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Review: Ice Remembers Water

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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 16th 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.

Rhyme and verse, and a little worse …

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Was a time when poetry was the last thing held any interest for this word-mangler.

Too esoteric, too flowery, concepts too emotional and hard to plumb. More times than not, too cathartic and revealing. Hadn’t poets something better to do than sit around all introspective, navel-gazing and self-pitying? Who needs need to know their innermost ruminations?

But then, that’s not all poetry. And it’s okay, really. Plenty of people probably do need to know, if not stroppy journos. Besides poetry’s actually lots of other things too, even the outrageous limericks I once made a mission of committing to memory. Blokes named Bates and Bings, blokes from Kilbride and Kent … grand silly stuff.

Slowly, the old grey matter warmed to the possibilities of poetry – via song lyrics. Slow because I was more interested in the music side of things. Introspective stuff was rife but occasionally you’d find some inspired material, evocative stuff. Social documentary, political commentary, voices left behind but heaving with everything from love and persecution to anger, cynicism and humour.

The best stuff, so I thought, blended these peregrinations with words that jumped off the page. Words that shocked, words that looked odd, words that mightn’t garner much airplay otherwise, words with an artistic aspect to them. Typography is a thing, of course.

It’s a quair thing writing in unfamiliar areas. Like songwriting, for instance. You can write thousands of journo yarns but opening yourself to a song’s lyrics is a very different creature. Eventually, though, I thought I’d have to have a crack at some sort of poetry, even if it was just brain salad slosh. Not knowing what you’re doing in might be handy, who knows? It’s not a blood sport,  I’d venture, but I could be very wrong.

Recently, I pulled together the following brain-spit to a theme raised by a poet mate down the Surf Coast: Can you buy the ocean? Can you buy the land? If nothing else, it was fun playing with those weird little characters and their finials, bowls and shoulders, their apertures and strokes, and their spines and serifs and ligature.

So here goes, best of luck figuring out what I’m on about. There was some sort of rationale to it, if I remember rightly …

CUSTOS …

Fisherman, monger, trawler and troll,

Say the kraken will take a grown man whole,

Neb full of salt, breeches of piss,

Spirit him down a perpurean abyss.

 

Sad, sullen fate for a jack of the brine,

But not minus merit, for the best of mine,

A crab needs to scuttle, a squid to squeeze,

Amoeba shape-shift, hyperborean freeze.

 

The djinns of the seas offer baleful trust,

Abstruse, symbiotic, misfortune, unjust,

White horses, maelstrom, storm and squall,

Dreams rent beyond hope from their chalice of gall.

 

But yo ho, on Jack goes, all belligerent plunder,

Sirens of vainglory and greed hauling him under,

Fates and muses, they can plot and inspire,

But Jack Tar still fuels his own funeral pyre,

 

So whaler, the poets sing, quell your daughter’s hunger,

Ambergris, candlewax, won’t hasten your slumber,

Poseidon’s all bubble, bubble, toil and trouble,

Hug the land instead, to your fortune redouble.

 

But hold, terra’s a blight, conniving and craven,

Its beauty a snare, its lustre no haven,

A mercantile magnet of thirst and lust,  

Mammon underwritten In God We Trust.

 

So tread ware as you grift, you huckster and spiel,

Grounds shift and they tremble, oscillate like your krill,

Lords, lairds, liens of the land, caveat emptor,

Dangers deep as the sea, no call to plumb more. 

 

ⓒ copyright Noel Murphy 2022