Paraphernalia

This collection is one of those you can read at one sitting or dip into and find something to make you think or just see things a little differently. It gives you a view on the world that is at times wry but is always threaded through with a subtext of what it means to be not just a woman but a human being coping with all the events and situations that life can chuck at you. I enjoyed it enormously and thoroughly recommend it to anyone.

Limburg has written possibly the least sentimental book I've ever come across about childbirth. The act of birth delivers her variously, a god, a king, a monster, a creature with no name. It rips her life apart and into the gulf it creates floods a fantastic mix of guilt, fear, religion, myth and consumer durables. From these she begins to construct various ways of looking at both her child and the new person that having a child has made her: `With such unstable chemistry/ we struggle to assemble love' (from `Love').Limburg's first book was characterised by its wit, and this collection has the same sharp humour. But this collection marks a considerable development in her work: her wittiest work is also her most poignant. The brilliant sestina `Late' works the unlikeliest end-words (including `toilet' and `A Levels') into a virtuoso meditation on madness, miscarriage and lateness; similarly the prose poem `The End of Civilisation' is a very funny faux-reportage piece that manages also to be genuinely disturbing.The poet's Jewishness is something she considers in these poems, although as the book progresses, it seems that this heritage becomes less something to be explained than a resource for her to dip into. In `The Making of an English Poem' which appears early in the book, the poet describes the process of becoming `this English poem', which begins with her Jewish ancestors in Russia and ends with a neat Oxbridge graduateOut of the destruction of childbirth has come an adventurousness, a variousness that was not there before: Limburg tackles a variety of forms and subjects, using all of them to attempt to express and understand the shattering of identity that occurs after her child arrives. Limburg, unusually, does not tell us what the compensations of motherhood might be, nor dwell on `good things': the accomplishment of this book is that unstoppable life crawls out of every corner of it. Chaotic, destructive, rampaging: this is what life after childbirth is for Limburg and she follows where it takes her, documenting her disintegration with a clear-eyed amazement that becomes, in the end, wonder.

Joanne Limburg's second collection is a book about, and probably for, women. Many of these poems are concerned with pregnancy, the difficulties of breast-feeding, the patience and self-sacrifice required to be a mother, the loss of freedom. It also recalls childhood bullies, looking at ways adults can be bullied, and explores those little passing daydreams in which it's possible to make life better when things are not going as anticipated.From the content, this collection would seem to be humorous verse at times. Full of little sideways jokes, often at the poet's expense. There's also an enforced brightness that strikes an odd note, as though none of this is quite what the poet intended. Yet the tone of the poems drops easily into the dark and bleak, right on the far edge of depression: 'Darkness falls, striking your mind's eye blind. / In vain you reach for thoughts, for words: all/ are lost to you.''Paraphernalia', indicating a clutter of miscellaneous objects, not all of which can be useful, describes the collection rather well. The poet defines it as meaning 'beside the dowry' originally, those little things a wife was allowed to keep after her husband's death. I wanted to hear more about that sense of injustice and inequality, but it kept sliding away into quiet muttering whenever the poems looked like getting interesting.The book's worth reading if you like your poems strange, neatly-written, and heavily oriented towards the mundanity of domestic issues: 'So my life has come to this:/ all I ever make is laundry.' Joanne Limburg is also prone to rewriting fairy-tales in unlikely ways, and addressing poems to individuals or groups of people: 'Congratulations, Bride-to-Be!'If a third collection is on the cards, it might do better for Limburg to strike out into darker, more threatening territory, somewhere the poet may feel more at home. With many of these bright, odd little poems, she's all at sea.