Not Drowning But Waking: Notes On Water By Amanda Dalton

To approach Amanda Dalton’s remarkable and moving poetic diptych from either angle – her pamphlet is made up of two long poems each running from opposite ends of Notes on Water – is to diminish the intensity of neither. It is fitting that both share the book’s title, for they are subtly cross-hatched and integrated around the predominant element of water, its capacity for random subjugation, but also for its binary potential to heal or redeem.

And in this regard Notes on Water shares inescapable thematic commerce with Clare Shaw’s resonant and harrowing Flood. Not least because both poets concentrate their focus on the Hebden Bridge inundations, whose waters continue to submerge the small Calderdale town with alarming regularity. Whilst Shaw’s thundering mantras echo the inexorability of rising floodwaters in sound and suspense, finding wider metaphors for endurance and suffering in the tide, Dalton’s approach is tentative and prose-like, lending a kind of directness to ruminations on snatches of personal experience, and dignifying the exercise with self-lacerating sincerity.

That history is as elusive and protean as water: inveigling its way into the drowned present as efficiently as the random flotsam of ‘fridges, sofas, Christmas trees’, memories become tangential, subordinate to the terrible currency of the immediate. The seven-year-old on a beach in Wales, ‘crying as the tide stalks / my mountain range of sand’ is premonitory. The lyricism of her world, overtaken by a sudden intimation of reality, foreshadows the material devastation of a valley in flood. And the visceral howl that is a consequence of anger and despair is later rendered without poetic artifice: ‘There’s a man / in tears in the road with his dog on his shoulders, looking at his half- / submerged front door. Next day the fucking sightseers blocking the / streets.’

Dalton’s theatre of voices – resonances of earlier times, of the wider collapsing world - are insinuated into her narrative like noises-off, laying claim to tenure where hope otherwise fails. At one moment looking into the river Cocytus’ mythical depths, at another recoursing to the submerged present, the narrator’s unpracticed vision cannot blindside the sanguine inventories of destruction’s sightline. And the poignancy and pain are always enveloped in the visible details:

‘I thought of the hotel that fell into the sea,
of the crockery and napkin rings buried in the hill,
the floating coat hangers, the reading spectacles
a guest forgot to pack in his haste.’

Hindsight enables Dalton’s narrator to inveigle the approaching death of a loved one into the poem’s timeline - an unbearable emotional blow in the wider devastation. This shadow lowers over events like a promissory, and prepares the ground for the elegy of the second, or possibly first, poem, a meditation on illness, anticipation and loss. Amongst the valley’s detritus, we sense the presence of the man who will leave in winter, a figure we only hear in remembered conversational interjection, whose voice is a diminishing echo.

And that figure is isolate, somehow set in the distance, except for an extraordinary sense of otherness, as if palpable absence rendered him conspicuous. Opening her elegy with reflective quintains, Dalton works through grief in retrospect. But when she engages with the details of withering decline, form fractures into monosyllables and the self-induced pain of close observation:

‘the last of the nights and days
when she holds his parched hand,
moistens his lips with balm, cups
a tiny glass to him
but he chokes on a sip
and the beautiful nurse says
just a drop on the tongue, like this
and when he opens his mouth for her fingertip
he’s a fledgling.’

Unable to look away from the memory, the narrator extrudes irony from the nurse’s beauty, and distils pathos into the infant-like dependency of the dying man’s final days and hours. The received effect is powerfully moving because it is an authentic mirror to experience. As, too, is the process of coming to terms, the immersion of the bereaved in the tonal world of re-enactment, of revisitation. And if Dalton’s narrative of disordered remembrance is a considered poetic device, then it is also a means of exploring personal grief and of encouraging catharsis by delving into deep waters. The actuation of water in the claustrophobic imagination is only marginally less hostile than the deluge that informs it, where ‘Everything is brown / and broken’:

‘and swimming in a fractured pool
in the bowels of an abandoned building.
Broken windows, rusted pipes. She’s flailing’.

The submerged dream to which the narrator is abandoned might be an evasion of the impulse to replay the pained past. The omnipresence of its tokens – in the final pages before the poem gives on to a pictorial grid of gently rippling waters – remind the reader by repeated accretion of recurring ghosts, and of our fundamental need to retain vestiges of beloved figures, even where their presence encourages a form of self-haunting. The most persuasive and affecting sections of Amanda Dalton’s fine narrative wrestle, exhaustingly, with the inescapability of a sense of presence in absentia, and we are privileged to be made privy to her ongoing pain:

‘He stands behind her,
beside her, in front of a bookshelf, suddenly there
up close and she wants to bury her head
in his damp shirt but there’s no chest
or shoulder and his arms are limp’.