Review - Deborah Harvey - Love the Albatross
Bristol poet Deborah Harvey is a co-founder of the Leaping Word poetry consultancy and has an MA in Creative Writing from Manchester Writing School. Deborah’s previous five poetry collections were published by Indigo Dreams, with her historical novel, Dart, under their ‘Tamar Books’ imprint.
I published two of Deborah Harvey’s poems in The Fig Tree (you can find them in issues 3 and 4) so was more than happy to take a look at the full collection from which they came.
Love the Albatross takes a poetic look at estrangement and loneliness, using the mother-child relationship as its inspiration. Relationship is not the right word, though - the relationship is missing and is written about in an achingly sad way.
Here the child that was carried “under my ribs” leaves the nest and ghosts the mother. Empty nest syndrome is obviously a well-known condition but it’s made much worse when the relationship disappears too.
In some ways it’s worse than your child
being dead, someone says
which of course it isn’t, because until death happens a reconciliation is possible, but the emotion is portrayed as a form of grieving. It’s probably more like when a child goes missing - we all know the famous cases. The “not knowing” allows no closure.
In addition to the albatross, other birds appear throughout the collection - blackbirds hiding in the bushes, frightened starlings emerging from the chimney, a gull skewered on a spike and in Once we were birds :
A mother pelican wasn’t something
I’d ever aspired to be
but there I was all the same, pecking and
pecking at my breast till it bled and my brood could feed.
There are occasional flashes of dark humour among the grief - in Blessing:
Your grandmother died the day
the devil spat on the blackberries
putting paid to that glut of jam.
As news spread, the share price of jam sugar
plummeted and the Dow Jones index closed
more than four hundred points down.
With my editor’s hat on, I think the collection may be a little bit long and I might have been tempted to prune it a touch but there aren’t any obvious weak poems in there. It’s not an easy read - the poems are analysing loneliness and estrangment so are never going to be full of laughs. But the poems reflect this in a sometimes melancholic, sometimes pointed way. The imagery is very strong, and they leave you emotionally drained. I had to bite this book off in chunks, but I did want to read it again, and I am grateful that we have maintained a relationship with our children, albeit in one case clinging on by its fingernails for quite a while. It may seem that writing these poems could be cathartic but there are hints that writing about it is painful. In Here be dragons:
Over the years I’ve watched many of them complete their life-
cycle but lately something untoward has been happening
& instead of dispersing to hawk riverbanks & byways,
searching for readers to prey on, they’ve been buzzing at
my window, battering their helmets against the glass, as
if they might break in, as if they’ve come back to bite me.
These poems are beautifully constructed and no words are wasted, so get a copy, get the kettle on and brace yourself for a tough but thought-provoking read.
Love The Albatross is published by Indigo Dreams Publishing and is available here.