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Hubbard writes exquisitely of colour and its connections to spirituality… her skills as a novelist come to the fore as the poems animate John’s character and (often dire) circumstances convincingly… GOD’S LITTLE ARTIST… may go some way towards ensuring [John’s] life and work receive the attention they deserve.”
ARTEMIS, issue 32
‘Don’t judge a book by its cover’, but who hasn’t plucked one from the shelf because of its immediate appeal and relished it as part of the enduring impact of the contents? Author and publisher are to be congratulated on the beauty of this slim collection as a physical object. The selection of Gwen John’s The Convalescent as cover illustration also points to the aptly chosen (by Moniza Alvi) adjective – ‘immersive’ – to describe this poetic biography of the painter by the poet and art critic, Sue Hubbard. And anyone who has stood in front of a portrait or study by the Welsh artist (and there are plenty of opportunities in UK galleries) can attest to the felicity of that description of the experience.
In her very useful introduction to the life and work, Hubbard points to the ‘myth[that] has grown up since her death, that of a solitary person who neglected her health and rejected the world’. The thirty-four poems which deal chronologically from childhood to death challenge that myth but also buttress its element of truth. Solitude, abstinence, hunger and religious asceticism loom large. Earthly vigour is in short supply – represented here in an early poem by the figure of her brother Augustus:
Augustus is pulling off
his clothes, flinging them pell-mell
across the rocks, cavorting in the buff
in front of his red-faced master. (Naked)
Otherwise, Augustus appears in the two last poems, including a devastatingly throwaway finalé: ‘Augustus promises a headstone but,/somehow, it slips his mind…’ (Dieppe)
Auden speaks of the conundrum of the novelist – in comparison to the privileged lyrical poet – of having to include ‘the whole of boredom’ in the narrative. As a lyrical poet confronting narrative here – the artist’s life story – Hubbard evades this danger elegantly through the quality and variousness of her voice and poetic structures in these thirty-four poems. Sixteen of them use couplets as stanza form, a form of horizontal margin that struck me as particularly suited to expressing the illuminated and exposed nature of the subject. This is the opening of “Teapot”, referencing the 1926 work, The Little Interior:
Hunkered on its haunches,
its conker sheen
is the only colour in the limpid
pallor of her tiny room,
where a curdy light spills
into her china breakfast bowl,
the little glass jar with its cubes
of crystal sugar.
She can feel the gift
of the tea’s tepid balm
This seems to me to be a very fine example of how to write a poem that focuses ekphrastically on a particular piece of art. I may happen to know this picture, but if I didn’t the curdy light spilling into a china bowl (among other images and hues) would induce me to seek it out – but, and this is important, my need would not be immediate. The poem is sufficient. Perhaps this leaves me with a paradox. My pleasure is enhanced by the experience of the artwork, but the poem does not need that enrichment. I am happy to live with that paradox.
This couplet form is also flexible, deploying a more expansive line in “Communion” which confronts the humiliation of rejection (by Rodin) and any idea of the romance in artistic
squalor:
Loneliness seeps beneath
her thin chemise pungent as sweat in the station din.
At home there’s only the heavy tread of her unseen
neighbour on the stair, never the steps she longs for.
To punish him she won’t eat. Is disgusted by the smell of food,
boils chestnuts in sugar milk not to contaminate her room,
convinced that meals in cafés are poisoned.
Still eschewing any sense of romance in dereliction, the form still holds for poems that express the ultimate triumph of great art – its endurance. These concluding extracts from the poems “Angels on the Washing Lines” and the title poem, bear witness to the price paid:
Each act mindful:
a bead, a knot on the rosary
of her days.
Barefoot, she stands, now,
with the poor, watching
her culottes billow and dance
in the wind
like angels on the washing line,
teaching her detachment,
obedience, purity
(Angel on the Washing Lines)
her rosary lies broken,
wooden beads scattered
among old buttons,
Her barren room
washed luminous
with light
(God’s Little Artist)
Aside from the couplet forms there are some pleasing symmetries and balances in Hubbard’s use of other forms. The collection begins and ends with poems of four quatrains, lending a sense of firstly, taking one’s hat off in church within a formal but easeful rhythm and then finishing with a grievous benediction that chimes back to that opening. Poems in block form, among them – “Solitude”, “Grisaille” and “Lead White” have an urgency – an infusion of Gwen John’s own creative compulsion and method – that is perfectly contained within these short, bristling pieces: Here is “Grisaille” in full:
Her world is made
of lead and ash.
Grief’s a force
she cannot control.
Its alchemy
changes everything.
It won’t obey her will
but swells like desire
to fill her sleepless nights,
her fretful days,
unmooring her.
In the yawning dark,
her flickering candle
pours its light
into her fathomless sea,
erasing ugliness,
wounds, old battle scars
with the silent
touch of her brush.
In the Introduction, Hubbard references Elizabeth Bishop’s belief that everyone should experience an extensive period of solitude in their life. As well as the clear relevance to Gwen John’s life, there is a nourishing Bishop-like tone in the poetry that is a further enrichment. This is explicit in “The Poetry of Things” – ‘that line of busy ants’ – but also in the almost quirky “Mother” with its line of listy hesitant questioning and plain statement of the strange:
And then her mother’s painful hands
trying to play Chopin.
Rheumatic gout? Nerves? Exhaustion?
She never knew –
she just got used to her not being there.
When one day, she didn’t come home,
she ran around the house chanting
‘Mama’s dead. Mama’s dead.’
This is a fine book, beautifully produced and with just the right amount of poems in it and perfectly arranged. For this writer, it was the ideal companion after a day at a recent exhibition of her work. It has a life well beyond that.
Litter Magazine
