THE SEA WAS NEVER FAR
A review and interview with poet, Marion Starling Boyer
by Barbara Sabol
THE SEA WAS NEVER FAR
80 pages
released May, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-59948-737-3
$14.00
On a personal note: It has been quite the pleasure to meet Marion, a recently transplanted Ohioan, through this year's Literary Festival sponsored by Lit Youngstown, and via readings in our lit-rich Northeast Ohio area. What a delight to review her latest book, THE SEA WAS NEVER FAR.
The English coastal towns of Norfolk and Yarmouth
serve as windswept, textured backdrop for the animated lyric documentary of The Sea Was Never Far, Marion Boyer's
second poetry book. In both cinematic-like sweep and particular detail, the
poet portrays the lives of those in the two main trades in the North Sea
coastal towns, circa late 1800's to present: the herring fishery and the
millers; this latter the poet's direct ancestors. The reader is privy to
stories and memories of this rough North Sea coastal life via persona poems: we
are charmed by the vignettes of cook deckie, beatster, herring girl, cooper, fisherman;
by the thatchers, marshmen, cutters, mill dressers, and basket weavers, in
speech lines alive with the distinctive dialect of the area.
A central figure in this host of townspeople is the
poet's grandmother, Fanny Starling. The collection serves as a kind of
reclamation project, wherein the poet amends the family tree, and honors her
people, living and gone. The two prelude poems, "A Murmuration" and
"The Investigation of Annie's Account" set the stage for Fanny's
journey, from birth to her young life "given over as foundling:"
My
grandmother Fanny was raised with a flock
of
white pinafore girls, their hair cut like boys,
in
London's St Pancras Home for Foundlings
They
rose and retired at six, prayed, studied,
ate
together, and were trained for service.
What the poet discovers in her journey to Norfolk
and in a trove of archival records was this truth about her grandmother's
identity as an illegitimate babe whose name was changed from Alice to Fanny at
the baptismal font, and who, like her disgraced and disowned mother Annie,
worked as a servant, until she immigrated to Canada. She left England to follow
her love, Davey, sent there by his parents in hopes of separating him from "that
woman―Fanny//. . .Four years older, no people."
The voices in these poems are
wide-ranging and brimming with narrative drama. The reader is drawn into
coastal time and place via voices whose rhythms are audible, whose tales,
couched in cadenced vernacular, credible. Herring girls, who "salt, gut,
sort. . .Make, pack stack the barrels" ("Barrels") figure among
the book's remarkable characters. In "The Herring Girls, Great
Yarmouth" a Red Cross nurse recounts tending to a herring girl in prose
that pulls us
right to the scene:
.
. .
.
. .She says nothing but all her body
cries
Quick, and quick! Get it out! The
scale
in
her eye is a misery common as salt sores
.
. .
I
sit her down and spread her lids, my face so close
on
hers, her eyebrow lends me a mustache.
With
my tongue I feel for the fish scale in her eye
and
flick it out. Up she gets, wipes her face,
too
impatient for me to rebind her cloots, the cloth
strips
unraveling from her fingers. Ta! she
calls
.
. .
Likewise, in every poem, the
diction rings true to the telling. In "Thomas, Home Fishing" Thomas
speaks of his friend, Shrimp Watson, "The best-heartedest fellow/I know. .
." says Thomas and shares a story:
.
. .
Shrimp
hates the cold. On the boat,
when
we go below, he'll park his stern
on
the fiddley. I got a warm sit now,
Tom, he'll say, roasting his arse
on
the grate above the engine room.
He's
on that like mustard.
Thomas's is but one voice that recurs through the
collection. Our introduction to Thomas in the poem "Thomas Warren"
illustrates the adroit speech line, sonic play and use of diction that fleshes
out the poems' figures:
THOMAS
WARREN
Mum
was a rind of a woman.
If
she spoke when Dad flogged me
he'd
chuck a bucket of water at her
and
lock her out.
There
are worse things and better.
I
signed on for the fishing at twelve.
It
was the sea or jail for me.
Dad
was a coalie for the steam drifters.
Drunk,
he stepped off the pier carrying
a
sack from the coal lorry.
Hauled
him from the harbor dead as a mitten.
Fitting then that the book's
closing lines should be in the voice of Thomas, out at sea: ". . .there's
nothing on shore seems sizable/enough to worry about."
Apart from the almost chewy
diction, the poet draws on our every sense in very tangible and visual
language, best exemplified by the beautiful poem, "The Basket Maker in
Norfolk Broads." Here, a narrative about Robert, the marshman, in the
voice of his lover. In effectively parsed fragments, we see, feel and
smell "Fens. A great flatness. Old swamped peat pits. Wetland ponds,
water/meadows. Mudflats gleam. Sunlight glances, glares." Then our
auditory sense responds to the long lines and lush sibilants that invoke a
sense of ease, of time standing still in a hushed, sweet quiet: "Wind
hisses through thickets of alder and willow/stirs the rushes. Shh. Shh. . .Water percolates in the
quiet. . .We've come deep/and away from the sedge cutters' notice. Far off we
hear the swish of their scythes."
There is a dynamic cohesiveness, voice
to voice, poem to poem, in the The Sea
Was Never Far, as if the figures were mesh of fishing net or willow reeds
bound in a basket. Yet each unique. The collection is bookended by the figure
of Fanny, opening with her coming into the world as a foundling in "A
Murmuration" and in the penultimate poem, "I'm Stealing a Clutch of
Stones," which figures both poet and her grandmother, Fanny. Here, as in
the first poem, the poet speaks in her own voice, with both authorial distance and
with empathy, the boundary between the two a powerful tension.
The poet recounts both her own and
Fanny's separate but intimately linked journeys. Boyer steps out of persona mode and into her own compelling voice at the end of the collection: ". . .I've flown across
the world/to step inside that house; to walk this shingle where she//must have
come and felt the wind. . ." Fanny's arduous journey to Toronto, to Davey,
in "the Saxonia's steerage" is conveyed in all its imagined awful
detail. The closing couplet ends with an enticing implied ellipsis: ". .
.I think of her trudging to Davey's door,/unprepared for snow, for all that
might follow her knock." And the reader is left wanting the story to go on.
***
I was entirely captivated by the characters in this book, their voices, the particular vocabulary and idioms of the Norfolk area. Remarkable that you created this dynamic slice of life in an English coastal area. Its people and history come alive through the poems in THE SEA WAS NEVER FAR. Thank you for this stunning collection!
The poems take on an deeper dimension, in that this book is about your family, your ancestry, your people. This personal connection to the poems is where I'd like to begin our conversation.
What was the trigger event that inspired you to write the book?
I had a “Finding Your Roots” moment when a friend of mine
offered me access to her Ancestry.com account. On a whim, I entered my paternal
father’s name and, surprise! up popped a photo of my grandfather posted by
someone in England. The photo had been taken before he had emigrated to
Canada as a young man. I was able to
contact Peter and Ann, who posted the photo, and discovered Peter’s grandmother
was a sister to my grandfather. That connection opened a doorway for me into learning
why my grandparents didn’t like to speak of England and never returned.
As it unfolded, Peter and Ann helped me discover a secret
that my grandmother had kept her entire life -- that she had been born
illegitimate and was raised in London’s St. Pancras foundling home.
So, you had no knowledge about your grandmother’s history before you started the collection?
No! None of us in the
family had any idea! Including her two children,
my father and my aunt who are dead, but it was important to me to find out
about her history as there is a rare blood disorder in our family and I wanted
to know the source, which we knew genetically had to be my grandmother’s
father. Of course, he turned out to be the shadowy man who caused my
grandmother’s illegitimate birth.
Two of my Canadian cousins and I decided to track the story
down first-hand and we flew to London to meet Peter and Ann and to visit the
London Archives and to see the Foundling Home museum. We also connected with
relatives in the Norfolk area where our family has lived for generations back
as far as I could discover. We held in our hands the actual documents which
recorded my great-grandmother’s appeal for her infant to be taken in by the
foundling home. We saw the sparse records describing my grandmother’s life in
the foundling home where she was raised to be a domestic servant.
Peter and Ann took us to Norfolk to see the farmland and
broadlands where my people lived and worked and continue to do so. We ate in
the Nelson Head Pub which our great-grandfather managed in 1908 after the mill
went bankrupt. We visited churchyard graves, spent the night in a mill
converted into a deluxe B & B. I met distant cousins who grow reed for
thatchers, who were fishermen and served in the merchant marine, who continue
to farm in the same area my grandfather knew.
Did you come away from your travels to Norfolk and writing these poems with a new or altered sense of identity?
The trip affected me deeply.
While in Norfolk I couldn’t get over how some many voices echoed my grandfather’s
particular way of speaking. It was subtle, more cadence and sense of humor than
accent, but it was all around me. And, of course, I came away with such a full
heart knowing that my grandmother had felt such shame. Once Ann asked if it was
too sad knowing her hard life. I told Ann
that somehow my grandmother had been shown kindness, because my grandmother was
kindness itself.
Clearly a great deal of research
went into the writing of this wonderful book. How did you cull and funnel all
of that information to these 47 poems? And on that note, with so much place and
person data to work with, how did you know when to call the book done?
When I began, I decided to simply write a few poems and see
if they could be strong enough narratives to appeal to someone outside the
family. I wrote a few and my critique group affirmed they were interesting, so
I set a goal of doubling their number. And when they jelled, I doubled the
number again hoping for a chapbook.
Then, research led to more research and I was flooded with
information about the herring industry’s boom and bust, how rhubarb is grown in
the dark, how the best reed in the world for thatch is grown in Norfolk, how a
mill’s machinery operates. It was all fascinating
information but, finally, it came down to the voices for me. And that meant
persona poems.
I fell in love with the vocabulary of the region. I wrote entire poems to find an opportunity
to use a phrase like “dead as a mitten” or “the sails are asleep.” It took a year and a half of writing. I created an expanding list of ideas, such as
“write about the basket weaver…need one for the herring girls…” and when the
list was exhausted, I decided I was done.
Please talk about your research. How did you find and gather the great amount of local character information, lore and all those rich details about the fishing and mill industries in Norfolk and Yarmouth?
Firstly, I had actual people, my people, to talk with
face to face and I listened carefully.
One was “Toady,” or Brian Rudd, a dear distant relative who
knows all the ins and outs of the herring industry. I had Peter Starling, who
took us through the broads on his boat, walked us around the Starling farm,
sang sea shanties, and shared stories and photos of the farm, the war, the mill
and the family members, like Austic who rode the windmill blades on a
dare.
I collected books on all these subjects. One is a book 157-page
glossary of fishing terms and superstitions.
I wrote to Jonathan Neville who has a website database compiling
information and photographs for over 1,000 miles in Norfolk and their
histories. And I read newspaper accounts
of shipwrecks, and interviews of fishermen and coopers and beatsters. I found a
fine old book written by a miller’s son I poured over his diagrams of mill
machinery.
When writing about past events,
there is always the issue of historical veracity. How much filling in of the
blanks did the poems need, and how did you balance fact and invention is the
poems?
The voices in this book are mostly those of real people. I
invented a few to round out the full picture.
My grandmother’s history is important to me, even though it
is spotty. The archival information indicates that even the investigation into
how Fanny’s mother became pregnant is ambiguous. In the book I keep that
ambiguity unresolved. The one thing I know for fact, that my father never knew
about his mother, and Fanny never knew for herself was her birth name, which is
Alice Southgate. The foundling home re-baptized her Fanny.
My grandfather was loath to speak about his life in England,
so after talking with every family member I could, calling upon the sketchy
memories of the elder English relatives and a very few letters, I decided to give
myself some leeway in guesswork. It was my decision to write his story showing his
parents attempt to block his romance with Fanny, who was my grandmother. This
was hinted at in one letter and I believe it created an animosity that kept him
silent about his parents and England.
Thomas Warren, Alfie and Nora, Robert and his wife, are
pulled from my imagination but their work and concerns are real. The other
people in the book are all real. Toady, Jello, Duffy, Dumps, Teapot, Mute, Old
Ben, Georgina, Austic, all the others, and of course, Alpheus, my
great-grandfather.
You chose the persona form for the
lion’s share of these poems, and were really able to inhabit the figures in the
book. How did you locate the voice and temperament of each of these very different
characters?
I appreciate that compliment. My biggest challenge was how
to handle the Norfolk dialect as it is distinctive and pronounced. I couldn’t accurately write in the voices of some
of my characters as it would be hard to understand without footnotes but select
phrases and colorful vocabulary words allowed me to establish voice, as long as
I could make the context elucidate meaning.
I wanted to avoid a glossary at the end for words such as “beatster,”and
“cloots” so hopefully the context makes their meaning clear.
The cover is beautiful, and a perfect complement to the book’s content. Please tell us about the cover art.
Thank you so much for mentioning the cover! I am proud of it. The painting on the cover is an encaustic piece
painted by my niece, Sarah Starling, who is an artist living in Denver. Her magnificent work can be seen at
Sarahstarlingart.com. I was grateful Main
Street Rag’s editor, M. Scott Douglass was open to using her work for the cover
and it was especially important for me to have a Starling family member’s art
on the cover of this collection.
Please talk about your writing habit. Are you a poet with a scheduled writing time, or write as the muse dictates? Both?
I would like to tell you that I am disciplined and sit each
day routinely tapping away on a schedule but that is not my habit. I find that I write in intense long periods,
by which I mean obsessed months at a time, and then long months will go by and
I want to write but find there is nothing in my brain to write about. I do not
like those months.
I have little patience for writers who moan about the work
of writing. I like its challenges, from
getting down the first draft to all the layers and phases of revision. I enjoy
the deep immersion into writing, writing until I forget that I should have
eaten that day and that my dog and husband are wandering forlornly, clearing
their throats hinting that a it would be great to have me present for a while.
When I want to write and haven’t an idea, I am cranky. Having a big ongoing project, like The Sea
Was Never Far helps as I can exit and re-enter the work as I imagine a
novelist gets back into the story by writing the next scene.
Can
you tell us about your next writing project?
I am exploring an obsession.
I am compelled by the story of the Antarctic explorers who were the
support team for Shackleton’s 1915 Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition.
Shackleton’s heroic and epic story of survival has been told and retold many,
many times and his incredible story has eclipsed the valiant and equally epic
story of his men on the other side of the continent who were charged with
laying the food depots for the Antarctic crossing. I hope to do justice to their story but also weave
through, as a counterpoint, the voice of Antarctica herself.
Marion Starling Boyer, professor emeritus for Kalamazoo Valley Community College, has published three poetry books: The Clock of the Long Now (Mayapple Press, 2009), nominated for a Pushcart and Lenore Marshall Award, and two chapbooks, Green (Finishing Line Press, 2003) and Composing the Rain (Grayson Books, 2014). Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. Born in Ontario, Canada, Boyer calls the Great Lakes region home. While she has lived most of her life in Michigan she now resides in a small town near Cleveland.
Barbara Sabol is the
author of the poetry collection, Solitary Spin (Main Street Rag Publishing), and two chapbooks, The
Distance Between Blues (Finishing Line Press) and Original Ruse (Accents Publishing.) Her work has appeared widely in
journals and anthologies. Barbara’s awards include an Individual Excellence
Award from the Ohio Arts Council and the Mary Jean Irion Poetry Prize. Barbara is a speech therapist who lives
in Akron, OH with her husband and wonder dogs.
