet

pyrosoma for your pillow. … the black canal colluding in a sleep.

 

The imagery is a meticulous depiction of Millais’ Pre-Raphaelite masterpiece ‘Ophelia’ as modelled by the doomed Lizzie Siddal lying in a bathtub. The poem closes on the gently lyrical lines: ‘i would take you inside myself. and i would give birth to birds, my love. i would give birth to birds.’

 

One suspects that Lock lost this particular friend to suicide and this seems to resurface in the following poem ‘intoxicana’:

 

… he called to me. at zero hour in giddy

heaven, called, but left me with the looping blare of grubby

feedback. canned static, or he spoke of suicide in thread-

needle whispers until his bluff was called, until the salt

air could not brace him.

 

This is another Plathian poem of the psyche with some phantasmagorical imageries: ‘enter the brain’s vestral spaces: here are a heap of mildewed/ ghosts. the crease in an embroidered sleeve is black with/ them, all black, quite wrinkled through’—the ghoulish: ‘death is a grim, protracted mothering’; the paranoid: ‘the nurses are thieves and vampires, readers over her shoulder’; and the sinister: ‘torn/ waltz ending in a twisted ankle. and the mahjong click/ of women’s teeth’.

 

The opening of the long piece ‘cordelia at the home for the incurables / maestro’ has the poet relating to a fragile rose with some exquisitely microscopic descriptions:

 

it has been said that i suffer on purpose; there is an art to that, and in an ugly soapstone vase

the yellow rose aspires to texas not to sweetness. … i swear i’m not in love with pain, but there is a

splinter under my nail, and it is a piece of the one true cross. who has been bringing you flowers? and

don’t they know you cannot siphon life enough by suction through a cut? the rose is trying to grow,

trying to stand on a snapped green tendon. oh, how sad. i crush her petals out of spite. we are alike. … if

love becomes an unrecorded weight, there’s joy in that, in going under, just the way some bodies melt

like floes of ice. a rose that cannot feed can only float. and you, some luscious drug has caught you in its

velvety fatigue. the rose has put its yellow on like armour. a paper boat with its paraffin seal.

 

I love the e-assonance of the phrase ‘machetes are fretting, all bets are off’ and the i- and p-alliterations in ‘as we speak some woman is typing up a prissy-fingered list’. It’s often in her highly distinctive and imaginative turns of phrase that Lock excels: ‘where sound curls into small convulsions’, ‘disfigured fury’, ‘bygone gargoyle’, and surprising similes: ‘rolling the moment end over end like a wet mattress’. Lock invokes the chimerical antagonist of The Tempest as a figure of metaphorical identification: ‘caliban, my back like the bottom of a capsized boat./ caliban, rising, barnacled, from the shallow end of the gene pool’. Later in this poem, we have an allusion to the iconic and tragic Joy Division singer-songwriter Ian Curtis: ‘and you can see ian on stage, along/ with every other tatterdemalion suicide bid the biz sicked up’. The image of ‘a brakish pint’ almost makes one think of the old nautical trope that drinking seawater makes you go mad. There’s a platonic sexless quality to the following passage, a sense of detachment from the body:

 

… the forensics of undressing. there was a time i was raised from the bed like a peat bog body, a bronze

age tool for cutting stone. an unkind archaeology, those hands. … you don’t like anybody touching you.

alone in the dark, developing your fetishes like photographs. in this we are the same. you said the world

does not belong to us. the world belongs to the cousins, those incorruptible pixelsmiths, perpetrators of

precision. their iphones make adjustments for erasure…

 

Something like a dark nursery rhyme or riddle in ‘one to hunger, one to thirst. which is hardest? which is worst?’. Thirst, it would seem: 'it’s hot. I require coffee so black it sucks the colour from our surroundings. you’re like a legionnaire/ crawling for water, holding out your arms'. Suddenly the poet appears to be in hospital and the Lockian evocation comes in typically potent sense impressions: 'chicory piss, the man in the next bed who is so fucking yellow, spread dead-centre like the

hardest heel of cheese in a trap'. Outside, and the imageries grow more therianthropic and Goyaesque:

 

… unswappable wives with rocks sewn into their bellies like wolves; junkies conjuring dithery mischief

from flailing sleeves, and a narrow dog, whining at a bus stop, enticed to shy allegiance by the crumbs

in my jeans pocket. … the girl in impractical sandals, her pink feet cooked and trussed like meat on the

bone…

 

One of the many things I love about Lock’s poetry is its sporadic habit of dropping in figures from history or fiction (or popular culture) to deploy as symbols or leitmotivs, as in ‘today you were wide-eyed and roundly abusive, ahab on adrenaline’. Even when the allusion is more general it still manages to stamp an image on the consciousness: ‘you have the profile of some roman general, embossed against the light. … immortalise your sneer in gold upon an obol’. I’m aware Lock has an interest in hagiography (the biographies of saints)—and this comes through in the following trope which is particularly evocative:

 

… i’m sitting in saint saviour’s, amateur catholic that i am. the evening lends itself to genuflections and

to reveries. the saints all have the gridlocked middle-distance stares of drivers in rush hour traffic.

 

Lock describes a barista serving her coffee thus: ‘her mouth is a blunt red pulse, wide and round with a new wound’s promising succulence’. There’s another Lockian aphorism: ‘there is no respite from the ethicless work of leaving, of being left’. This is a stream-of-conscience, something confessional: ‘and i said i don’t want to catastrophise... but i do. i want the salty river’s lick, a sleek limb in a silver gauntlet’. Then into Jungian territory: ‘i know how it is to live by maladjusted tumult, black amusement six a.m., when you cannot confront the former self you’re shadow of’. And there’s the image of an androgynous Hamlet in ‘playing the dane in a dunce’s cap, a tricorne hat, half smiling. the moon is a tinfoil fascinator tonight’.

 

‘dead / sea/ remix’ starts out with immediately arresting images: ‘in all my sad dreaming, where the sky is excessively sapphire; butterflies are fickle hinges, joining the world to the world’, ‘my tears, at twelve, a long, silver brocade that runs from nose to wrist’, and ‘the hillside hugs the heather to her superstitious bosom’. The following image is almost like the description of a painting: 'a woman on a lichened bench coddles her pungent son, inhaling solvent gusts of him, showing him the broad and/ untranslated country: sudden drops, the sweet amoral promise of the spring'. More arresting phrases: ‘they said your face necessitated websites’, ‘like something you might whittle out of green wood’. There is much avian imagery in this poem—the following passage closes on a Senecan aphorismic flourish: 'out here i feel we might mistake flight for strong drink and swallow bluebirds, blackbirds, starlings,/ unmappable galaxy, augury, omen. our deaths await us like our unmade beds, fit to shame us'. I especially like the Joycean close: 'open my mouth pull the english out of me like silk scarves, an infected tooth, give me a word for/ when naming fails us, something to call you. glory o, glory o'. And we’re back full circle to Koenig’s Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. The shorter ‘substance’ contains phrasal multitudes: ‘london’s small brown dogs’, ‘old men rehearsing / their sooty mortalities’, ‘my cigaretteless leanings’, ‘omnivorously abject / in the blunt convulsing light’, ‘from the people who brought you weaponised malnourishment’, ‘who cringe in cells like white cresses’.

 

There’s an ambiguity in the final piece of text, by far the shortest in the book, ‘Outro’, as to whether this is a sort of potted afterword, a poem, or perhaps a combination of both—I excerpt it in full:

 

Yes, there’s something sentimental here, something over-the-top, silly even. In part it’s a poetry

collection read by a white-faced Baby Jane Hudson, or by Norma Desmond flinging herself at a

Victorian chaise longue. There’s violence in that, you know, a kind of weaponised hysteria, a mental

self-indulgent flux that’s utterly destructive. Or that’s how it seems today. I change my mind about

these poems often, except that it feels right, that they’re here like this, now, together. Excess as

aesthetic? Mode and commentary out of melodrama? Somebody called them Gurlesque once. Maybe

that’s true but not as we know it.

 

I appreciate the references to the two faded film star grotesques of Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? and Sunset Boulevard played by Bettie Davis and Gloria Swanson respectively.

 

So ends Contains Mild Peril, which in more ways than one fulfils the disclaimer of its wittily oxymoronic title.

 

These two exceptional volumes by Fran Lock could well in time ferment into the kind of critical reputation apportioned to such past triumphs as Sylvia Plath’s The Colossus and Anne Sexton’s The Awful Rowing Towards God. It’s the sheer intensity of Lock’s poetic tone which raises her work far above more complacent postmodernist experimental poetries.

 

Dogtooth and Contains Mild Peril are ringing testaments to Lock’s extraordinary, seemingly exhaustless gifts with imagery and phrase, boundless vocabulary, and singular grasp of angst and nostalgia, and an anti-zeitgeist, in the saturation-point (mis-) information age—in these senses Lock is the unwitting poetic delegate of her precariat generation.

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Alan Morrison © 2022