Scholarship Girl by Lesley Wheeler

Finishing Line Press, 2007
Review by Rachel Dacus

Can memories be passed down through generations? This is the question at the heart of Lesley Wheeler’s fascinating new chapbook of linked poems on the theme of her mother’s World War II era Liverpool. The book begins with a poem whose title challenges ideas of thought and memory, and where memory resides. “Remembering My Mother’s Childhood” dares conventional ideas of memoir by giving it a twist: the concept of a parent’s experience transmitted through living language, full-blown and layered as if experienced by the child. That initial poem begins with definitions critical to the question:

When she says stove she means fireplace,
a great soot-blackened maw. When I say
Liverpool I mean an unreal city, purified
of reeking detail like a fairy tale

But this is no fairytale world that Wheeler’s poetry evokes in rich detail. With a startling authentic voice and “remembered” imagery, the poet layers the present day daughter and her questions about origins with cultural inheritance, even questioning the possibility of such questions being answered. She declares the ambiguity of memory in the poem’s last lines: “I invent this blitzed, hungry, smoke-thin world/ because it invented me, and lies/ are my birthright.”

The layers in Wheeler’s poetry are most deeply revealed in the book’s adroit crown of unrhymed sonnets, “The Calderstones.” The initial sonnet sets out its scope of history, making it as solid and yet mysterious as its subject, a ring of ancient stones. The poem ends by showing the destructiveness of time on culture and memory and even on megaliths: “Liverpool shrugs and shrines/ topple.” The callousness of history becomes part of history and culture.

Wheeler’s deeply rooted – if borrowed – sense of place pervades this collection. At times the poems reminded me of English poet Alice Oswald’s marvelous Dart, a book-length poem that traces the course of the river Dart from its source to the ocean, folding in all its people and occupations along the way. At other times, the idiomatic voices and terse commentary made me think of Eliot. Using a rich blend of artifact, dialect and rhythm, Wheeler points to the mysterious accretion of cultural patterning while simultaneously shrugging them off with the observer’s detached stance.

“No elegies here,” declares the last line of the last poem. Yet I felt in these poems a river of plaintive tribute to the power of language to transmit a deep sense of place. The final poem begins with lines that might be anti-ode, an elegy for memories that cannot completely cohere, but still resonate in the time capsule of verse:

There is no way to prove to you how
my mother’s Liverpool sounded,
the slosh, the rattle of it, the catarrhal
school girl recitations of “Daffodils”

there is no grooved disk, no file
to click, no black-and-white child
to stand on the chair for a song

me auntie Mary had a canary
up the leg of her drawers

In refusing to pen elegies, Lesley Wheeler has instead poignantly recreated another world and another time.