Ice Remembers Water

Marnie Dredge

The ancients believed the human body and its multiplicity of positives, negatives, health, ailments, were all predicated on the balanced status of the four humours: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile.

Amazing how such complexities might be reduced to just four fundamentals but this proto-medicine held sway for millennia; all the way from the ancient Greeks and Romans through to around the 16^th century. Not much a good course of leeches couldn’t fix either, if you follow mediaeval medicos and apothecaries. Nothing like a good bloody catharsis.

Forgive the clumsy comparison but poet Marnie Dredge has also happened on a quad-strong formula for a healthy soul. It’s fair to say it’s been a painful process getting there, for the longest of times witheringly painful.

“For years, shame sat beside me,

“And I left, I ran, I hid,

“Until no one could find me.

“Not even myself.”

But her Ice Remembers Water is a wonderfully purifying vehicle that plumbs the depths of anxiety, fear, rejection and anger; that examines the spark that massages illumination and belief; and which champions the tentative steps leading to the sun-kissed treasure of love.

Her four totems – freezing, burning, remembering, being – track this deeply personal odyssey and all its intricate torments and trials in an exquisite omnibus of word, sentiment, typography. She imbues a beauty into pain as much as into redemption.

“The names that clung to me,

“The lies that shaped my silence,

“The garments stitched from fear,

“One by one, they loosened,

“And beneath something breathed.”

As Dredge says, some stories are told in words, others are carried in the body. What she’s engineered here is an extraordinary transporting of the visceral to the page.

The result, again in her words, is “a collection of poems and parables about the ways we learn to protect ourselves, the beliefs we inherit, the stories we tell ourselves to survive and the quiet process of returning home”.

It’s a formidable effort, one where the reader can all too easily share the pain but also, ultimately, the joy of release and ascension.

You might even say the outcome is the nicest of humour.