Storm-damaged: me, my daughter and Jodie Hollander's Nocturne

Niamh is sitting by a gravestone, writing in her shiny notebook. It’s a sunny day in Heptonstall, and we’re both attending at a Jodie Hollander poetry workshop in the museum. Jackie Hagan died yesterday. There are two churches here: one in ruins. Everything is Jackie, the sunshine, the gravestones, the ants.

Jodie Hollander is originally from Wisconsin. She was raised in a family of classical musicians, and her childhood was not happy.  You learn these things very quickly in her second collection, Nocturne, which was published with Liverpool & Oxford University Press in 2023. You also learn that she has an extraordinary ability to give voice to the impact of childhood trauma, and to find meaning and form for those experiences:

Though the green coconuts seem safe

in the trees, as the winds pick up, I wonder,

perhaps something is coming once again

(from Storm)

It’s Niamh’s first poetry workshop, and she’s relieved that almost everyone is older than me, and therefore unintimidating. Jodie holds the workshop with care - and with all of my full sacks of grief, I’m deeply grateful. Before we came outside to write, we read together - House by Richard Wilbur, Horse by Louise Glück, and in accordance with the frustrating (imho) etiquette of writing workshops, nothing by Jodie. But here are the images and the techniques we’ll find throughout Nocturne – the horses, of course, and the houses; the troubling uncertainty, the constant sense of threat, the losses, the dreams.

The second poem of the collection is Dream #1: Liebenstraum, the first of six dream poems which explore the various manifestations of intergenerational trauma, using surreal imagery and a painful deadpan tone:

“The grand piano that fell from the sky

did not make a sound as it crushed me”.

Jackie is my third friend to die in nine months. My friends died young – the oldest was my age. They were all extraordinary, and I loved them. As the extraordinary Gwyneth Lewis said to me, “grief brings in all of its bugbears with it” – and my bears have come crashing in. Crushing. It’s been a dark and difficult year, in which I have also completed the manuscript of my fifth collection, I Know What I saw, which explores the story of my childhood ghosts, and the various ways we are haunted.  

Nocturne is also threaded together by hauntings – not only the persistent presence/ absence of the mother and father, but the full cast of characters who drift through the pages like ghosts, or sometimes monsters … the brother and sister, her mother’s lovers, schoolmates and teachers – all of them rendered both solid and ambiguous in words. It’s a skilful act, to write with certainty and uncertainty, and the result is deliberately disturbing. Initially, the book exists almost completely within a close domestic circle … so it’s a relief when we encounter the poems of travel, of an expanded though still haunted life:

“only the young Nepalese Children knew

                  how I woke I the dark mornings and wept”    (from A Bell from Kathmandu)

It’s in these poems that the enduring legacy of trauma resonates most strongly for me:

“ to weep in this bold sunlight

must be the most painful thing.

For here where sea and sky

and trees and flowers meet,

one thinks perhaps of rest,

one thinks, even, of happiness –

nevertheless, the horses

have found me once again” (from Santa Barbara)

Anyone who lives with mental health difficulties, or the legacy of trauma or close bereavement, will recognise the dreadful plunging beat of the dark horses, the fear of their return.  Perhaps we shouldn’t need to find ourselves in the literature we read – and Jodie’s story is absolutely particular – but I found myself reflected there, to the extent that Santa Barbara is the stand-out poem for me, though I expect that for many readers, it’s Her Singing Horses:

 “my big sister's horses are mostly dead horses.

Once her horses were talented horses; once

her horses were singing horses: once people said

my big sister’s horses had the most gorgeous

young voices they'd heard. Everyone said

she had show-stopping horses, everyone said

her horses were stars. Everyone said they'd be

headliner horses and VIP horses, celebrity

horses, the next IT horses to sing in New –

but somehow my big sister's horses got sick,

and somehow her horses got so fucked up

they couldn't sing” (from My Sister’s Horses).

Given her background, it’s unsurprising that Jodie’s workshop focuses on sound – she encourages us to focus on the music of poetry (Niamh is gratified that only the two young people in the workshop can define “trochee” and “ionic”). Nevertheless, the music of Jodie’s poetry is deceptively simple, subtle, woven around patterns of speech and reflection – and the sense we’re being spoken to and confided in, is perhaps part of the reason that Niamh races through the book, The poems are deep and nuanced, making full – and sometimes slightly comedic use of metaphor and surrealism, -and I’m proud that my 16 year old, like me, is easily and deeply moved by them.     

It interests me that the book was longlisted for the Laurel Prize in 2023 – the annual award established by Simon Armitage for “the best collection of nature or environmental poetry to highlight the climate crisis and raise awareness of the challenges and potential solutions at this critical point in our planet’s life”. Nocturne doesn’t obviously fit this bill. Although nature – in creatures, landscapes, plant life, weather – play a crucial role in the collection, they often give expression to personal, rather than global, crisis -   

“I wonder, what it's like

to not always be afraid –

as a child I learned early

to tiptoe round the beast.

You never really knew

if even the smallest thing

might trigger an attack.

To feel so little then,

so utterly powerless

in the face of all that rage –

the body never forgets” (from Moose: Homer, Alaska)

Perhaps, though, in finding ways to live with, find meaning in, and to a certain extent, resolve individual and family crisis, the collection offers a more general guide.  We’re past the halfway point of Nocturne, at a series of ekphrastic poems, when we begin to move towards what might be clumsily termed as ‘recovery’. After Monet The Port of Le Havre, Night Effect, for example, is an intelligent expression of how art both creates and illustrates a form, a kind of holding, for our otherwise unbounded experience and emotion – or at least, the longing for it – the desire to make sense of, to find the shape of it:  

“It's a relief to finally be here,

to a long last know the corners

and the edges, symmetrical on all sides”.

In this context, the re-emergence of peace, calm, hope, is so tremulous, so delicate, the re/discovery of happiness so surprising, that it’s glaringly obvious that depression or illness, grief or trauma, may return at any point – and that happiness glows even brighter given its contrast with the darkness:   

“At times they’re even radiant

after the brutal winter -

perhaps there may be hope.

Think of Prairie Smoke” (from Prairie Smoke: Flagstaff AZ)

It’s over two months now since Jackie died, and Niamh and I went to that workshop. I’ve carried Nocturne with me through a difficult summer. It’s one whole month since I started writing this review – in the peace and beauty of the Duddon Valley, amongst its deep rivers and waterfalls, thick woods, its crags and abandoned quarries. Each morning Niamh and I watched the woodpeckers in the garden, bright and ungainly. We swam in the rivers and we walked, and each day I read Julian of Norwich and tried to convince myself that “all will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well”, and every day there was an echoing distance between the beauty that surrounded me and the lifetime of angry grief inside me. On the fourth day, though I tried, though I felt like the world’s worst holiday parent, I could not stop, I could not stop crying. The dark horses thundered in, God dropped a piano on my head, the hurricanes raged.  

It was not cathartic. The holiday was storm-damaged, and so was I. Good people die and it breaks our hearts. When very bad things happen to us, we suffer, and that suffering endures. Recovery is not linear. Pain is not logical, or chronological. There are no platitudes to ease this. Only that we are not alone, and that art can offer us a sort of shape, a point of recognition, company, a holding. The reminder that, whatever our dark and damaged ecologies, whatever our weather systems, the sun – like pain – will always return. And it feels like some sort of miracle.  

“All day long I walked through town

same to strangers ‘isn't it great?

At last the sun has come back again!’

But people just gave me strange looks” (from After the Storm: Key West, Florida)

Jodie, I would not give you strange looks. I would give you gratitude. For making my teenage daughter feel welcome, not just to your excellent workshop, but to the written world of poetry. For holding me in that storm-shocked day after Jackie’s death, and in Nocturne, for offering a hand, a map, a mirror.  And lastly, and very deeply, for this poem:

Two Horses: Macedon Range, Australia.  

There is no happiness

like the happiness of horses.

Just look at these two beauties

moving through this landscape –

who has sent them to us,

and from what other world?

Today I'm watching them

meandering together

beside the Acacia trees.

As they paused to eat grass,

I see their long tails

swaying in the sunlight,

and I wonder what they know

of life that I don't know.

I've seen them stand for hours,

it doesn't really matter

whether the rains are coming,

or if that familiar darkness

will soon be on its way.

Seeing them here today

under this vast Australian sky

it finally dawns upon me:

my life is more than enough,

to be alive is a blessing.

PS: For our paying subscribers, I’ll post some poetry exercises based on Jodie’s workshop, along with my own responses to those prompts – and as usual, you’ll be encouraged to share your own thoughts and poetic responses.