Photo: The cover of 'Picking Up Signals'.
Picking Up Signals
By Jane Pearn
We are encouraged in Advices & queries to take heed of the promptings of love and truth in our hearts. The Quaker poet Jane Pearn regards these promptings as signals. Dealing with signals requires the sensitivity to detect them, and the capacity to interpret them. Pearn is gifted with each of these abilities, as revealed by this fine collection, which faces up to many of truth’s challenges with courage, intelligence and humour.
The opening sequence deals with the fact that Jane had been adopted, leaving her with no pre-history beyond ‘being chosen’ by a woman who was not her real mother. Her sense of loss was deepened when she traced her birth mother and was rebuffed. Yet when she has a child herself, she becomes aware that the quality of this new relationship was never enjoyed by either of her mother figures.
Pearn covers a wide range of sympathies and concerns. ‘I travel best without a map,’ she says, open to whatever happens along the way. In an appreciation of the River Tweed, which runs close to her home, she notes that it ‘asks relentless questions of its banks, tests for weakness’, rather like herself.
Jane helped clear mines in Cambodia, and at one point bears witness to the misery caused by minefields in writing that echoes the penetrating irony of Jonathan Swift.
‘‘‘I travel best without a map,” she says.’
Elsewhere, when she comes across an old man playing a didgeridoo in a scruffy street, the drone affects her as if it were the song of the Earth. Then she pays careful attention to birds, envying the stonechat’s capacity to fly, being but a ‘lumpen human tethered to Earth by gravity / and disappointment, lacking / the dimension of air, needing tracks’. Her sparrow, crow, owl, heron come into focus with precision, originality and respect. A cat ‘pours herself like upward water to a tiny ledge’.
Jane is also a speech therapist, alert to refugees struggling to cope with a foreign country ‘awakening in this house / of unfamiliar brick we try to call home, in this land of smiles and rain, where / the sun does not keep its promises’.
Later, she returns to her younger self, and her complex reactions to puberty: pride in becoming a woman, alongside regret at the loss of a body that could play in an unconsidered way. An intensely moving poem, ‘At a stroke’, describes with compassion and dignity her mother’s final days when: ‘My words, I can tell, start to make no sense slip off their skins of meaning.’
In her concluding poem, Pearn imagines walking towards a coast ‘until water nudges my toes’. Once there, she carefully removes her heart and launches it into the waves. Who knows where it will end up? But rescued hearts, she says, should be ‘treated humanely and delivered to a place of safety’. Indeed so.
