Sarah Maguire’s Almost the Equinox is a bouquet gathered over time. These beautiful poems belong together – in a way that is rarely the case with selected poems. She is our finest gardener-poet, her botanical knowledge evident but unostentatious in her poems about flowers. You see her recalcitrant gardenia as if it were in front of you: “One lopsided, scorched-brown bloom…” Her secretive African violet is vividly present, too: “Hirsute secret hoods/ ease back/ the gauzy, veiled flesh/ to a star of opening mauve,/ pierced at the heart / with sheer gold…” And oranges, souvenirs of Taliouine, are described with tart truthfulness: “Oh, they were sharp! like hybrid grapefruit…”
With Maguire, blossoms are unpredictable. And ripeness is not all. The Florist’s at Midnight – a wonderful poem – acknowledges the violence of uprooting flowers, “cargoed across continents/ to fade far from home”. At night, in the shop, the flowers are not required to put on a show. She finds apt, unfanciful adjectives for the lily – “solitary, alert”. And there is a dazzling instability about the last line: “the streetlights/ in pieces/ on the floor”. She is a poet who summons mysterious atmospheres precisely.
If the flowers have travelled, so has Maguire. There are poems set in Marrakech, by the Dead Sea, in the US, in Suffolk, London and Ramallah. She was the first British writer to be sent to Palestine and Yemen by the British Council (she has the additional distinction of being the only living English-language poet to have a book of her poetry in print in Arabic). There is a sense of exotic distance in her work, but it is seldom the places to which she travels that are ungraspable. It is the moments where Maguire suggests she is foreign to herself.
In Damascene, she writes: “How strange I am to myself here –/ out of bounds, unknown.” In Travelling Northward, she confesses more than once: “I don’t know where I am.” In Hibiscus: “I have no idea what is coming/ as I take the hand of a perfect stranger.” She is the exotic – translated through and by poetry. The paradox is, she never allows the reader to feel lost.
These poems sometimes touch on the impossibility of return. They exist on the edge of elegy. In Cloves and Oranges, when she writes “I will never come back”, it contains the seeds – or pips – of future regret. In Hibiscus, she writes: “I return to a room I will never return to.” The double use of “return” acts out the very thing she says she will never do – going back on itself within the phrase. Verbs are elegantly turned inside out elsewhere, too. In The Invisible Mender, she writes: “and I know that I’ll not know/ if you still are mending in the failing light”. To “know” contains unknowing, “return” explores leaving for good.
She has a breathtaking gift for covering a huge amount of ground in a single poem. Fracture Clinic, about meeting her birth parents, is, at only 10 couplets long, as powerful as a memoir. The structure is elegantly unforced – choreographed – describing dancing (hers and her mother’s) and their different ways of falling. Spilt Milk is another almost perfect poem of stark romance, alluding to a lover (vanished), rain and the roar of trains – it reads like a novel in the making. But it is Colchicum (the Autumn Crocus) that disarmed me most, describing the flowers “all keeled over,/ their etiolated stems/ flat out at random”. Anyone who has ever grown colchicums will recognise this moment of collapse, but Maguire makes it hers alone:
this is the time for grief,
to look carefully at loss,
then turn away.
Almost the Equinox is published by Chatto (£15.99). Click here to buy it for £12.79
The Florist’s at Midnight by Sarah Maguire
Stems bleed into water
loosening their sugars
into the dark,
clouding dank water
stood in zinc buckets
at the back of the shop.
All night the chill air
is humid with breath.
Pools of it mist
from the dark mouths
of blooms,
from the agape
of the last arum lily –
as a snow-white wax shawl
curls round its throat
cloaking the slim yellow tongue,
with its promise of pollen,
solitary, alert.
Packed buckets
of tulips, of lilies, of dahlias
spill down from tiered shelving
nailed to the wall.
Lifted at dawn,
torn up from their roots
then cloistered in cellophane,
they are cargoed across continents
to fade far from home.
How still they are
now everyone has gone,
rain painting the tarmac
the streetlights
in pieces
on the floor.
