Confessions of a Survivor: A Review of Poems by Lily Brett

Lily Brett's writing is always personal; confessional. Even in fiction, the characters follow the contours of her own life; her family and background. In poetry, this sense of the personal is even stronger, and this is both the strength, and weakness of her work. Poems by Lily Brett includes two recently published collections, In Her Strapless Dresses, published in 1994, and Mud in My Tears, published in 1997. As with Brett's fiction, both of the poetry books concentrate on the Holocaust, both Brett's own experiences of fascination and obsession - the daughter of Holocaust survivors, and her parent's firsthand experiences. There are also poems about love, death, parenting, growing up, vanity, and pain.

In Her Strapless Dresses is the older publication, and is the first set of poems in this book. The problem with the poems in this collection is that they really aren't poems. Just what makes a poem a poem, and not prose, is a serious and scholarly topic, and a subtle and difficult one too. However, if these were written in something other than stanzas, they would simply be prose, and no one would question it. There is no real transformation; no attempt at saying something unsayable - or illuminating through hint, sensuality, innuendo; no attempt at calling forth something bigger, and more complex, than the words would suggest. There are no epiphanies. The writing is strong, and moving, and at times, intense, but as a reader, I kept wondering why this was written in stanza rather than paragraphs. These could be quite good short essays, or little autobiographical vignettes, but as poetry, the writing is simply too basic; too straight to, and the poetic format seems unnecessary, and perhaps even indulgent. The sentences themselves are good, and the writing is interesting enough for the reader to follow the line of thought which is clear as the simplest prose, forward towards its conclusion. A lifetime's accumulation of things - clothing, tickets, papers, mints, medicines, and photographs are examined in the first part of In Her Strapless Dresses. In "Old Figurines", the narrator rifles through her mother's possessions, and takes "a can opener/a meat mallet/her cake knife/her flour sifter/and her rolling pin." Her father's items are 'shocking', while her mothers are immaculate, and both are examined with a kind of sad longing, as if this was all left of these people - the sum of their lives, pain and joy: "if I let them/she would be lost".

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