Review - Sally Jenkinson - Pantomime Horse, Russian Doll, Egg

Review - Sally Jenkinson - Pantomime Horse, Russian Doll, Egg

 

Sally Jenkinson was born in Doncaster, South Yorkshire. She has been writing and performing poetry across the UK for more than a decade, and has also written and performed internationally in Sweden, Iceland and Australia.

Her work has recently been featured in The Morning Star, Lighthouse Journal, Emerge Lit Journal, The #MeToo Anthology from Fairacre Press, and on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Power Lines’.

She is a care worker and community arts producer, and is currently working towards her MA in Creative Writing from the University of Gloucestershire.

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I recently reviewed Helen Mort's "The Illustrated Woman", which was a broad ranging look at women and how they and others viewed their bodies. Part of it was about childbirth, but in this pamphlet Sally does a deep dive into her specific childbirth experience, in all its gory, frightening and magical detail. Reading this I felt at times a bit like Ewan McGregor's character in Trainspotting when he goes into the filthy toilet to get his drugs. I felt like I was going head first into a birthing pool, drowning in various fluids, to get to the poetry. I, of course, have never experienced childbirth in person and I did miss our first (I was in America for work and he decided he wanted to come 4 weeks early) but the other two were relatively routine once we'd reached the hospital. Actually I really must write about the journey to Jessop's on 29th January 1990 - but that's for another day, get back to the review!  

It starts with the early stages, with a prose-poem "Pantomime Horse" that uses the stages of labour as a start point for short prose pieces that poetically reflect the very matter-of-fact descriptions of each stage of birth. 

Then the setting up of the birthing pool. In the very short poem Birth Plan (this is most of it), Sally writes

I hope to do this at home
because hospitals are choked with ghosts

Spoiler alert - the home birth plan is thwarted and the poem Hospital Transfer explores the moment that the plan changes.

No bone-old fears can compare to this.

Wagons roll says the parademic.

In hospital the poems become increasingly frantic, giving a sense of disorientation and hallucination as memories mix with the reality of the situation the soon-to-be mother is in. The poem Forensics breaks out of the panic and views some less than pleasant memories of men, as the doctor reaches between her legs. I won't spoil the ending, but the last line of this one is very sharp indeed. 

Once the baby is out safely the poems soften and the final one, The Goddess Myth, is a lovely reflection of the joy and relief. 

Your tiny hands, your tiny ears, your tiny wail
                I won't write a poem for another year
You're the best thing I've ever made
    One day you'll ask me a question I can't answer

This isn't an easy read and it may be best to avoid it if you're about to give birth for the first time. Save it for afterwards. It's full of brilliant images and swaps poetic styles and rhythms effortlessly. the poems change shape; there are found poems, imagistic poems, narrative and lyric, and there's even space for a Golden Shovel. 

This is a very creative and visceral work, a fine poet writing about her experiences in a vivid and challenging way. Highly recommended.

"Pantomime Horse, Russian Doll, Egg" is published by Burning Eye Books www.burningeye.co.uk