Reviewed by Magdalena Ball
The Flowering Dark
By Sue Lockwood
5 Islands Press
ISBN: 978-1-923248-00-7, Paperback, $26.00, 106 pages, June 2024
The Flowering Dark is the first poetry collection in the revamped, revitalised 5 Islands Press. Before I get into the work itself, I feel it needs to be said how important and perhaps tenuous these small presses are for the poetic ecosystem. They run mostly on the infamous smell of an oily rag with a very significant amount of work provided free by the hard-working owners/administrators, and yet the books they produce are often exquisite, carefully edited, and a joy to have on the bookshelf. Sue Lockwood’s The Flowering Dark is no exception. It’s a debut by a poet who has been writing for a long time. Lockwood is not a novice. In fact The Flowering Dark is an assured, sophisticated collection. As an object, the book is attractive with its botanical cover, dark cream paper, small, serif text, and high-end puffs from no less than Judith Beverage, Kate Middleton, and Audrey Molloy. There’s a precision and careful unfolding in the poems of The Flowering Dark that belies how delicate they are, as they take us, by way of allusion and imagery, into the domestic spaces of the garden, the earth, a world that is both familiar and through close inspection, strange.
The book leans heavily into the epigraph. All of the five sections open with multiple quotations and many of the poems begin with an epigraph as well. This creates a sense of conversation and reverence that is echoed thematically in the work that follows. The referenced poets vary widely from poetic giants like Theodore Roethke and Louise Glück to novelists like Janette Winterson and artists like Joy Hester. These words feel like a second level in the work, an underlying conversation between the authors of the epigraphs, the work itself, and the readers as well as between the epigraphs and the words that follow. For example, the first section “Time As Ever”, opens with the following epigraphs:
…and time folds
into a long moment. —Theodore Roethke
memory
is an absurd present
tense—Rosalie Moffett
Both of these pieces pivot around time and its illusory nature, focusing the whole section, which explores time as a wormhole, quantum folding, and the paradox of memory and how it both reflects time passing and collapses it:
Time is a moving arrow
the fraught among us say,
flexing our wills while overcoming
what it was to be young and not brilliant,
fooling around with ambivalence
and the jazz of language. (“Arc”)
The two epigraphs connect to the epigraphs that open the next section which is also the title section of the book, with snippets on the nature of darkness and light.
clouds are flowering
blue and mystical over the face of the stars.—Sylvia Plath
All darkness has its counterpoint in light. —Mark Tredinnick
Taken collectively the work creates an poetic physics which pivots around human frailty and the changing nature of the natural world. This both illuminates the work and helps to focus the reader.
Throughout the book the garden is a constant, providing more circular ways of viewing time, a foil and a parallel to human time, with its illusion of linearity and over-emphasis on the power of the intellect:
It was the future already and we’d come to see
where your mind conjectured long before I met you.
I could have named the trees you waled beneath
but why disturb your groundwork?
Anyway your properties are intellectual,
not botanical. (“Co-ordinates”)
There is a lightness of touch here coupled with an assuredly quiet voice that has an expansive quality, equating the intellectual and the botanical, the flowering of ranunculus with human flowering, and the sensual nature of the earth with the rest of the universe. The poems deftly change their perspective through space and time so that all times feel concurrent and all things seem equal, continually in the state of transformation and yet always available:
Over you now the sky is a screen
scrolling through highlights of the day
Until the ground swells —
Leaving time as ever in darkness (“Time as Ever”)
There’s a lovely conjunction in the work between a deep grief that almost feels nostalgic—so much has been lost before we get to the first line – youth, people who have been loved, the treasures we’ve created and cultivated—against what is gained in the present moment. The past is never really gone, relationships are not over, and the traces we carry become part of the moment we are in now, eg: “blackness not black but volume” as as Lockwood puts it in “Bevelled”:
I watched from a window in the past.
My mind was without words for a while.
I moved back and forth along the bevelled
Edge, making and unmaking the work.
It’s where light is drawn, striking
Like a bell sounding a first language.
The Flowering Dark is full of poems that engage with the natural world, the seasons, the weather, the transition of day to night, and what it means to be alive through these changes and for a lifetime. Much of the work also explores the creative process itself and how that creativity works to transform the grief, the disappointments, the flowers that bloom and then die, and the people who hurt us and then disappear, into something transcendent. This reminds the reader of their own seasons and accumulations – like all good poetry – there is a new conversation and new meanings opened in the that space. Ultimately, The Flowering Dark is a book focuses most heavily on love in all of its forms – Eros, Philia, Agape, Pragma – love for the self, the other, the world and all that constitutes life:
The once-lived live on, their words a crucible in which we burn,
air rich with the sting of ink, the intimacy of exposure. May I know
more of you and less of me — I cannot help what pushes through
Llke a gloved fist against a stretched woe. Oh, sweet, sweet world,
how I greatly love you, your summer face, your winter back;
the silent recitations of your alphabet. (“Correspondence”)