Gary Cummiskey
OF WOMEN AND SOME MEN by Don Maclennan (Firfield Poetry Press)
Faced with the cartoonish illustration on the cover of this poetry collection, one may think the poems are lighthearted and whimsical. But Of Women and Some Men is not a collection of outdated witticisms on the battle of the sexes. It is an examination of woman’s power and mystery, yet it is placed within the wider context of old age and decay, forces which neither man nor woman can withstand.
In My Mother Taught Me, the narrator’s mother teaches him how to make a fire, putting a match to “the druidic pile”. In Beach Portrait, female clairvoyance is personified in the figure of a woman who senses something “which lies/ outside the frame”. In Saint Augustine Claimed, we are introduced to woman’s magical ability to unleash self-knowledge, for “Men can’t find themselves/ until they gratify a woman.”
In this collection, the male is often timid, passive observer, “ineffectual/ compared to women”, lacking healing power, and able to “offer neither mystery/ nor grace”.
Yet woman is not without her sinister aspects. In the Orange Twilight offers a portrait of female sexual and emotional manipulation, while in Portrait of a Lady an irresponsible and vain young woman asks, “Who in his right mind/ would give us free will and not/ expect the worst to follow?”
But, whatever their weaknesess or powers, neither man nor woman is safe against old age. In You Exist, the narrator observes a woman’s “arthritic joints,/ those hips that thrust/ your lovers into ecstasy”, watching her “smile wistfully and sigh/ at the disgrace of age”. In Getting Old, women are left with memories, “their eyes alive/ with diaries of remembered love”, and in I Loved Her, the narrator is once again rendered ineffectual, unable to delay the ageing process.
The charcoal drawings in this volume, by George Coutouvidis, tend to illuminate rather merely illustrate the poems. With dark, misty backgrounds, many evoke an atmosphere of bleakness, fear and uncertainty. Some of the imagery verges on a surrealism reminiscent of Ren Magritte, such as the drawing which depicts a naked woman floating above a tortoise.
One wonders what female – and feminist – readers would make of this volume, a delayed final title from the recently defunct Firfield.
Poetry Press.