Sorry About the Mess, by Heather Trickey

Author: Heather Trickey. Review by Stevie Krayer

I’ve been wondering whether this book should carry a warning, like those you get before a movie begins: ‘Swearing, violent emotions’; ‘Readers may find some poems distressing’; ‘May cause choking from laughter’.

Imagine the moment of receiving a diagnosis that turns you into someone unfamiliar and rips up your world; or the relentless round of tests, treatments, setbacks and failures; or the Covid restrictions that mean the nurse can’t hug you as she would like to – all these have been transmuted into punchy, witty, quirky poems that hit like a kick from an extremely well-read flamingo. Everyday joys have become intense and precious, even the glee of chasing headlice through a child’s hair. Yet buried in that glee is a ‘pinprick of writhing despair’, which the poet quickly flicks away.

Trickey loves to experiment with form and play with words. ‘All shall be well’ is a pattern riff on Julian of Norwich’s famous words. It’s shaped like a lozenge, or like George Herbert’s ‘Easter Wings’ turned inside out. This neat box contains the utter disintegration of the phrase into chaos, beginning and ending with the word ‘and’. Another poem, concerning depression, only manages in one place to breach the solid black line that splits the poem vertically. And then there are the titles. Apart from the deadpan, or bedpan, humour of the book’s own title (Trickey’s note on this is alone worth buying the book for), there are ‘Lines Composed While Looking for the Sellotape’, ‘For Grace Received by Open Mic’, ‘In Case of Breakdown’, the heavily ironic ‘Nature Poem’ and, one to please Friends, ‘Carefully Considered List of Reasons to Support my Application for Membership of The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) After More Than Twenty-Five Years of Attending Quaker Meetings’ (the poem itself consists of a single two-word line).

Not the least of the volume’s charms are the cartoon illustrations by Trickey’s artist daughter, Silva Brindle, depicting the family as a gaggle of geese. They are loving, comic and touching, but with an edge like a Stanley knife.

The energy in this little book is barely contained: love, savage anger, grief, playfulness, a compulsion to tell the truth however messy, and an undimmed appetite for life. All this is subjected to the discipline of a sharp, self-critical intelligence and a profoundly reflective spirit. If it has a fault, it lies in that word ‘Sorry’: Trickey has a slight tendency to self-deprecation, a trait that is sadly common among creative women. But never mind that, deep down Trickey knows she is brave and brilliant and brimming with Light.

This is Trickey’s first published collection. It is maddening and heartbreaking to consider that it might well be her last. Perhaps that’s why it ends on this carpe diem invitation: ‘Come! Let us feast on our lives’.

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