NOTHING LIKE LOVE
by Jenny Joseph
Enitharmon Press, 2009
48 pages
ISBN: 978-1-904634-84-3
Price: £9.99

Rory Waterman

A warning, of sorts: this is a very short book, an extremely slim slim vol. Poems appear on only forty-two of its pages, very few of which fall further than part of the way down one page. Moreover, there is not a great deal of new work here. Many of the poems were in Joseph’s Selected Poems (1992) and some were published in book form as recently as 2000 in All the Things I See. For this is a compendium of Joseph’s ‘love poems: collected, previously unpublished, and new.

Another warning: an unknowing reader expecting Joseph – most famous for her poem (which shall remain unnamed) about wearing purple and a red hat when she gets old – to be the author of happy, comical love poems is in for a surprise. Such verses are here but the strongest poems in the book are altogether more sinister, about having ‘lost it all’ or about ‘walking away hard / from beds where love went wrong or died or turned away’. The title Nothing Like Love is purposefully ambiguous, of course: when love blossoms it is unparalleled; these poems are almost never about love in the present tense, however, and the book takes missed opportunities for love, or messy failures in love, as something of a theme. Joseph is given to philosophising about what might have happened had one gone about life differently, or had love been requited. ‘Dawn Walkers’, for example, recounts seeing a ‘strong young man’ leaving his ‘girl’ in a very public display, ignoring her pleas for him to ‘please wait, please listen’ as he runs away from her at full tilt. This is a poem about love, sure enough, but nothing like a love poem in any conventional sense. In ‘Still Reading Fairy Stories’, Joseph toys with a stock trope of chivalric romance and holds it up – in typically boisterous, stringy lines of verse – as something that makes a mockery of real life:

If you were bred on fairy tales

As was I

You would know where the prince was going to

And why;

And if you had then also lived in the world

As I have done

You would know too that he went past the ten-foot wall of roses

And kept straight on.

She can be wryly humorous in a similar vein, as in ‘X Marks the Spot. A Postcard From Home’, in which curling up in front of ‘glowing coals’ is a solitary pleasure:

Good stretched alone by the fire

Thinking, dear

Nicer things, very likely

Than if you’d been here.

But more often than not, the overwhelming feeling is one of loss and heartache at what might have been, as exemplified in ‘The Feast’:

You spoilt what was on offer with your care

And self-regard. And so you lost it all.

A third and final warning: this is a book of mainly modest peaks and bewildering troughs. Joseph can be moving and memorable, but most of these poems are slight to say the least and a certain proportion of this little book is given over to what might reasonably be described as pretty doggerel. The blurb on the back cover informs readers that Joseph ‘has always written what she thinks of as “songs”’. So be it. The second poem in the book, ‘Lady Love’, reads exactly like the lyrics to a certain type of pop song and has no more literary merit than the Lou Rawls track of the same name. It tells a very forgettable tale very forgettably:

O hat that sits supreme

A-beam

On curly head

That comes up over the hedge

A bob-bob-bobbing

To see love

Lady Love.

Only the occasional near-perfect lyric, such as ‘Euridyce’, almost makes all right again:

My love could make the dead cherry-tree stir

White in the growing grass, had power to give

A paradise to the desert, shyness to the wolf

But not to make me live.