{"id":4182,"date":"2024-04-15T16:31:21","date_gmt":"2024-04-15T16:31:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.marriages.me.uk\/alwyn\/?page_id=4182"},"modified":"2024-04-15T16:32:02","modified_gmt":"2024-04-15T16:32:02","slug":"review-reading-at-winchester-muse","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.marriages.me.uk\/alwyn\/review-reading-at-winchester-muse\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Reading at Winchester Muse; 8 April 2024"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Monday 8th<\/sup> April, we gathered in person and over Zoom to welcome our guest poet for the month, Alwyn Marriage.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Aptly for a poetry group that centres women and women\u2019s writing, Marriage\u2019s newest collection, Possibly a Pomegranate<\/i><\/a>, is subtitled \u2018Celebrating Womankind\u2019. However, for us, she started with a poem from the almost novel-like Pandora\u2019s Pandemic<\/i><\/a>. As the name suggests, this collection charts the course of the Covid pandemic from Marriage\u2019s personal perspective (she caught the illness early on, and her brother died from it) while also looking at how, like Pandora and her ill-fated box, it changed society. If Marriage\u2019s analogies with World War Two are unsurprising (\u201cYou ask if it was like the war\u2026.\u201d), her acknowledgment that learning \u201cto look no further than today\u201d sometimes has benefits has a startling truth to it.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

In fact, each of Marriage\u2019s poems rings with truth, whether this is her own or that of \u2013 usually \u2013 another female. For instance, in \u2018Nancy\u2019s Star Turn\u2019, we\u2019re plunged into Marriage\u2019s own lived experience and we meet her five-year-old self, currently enraptured by the exotic Nancy. Although Nancy is another five-year-old, she is the daughter of a GI and has a confidence and exuberance that inform classmates that \u201cthere were worlds wider than our own of which we could only dream\u201d.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Using her words to conjure up these \u201cwider worlds\u201d is the adult Marriage\u2019s own special skill. She takes her reader (or listener) back to the South London of her teenage years (and, briefly but no less impressively, into the mind of her mother, waiting for her daughter to return home after a night out) as easily as she lets us see her older self reach accommodation with a body that no longer suits its two decade old \u201cpacific blue\u201d bikini. Later, she allows us to feel \u201cthe measure of a long marriage\u201d \u2013 her own? \u2013 both in respect of the speed of its passing (\u201c50 years of faithfulness have flown\u201d) and the beautiful permanence of the meshing of two lives (\u201cShe a bird in his branches \/ He the wine in her cup\u201d).<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

However, Marriage also looks beyond her own life experiences to explore the lives and, sometimes, the imagined lives of other women. Some of these are well-known historical figures (Jane Austen, Cleopatra and Sappho among others). Another, the nameless woman in \u201cRisk and Refuge\u201d is perhaps more accurately described as an amalgamation of countless unfortunate others. Marriage prefaced her reading of this poem with an acknowledgement that some people might suggest she had not had the right to write it. Nonetheless, she was sufficiently confident to offer it up anyway in, as she said, \u201cthe hope that [those nameless others] will be safe\u201d and sufficiently sensitive to empathise with experiences no one wants to have as their own (\u201cthe horror when I became a number not a name\u201d).<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Straddling the line between real and imagined lives, Marriage gave us the instantly relatable \u201cGPS\u201d lady, whose always calm tones provide the commentary and punctuation to so many car journeys. We laughed when Marriage told us that her husband fails to see the appeal of the poem and even less fails to see why largely female audiences love it so much \u2013 but how could they not when given lines such as \u201cThat other woman in your car always makes it clear that she knows best\u201d! However, if poems can sometimes be said to have punchlines, this poem\u2019s arrives when the poet narrator brings in her husband: \u201cYou clearly trust a distant satellite more than you trust your wife\u201d.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

As far as trust goes, Alwyn Marriage is a poet her reader can trust to travel to many different places and into many different lives. Moreover, she does so with a lightness of touch and an unpretentiousness that never shies away from the difficult or the disturbing. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Louise Taylor, April 2024<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Monday 8th April, we gathered in person and over Zoom to welcome our guest poet for the month, Alwyn Marriage. Aptly for a poetry group that centres women and women\u2019s writing, Marriage\u2019s newest collection, Possibly a Pomegranate, is subtitled \u2018Celebrating Womankind\u2019. However, for us, she started with a poem…<\/p>\n

Continue readingReview: Reading at Winchester Muse; 8 April 2024<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-4182","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry","entry"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marriages.me.uk\/alwyn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4182","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marriages.me.uk\/alwyn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marriages.me.uk\/alwyn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marriages.me.uk\/alwyn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marriages.me.uk\/alwyn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4182"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.marriages.me.uk\/alwyn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4182\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4185,"href":"https:\/\/www.marriages.me.uk\/alwyn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4182\/revisions\/4185"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marriages.me.uk\/alwyn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}