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Confessions of a Survivor: A Review of Poems by Lily Brett - Page 2

© Maggie Ball

The transitions between the poems are handled well, moving from the items of parents, to photographs which evoke a series of images - her own teenage discomfort, her mother as a young beauty, through to her parent's neuroses, her own neuroses, fears, life growing up, and finally, the tribute pieces to her husband. What works well in these poems is the intimacy. You feel as if Brett were confiding in you, as if you were stepping briefly in her shoes, and feeling her insecurities, her puzzlement, and as with a friendship, there is a sensation of warmth, and shared pain and pleasure. Brett confides her dreams, her psychosis and subsequent experiences in therapy, her obsession with numbers and compulsion with repetition, and a few images of Manhattan out the window, and outsider taking note of the city. It is all prose; accessible and interesting, but prose nonetheless. The husband poems are much more like poetry, and more complex in their imagery, particularly "We are Knotted", which plays rhyming and alliterative games, "knotted and matted/snarled and tangled/plaited and braided".

Mud in Your Tears is very much more focused on the Holocaust, and although the tone is slightly less intimate (but still close), and less prosaic than In Her Strapless Dresses, the pieces are in many ways the more powerful ones, delving deeper, and exploring the difficult subject matter on a much rawer, more intense level. Many of the poems are quite long, and at times vacillate between Brett's natural instinct to the relaxed confidence, and her desire to create that poetic distance, and linguistic transformation. The title poem of the collection "Mud in My Tears" has some nice repetitions, moving the poet's voice away from the personal and confessional, into a place of pain and horror - the ugly floor of a concentration camp:

I am the daughter
born after the war
but I've stalled

I am stuck
like a pig in the mud
mud from the barracks

Mud from the huts
mud from the bunks
mud from my eyes and lungs

Once the reader is exposed to this muddy, and permanently ugly and pervasive place, there is no escape. Hitler is in a restaurant in Manhattan. The Nazi's and their lengthy, almost comical titles with the black humor of their rhythms: "Untersturmfuhrer/and Unterscharfuhrer/and Surmbahnfuhrer/and Hauptscharfuhrer" are making business with the teeth of the gassed, and the hair of the murdered. The Nazi's are kissing their wives and children while torturing and mangling children; eating excellent foods while painfully sterilizing girls and destroying babies. This isn't easy work to read, and the writing is very much focused on telling the real story, revealing the atrocities in all of its power. The reader may have, like myself, heard the stories, and even seen the many documentaries, and films, eyes filling with tears and guilty lump in the throat, but Brett's descriptions are no less moving, especially as she calls on her own family - her mother, father, uncles and aunts, and highlights the impact on herself, second generation survivor. The irony of her parent's wanting her to speak perfect German, or the pain, shame and insecurity of Brett's Jewishness, and its effect on her children is all brought out clearly in poems like "The Yiddish Songs", or her and her father's relationship to food, and its symbolism. The collection ends again with a husband poem, and after the pain, and slouch towards death, it is nice to find once again a celebration poem.

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