The Importance of the First Poem - Looking at "Swell" by Maria Ferguson

By Kim Moore

I have had my head down for the whole of February. I am now working full time as a Senior Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University. It’s my first time being fully employed for many years now - the last time I was employed was probably around 2008, and back then I was teaching brass instruments to over five hundred children a week.

I must admit, I thought that teaching at university would be a breeze compared to that - and in lots of ways it is. I don’t get covered in spit and valve oil every day. I don’t have to fix multiple instruments whilst holding the attention of thirty children. I don’t drive from one end of Cumbria to the other anymore, or have to think of lots of different tunes that use the same three notes that the children can play. I don’t have to think about teaching. I don’t have to think about different strategies to manage classroom discipline. I don’t have to argue for the importance of music in a system that often only rewarded numeracy and literacy.

In so many ways, it is much easier than state school primary and secondary school teaching - sometimes it feels as if that time of my life was a kind of fire that I walked through that made me a much better teacher. But there are other stresses - my teaching load is heavy this term: one MA poetry class in the evening, two Foundation units and one first year undergraduate unit. I’m supervising PhD students and final year undergraduates. I’ve just got to the end of marking from last term’s work. I’ve been valiantly trying to keep my Monday free to write, mostly so I could finish the short story I told you about in the last post and then just keeping my head down Tuesday to Friday with university work. But I also have my freelance life, which I can’t quite let go of - judging a poetry competition (more on that later in the month), giving a few readings, hosting a reading and some mentoring.

I’m currently mentoring three poets at the moment and they are all thinking about putting together either a pamphlet or a collection. One of the exercises I often set people at this stage is to read other collections and start to think about how they have been put together. I ask my mentees to look at the first poem in a collection and ask themselves why the poet has chosen to put that poem first - what is it telling us about their collection? How is the poet setting out their stall?

So I’m going to have a go at doing this with a brilliant poetry collection that I was lucky enough to get an advance copy of - Swell by Maria Ferguson, published very recently by Penguin.

Maria Ferguson is a writer and performer. Her poetry has been widely published and anthologized, and her debut collection, Alright, Girl? (Burning Eye, 2020), was highly commended in the Forward Prize. On the stage, her one-woman show Fat Girls Don’t Dance (Oberon, 2017) won the Saboteur Award for Best Spoken Word Show; Essex Girl (Oberon, 2019) was shortlisted for the Tony Craze Award and won Show of the Week at the VAULT Festival. She has been commissioned by the Royal Academy of Art, Stylist magazine and BBC Radio. She currently lives in Leeds.

I should put a content warning here for brief discussion of miscarriage, so please look after yourself if you continue to read this post.

Swell is Maria’s second poetry collection and one where she explores the experience of becoming a mother. I think it’s unusual in that it manages to encompass the time before and after and the complexities and ambivalences of motherhood and mothering. I think even if you hadn’t read any of Maria’s poems before, you might get an inkling of the subject matter from the cover, with the wonderful dungarees which bring back to me at least those long months of pregnancy, and from title of the book.

I think it’s a great title for a book - it makes me think of the swelling that happens in pregnancy of course. If you swell with something, it means you are carrying something, you are growing something. You swell up. We swell up. The third section of the book, the third of four is called ‘Swell’ and the poems within this section concern themselves with pregnancy - the intimacies and indignities, the wonder and the absurdities.

But back to the first poem, which is a kind of prologue poem. It sits before the first section of the book which is called ‘Wood Chip’. The first poem is called ‘Lambing Season’.

LAMBING SEASON
MARIA FERGUSON

As usual the cuts of meat hung cocked 
in the butcher's window. 
Elderly women came for their sausages. 
Lamb hearts for the dogs. 
A new coffee shop had opened up
on the high street, serving 
a shamelessly similar menu to the one 
a few doors down. 
Never before had I felt such air.
The evenings were periwinkle. 
I was sober. Freckled. Loved.
Every so often, a slight whiff of petrol.
I didn't complain. How could I?
When the coffee was served with such flourish!
When I lost that first pregnancy it was 
deliciously warm. The sun beat down 
on the canal like it had something to prove. 
I glugged it down. Pints of it.
Blocks of yellow butter.
Children in Easter hats. 

---

Well, I was expecting a book about motherhood, from the title and the cover. The first poem is called “Lambing Season” so I was expecting - well, kind of cute and fluffy lambs. Maybe cute and fluffy poems? I, and any reader is quickly disabused of this notion with this opening poem. This is lambing season, but the lambs we are talking about are no longer living. Their hearts are being fed to the dogs. Cuts of meat are hanging in the window. Somehow this ordinary image of a butcher’s window is made extraordinary - visceral and full of death, as opposed to the usual feelings we might have about new life starting in lambing season.

So we know from the first few lines of this poem that this poet enjoys subverting our expectations, that we are going to be surprised when reading this collection. We also know as the poem continues that a sense of place is going to be important. The speaker of this poem has an intimate knowledge of this high street - not only the shops and cafes, but the menus of the cafes.

The first appearance of ‘I’ comes nearly halfway through the poem with a short statement: “Never before had I felt such air”. If we look at the way the poet is handling syntax and the line from the beginning, there is lots of enjambment. The only lines that we land on as complete units of sense are the third and fourth - the elderly women who come for their sausages, who somehow sound as if they are enjoying the death on display, and the ‘Lamb hearts for the dogs’ which in its short statement of course serves to make us re-think the title. We then get a sentence that twists and turns over four lines, before we land on the first I, the first time we get a sense of who is speaking these words to us, who is telling us about the high street.

This ‘I’ is a speaker who is absolutely present in the world, who is taking everything in. Even the air feels different to this speaker today. We then get the very strange line ‘The evenings were periwinkle’. What does this mean? The first thing I thought of was a shell, the common periwhinkle, a small edible sea snail - not that I’ve eaten one. And this consumption of flesh does fit with the first part of the poem, but ‘periwhinkle’ can also be used to refer to a colour - a lavender blue or light shade of purple, and this fits as well I think. These are summer evenings with a blueness in the air.

The next line brings the next surprise when we read ‘I was sober. Freckled. Loved’. Whenever we make a statement like this, it conjures the opposite into view. So now we know there was a time when the speaker wasn’t sober. When they weren’t freckled - so they must be freckled by the sun. When they weren’t loved. This is such a clever way of giving some depth and backstory to the speaker, of connecting us to the other possible states of being.

We then get more information about the place. We know we are next to a road - there is a ‘slight whiff of petrol’. We know the speaker is sitting in the coffee shop - there is a touch of humour with the lines ‘I didn’t complain. How could I? / When the coffee was served with such flourish!'' This then makes the next line even more of a gut punch, more of a surprise, both because of the contrast to the preceding line, and because of the matter-of-fact way the information of a miscarriage is relayed: ‘When I lost that first pregnancy it was /deliciously warm’.

The first time I read this poem, I didn’t catch the speaker blaming themselves for this loss, but reading it again, I think there is blame there, but it is very subtle. There is violence in the imagery of the sun beating down - again this contrasts with the description of it being ‘deliciously warm’. Then the speaker tells us that they ‘glugged it down. Pints of it’ which I assume refers to the sun - is the speaker saying there that the sun was to blame, or their act of sitting in the sun?

This is a fantastic poem to open a collection with - I think it promises that the poems which follow will be surprising, that they will juxtapose things that are not usually juxtaposed against each other, that there will be a mix of darkness and humour, and that the poet will not shy away from difficult material, that though this is a book about motherhood, and about life, we cannot talk about these things without thinking about death or at least the possibility of it. Having read the whole book, I can reveal that it does all of these things and more, hence why it is a brilliant poem to start with…

As an aside, the final poem in the book is called ‘Bamboo’ and has a line about chicken which ‘defrosts in a white bowl’. I love that by the end of the book, we have moved from the meat behind a window, out of reach, to being contained in a bowl, in a domestic setting.

If you would like to order Maria’s book, you can order from Penguin here or you can order it from my Bookshop.org list here

Thank you to Maria for letting me share one of her brilliant poems here!