‘Embodiment’, by Dinah Livingstone
Review by Frank Regan
The very last line of this celebratory collection of poems reads, ‘Thank you, Life!’ The fact that the poet puts the ‘L’ in uppercase suggests that she wants to personify life, to make it a person with whom one can relate. In the mystical vision of Saint John Jesus calls himself the Life. His most beautiful words are: ‘I have come that you might have life and have it abundantly.’
Dinah Livingstone celebrates life in its ordinary ‘everydayness’ and in the moments in which life, and its living, hint at something more. She does not make explicit what that ‘something more’ is. Nevertheless the very title, Embodiment begs the question: of what, or of whom?
Let me touch on a few of her successful poems. (I understand by ‘successful’ a poem that, as I read it, reads me.) Only one or two did not read me, in part because I never had a baby. But I did have a cat. Mine was a tabby, same as hers. And he behaved in the same way. The poet writes almost petulantly of the inconveniences, disjunctures and headaches of living with an animal. Still, we can hear, as though in a subtext, that she would not have it any other way: ‘You are a canny animal. / I don’t know why they call you dumb. / I’m under your thumb.’
We’ve all had the experience of a smell which triggers a memory and transports us to the original experience. Our noses are our memory sticks. Livingstone remembers the smell of an English spring, where jasmine brings on a cascade of memory fragments: a yearning for intimacy and warmth, and a fear of frost. Smell brings instant recall.
Our poet listens intently to the voices of immigrants. She hears the Arabic words saa iduunis and the Somali I caawi. Both mean ‘Help me’. She goes to the supermarket where heaps of fruit and peppers ‘whisper a dark secret’: ‘we were picked and packed / by immigrants treated like dirt’. ‘Who listens?’ she cries. ‘Something is wrong. / What can we do?’
We must also listen to the earth, whose urgent music is ‘somewhat whalelike’. Our poet invites us to view the oceans, continents, forests and cities. And the people chatting, laughing, calling, pleading. How does it feel to be an earthling? We are invited, we who are evolution’s product, to ‘form the poem / wording Earth’s deep hum’.
The poet, despite treasuring moments of quiet at home, leaves to walk up the street. She encounters different, diverse selves: a conversation in Portuguese, a couple kissing, a young man pushing a buggy, men unloading barrels for the local pub. She asks: ‘What is it to someone else?’ It evokes in me the question: will I someday discover that I am they and will I rejoice in that?
There is so much more. The seventeenth-century Marathi Indian poet Tukaram said: ‘A good poem is like finding a hole in the palace wall – you never know what you might see.’ These poems of Dinah Livingstone are full of simple, contemplative observation coupled with unadorned yet penetrating expression. They touch on the one thing that makes us unique: our story, with its moments terribly ordinary and ordinarily terrible.
