“I go deep into my instincts / But domestication pulls me back,” mutters Lucy Mercer in Mirror. This poem is a snapshot of this collection’s overarching themes: domestic motherhood and the internal wars of nature and nurture. I couldn’t help but feel I was missing an overwhelming amount of context going into Mercer’s debut, initially thinking I’d have benefitted from a tad more experience reading experimental literature. Published last April by Prototype, the collection “revitalises this forgotten hybrid form in the present as a frame to contemplate the obscurities of motherhood, faith and the interior” (according to the publisher). Built upon surrealist instability, there is a solid attempt at capturing the subconscious feelings of a mother caught in a whirlwind of life’s complex nature. I just wish this were clearer.
Of course, I may be the wrong reader, but the inaccessibility of Emblem is so entirely off-putting that I can see these works pretentiously praised but likely not understood. Where so many modern poets fall victim to oversimplified, dumbed-down tones, Mercer goes in the opposite direction. This debut fails in attempting to stand for more than it feasibly can. There’s merit in the fragmented nature of these works that reads like disjointed Sappho lyricism – until its reading feels so convoluted that no matter how hard we try, the ideas fall completely flat.
Take Woodcut Print as a perfect example in its opening lines, “Into is it memory we press and press / and and pulps like old flowers – armour? / And we press tied somehow / somehow still ourselves?” Mercer can conjure up such a storm of counterpoints and misplaced aestheticism that it’s impossible to get a sense of perspective behind an amalgamation of such massive ideas.
Where Mercer might fail to convince me, there is admittedly a meticulousness in how deeper feelings catch you off guard as they unearth themselves. Commit yourself to read between the lines, and you’ll realise that this collection is a feast of overwhelming imagery. It’s the unknown, anxious terror of Emblem that makes understanding it (where possible) so rewarding. If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to see into another brain, this is it. Not a single poem goes how you expect; barely a line in the collection continues where the last suggests. This collection needed more time to brew into its potential: more time for such rich illustrations of brainwaves to turn into something more fleshed out.
Emblem is a family portrait of nostalgia wrapped in uncomfortably loud rustling wrapping paper. Whether that affects your reading is up for interpretation. Mercer must commit to clearer assertions. This will reduce the background noise that otherwise plagues fascinating subjects. Emblem is undoubtedly raw and unmistakably intriguing throughout – in its sheer mystery, you are sure to be drawn in just as you are sure to never understand it.
Image courtesy of Tom Manning