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Seventeen Horse Skeletons by Charlotte Runcie

I closed this pamphlet of seventeen poems feeling, in a good way, that I must have read a much longer book. Charlotte Runcie's poems are broad in their thematic range and give an intriguing introduction to a lively and sometimes very peculiar imagination. Many of the poems are dramatic monologues, their narratives vivid and compelling whilst the characters and situations remain somewhat enigmatic. The authoritative ‘Yes' which begins opening poem ‘The Seventh Winter' leads into a scenario in which a seemingly isolated family erect birch trees as a frail defence against the ‘murderer' snow:

They know their spines will break for us,
and in the storms
I feel them shivering.

This is how it is with us.
We hold back snow with bones.

Elsewhere there are poems in the voices of a meteorologist, a glassblower, an explorer, an astronomically-inclined pope and a selkie, a mythological creature that is able to become human by taking off its seal skin and to return to seal form by putting it back on. Two sonnets, ‘Dating the Anglo-Saxon' and ‘Crossed', explore the familiar territory of thwarted love in a quirky manner. The first describes a date at a fair with a ‘wraith in wolfskin' who afterwards ‘didn't call but wrote to me in runes'. In ‘Crossed', a marine biologist and an astronaut are the thwarted lovers who in this case are separated by space (the irreconcilable environments of their vocations) rather than time. There is a delightfully synaesthetic quality to the descriptions in this poem that heightens the otherworldliness of the narrative, which encompasses both space and the deep sea:

I taste you and I taste the weightless spike
and sonar of the ocean; oh it sends
me to the tentacles

Runcie has a gift for description and her metaphors are surprising without seeming overwrought. A woman wears a stole of ‘long albino eyelashes' in the gorgeous poem ‘Fur', and in ‘Grotesque' a girl's conjoined toes become, once polished, ‘sparkled Siamese showgirls'. The breadth of reference in this pamphlet is remarkable, blending mythology, science and the fantastical with technical skill and a touch of humour. This is without doubt a highly individual collection and something of a Tardis, much larger on the inside than it may appear.


Crossed

I taste you and I taste the weightless spike
and sonar of the ocean; oh, it sends
me to the tentacles. I think you'd like
the froth of it, and you give me the bends
on land so maybe in the deep the air
is easier to breathe. You'd be my line
up to the morning. Rays and seaweed hair
would hold your toes, your tonsils sharp with brine.

Marine biologists and astronauts,
they say, are not compatible, but I
have heard you slip your oxygenless thoughts
into the quiet water of the sky,
and Lizard Island's just as grand as Mars.
Its waves are filled with skeletons of stars.


Rowyda Amin was born in Newfoundland, Canada to parents of Saudi Arabian and Irish origin. She has lived in Riyadh and is now based in London. In 2009, she was awarded the Wasafiri New Writing Prize for poetry. Her poems have appeared in Magma, Wasafiri, Notes from the Underground, Rising, Calabash, The Frogmore Papers, and the anthologies Ten (Bloodaxe Books, 2010), Coin Opera (Sidekick Books, 2009) and Exposure (Cinnamon Press, 2010). Rowyda is a PhD candidate at Birkbeck, University of London, where she is completing a thesis on the topic of ‘Identity in Arab Diaspora Fiction'. She has reviewed books for Modern Poetry in Translation.
She blogs at http://rowyda.wordpress.com/