Book review: Thirty Angry Ghosts: Poems by Mai Black

 

Thirty Angry Ghosts: Poems by Mai Black

 

Mai Black takes thirty famous historical figures and imagines they are speaking to us from beyond the grave. This is a brilliant idea and gives the book a distinctive theme, which many volumes of poetry lack. It also means she can inhabit a wide range of ‘voices’, from Julius Caesar to Pocahontas, Tutankhamen to Joan of Arc, which provides variety in style and tone. The poems are accessible, interesting, imaginative and should appeal to even those people who don’t generally read poetry.

Black also provides a detailed set of biographical notes in the back of the book so that readers can look up the life stories of the characters portrayed. Her writing is lucid and her ideas frequently original. She has a clear, accessible style and knows how to construct an effective opening line:

 

‘How many ways are there to kill a man?’ [Grigori Rasputin, p79]

‘I am lonely here but never alone’ [Margaret Catchpole p60]

‘You will have heard of me, no doubt’ [Adolf Frederick, King of Sweden, p54]

 

Though her writing at times tells rather too much for my taste, I know that many readers enjoy poems that are not too obfuscating, that allow their meaning to shine through clearly. She does make use of some wonderful images which illuminate her work, but occasionally overdoes them, writing a little too much. For example, the brilliant phrase ‘the eloquence of gunshot’ [Abraham Lincoln, p70] is immediately followed by ‘the genius of shooting a man from behind’, which, while not a bad line in itself, feels to me like it is making explicit what is beautifully implied by the first phrase. Similarly, in ‘Adolf Frederick, King of Sweden’, she writes ‘To eat semla is to have your tongue brushed/by a rose petal’ [p53], a wonderful image which is then diluted rather than amplified by the addition of several more unnecessary comparisons – ‘held by an angel,/resting on a butterfly’. However, there is a case to be made that such language is appropriate for the character, that the King of Sweden, clearly a gourmand, would use a list of metaphors rather than just one. The excess of words seems appropriate for the character, and conveys something more about him.

There are some lovely images in these poems, and some striking choice of words, often created with a strong sense of the specific character, the time in which they lived, the reasons they are well-known. The voices often sing out, with vivid particularity:

 

‘and then the earth rose up to meet me,/smacked me round the face’ [The Unknown Soldier, p77]

‘The blood moon hangs heavy in the sky’ [Mary Shelley, p64]

‘What joy they must have taken in snapping/off my pretty head’ [Marie Antoinette, p58]

‘I am not the one who troubles/your rump-fed brains’ [William Shakespeare, p49]

‘And my words were yellow leaves drifting in the water’ [La Malinche, p41]

 

I admire the way Black has conveyed the personalities of her characters, often with subtlety and nuance, and with more complexity than her overtly straightforward style would initially suggest, whether it is the wry humour of Henry VIII’s misogyny, or Anne Boleyn’s contemptuous assertion ‘I’d rather be a witch than a fool’ [p43]. There is a strong vein of protest running through the collection, feminism, revolution, anger – but also touches of humour and refreshing insights. The emotional atmosphere of the poems is varied and interesting. The characters are drawn from many different cultures and historical eras, and their stories are told in voices that feel appropriate to their characters in general. The book works as an effective means of learning about famous people from the past, as well as an enjoyable collection of entertaining poems.

 

Rating:   **** [recommended]