Nigel Kent's Review of ‘Welcome to the Museum of a Life’

 

Nigel Kent's Review of  ‘Welcome to the Museum of a Life’ 

by Sue Finch

You know that you’re in the presence of a special talent when you read a collection, and you realise that you have never experienced anything like it before. That was the case for me when I first read Welcome to The Museum of a Life by Sue Finch (Black Eyes Publishing UK, 2024). The collection is split into 7 parts: a foyer, 5 galleries and a gift shop. Each of the galleries contains exhibits, such as a blue apple, a pelican dancing on a patio, a blade of ice and a pound coin, which provide the subjects of anecdotes, sometimes fantastical and sometimes sharply authentic, but always providing the reader with a profound insight into the nature of the human condition.

As in a conventional museum, these exhibits are organised into themed galleries. In Gallery One, we meet exhibits on the subject of childhood. It is portrayed as a time of irrational fears, naivety, recklessness and unrestrained curiosity.  Always written in the first-person, Finch allows us to see her world as a child. For example, in When I Saw Jesus in a Tomato she writes, ‘I ate him; he was a woody version of grass./ I swallowed him hard/ not wanting him to get stuck/ in my throat.’ This is so well observed with its naive fear of getting Jesus stuck in her throat and its description of the taste of a tomato that draws on a narrow frame of reference so appropriate to a child. Above all, Finch presents childhood as a period of infinite curiosity. It’s there as the narrator watches a tortoise being bathed as it emerges from hibernation, as fascinated by the thought that the tortoise might not wake up as she is by the fact that he will (She Puts on a Spring Dress the Day the Tortoise Comes Out of Hibernation). It’s also there in Pelting, a poem full of conflicting emotions. It describes the narrator watching the killing and skinning of a rabbit. Witnessing the killing has a disturbing effect on the child, the moment of death ‘still sounds’ in her chest now. There is an empathy for the animal in her description of its ‘unquestioning eyes’, and there’s denial of the cruelty of the moment in her need to reassure herself that ‘there are whispered words of love/ as ears are folded back/ to reveal the soft white fur/ at the nape of the neck.’ Yet despite this, she has to watch, her curiosity cannot be resisted. ‘I am held by the silence. Through the cobwebbed window/ I still watch’ even though she is repulsed by what she sees (I just know I hate the rip/ and the peel/ and the thought of those hands’).

Finch calls Gallery 2 ‘A gallery of the unspoken’. This is devoted to the development of the self as it comes to terms with the world around it. In this section we see the poet dealing with issues such as self-worth. grief, responsibility and independence. Take for example, the poem, I Hate You. Discussing Gallery One, I focussed on Pelting, a poem viscerally real and authentic. I Hate You is a very different sort of poem. It takes us into an imaginary world of talking cows, birds and gates and yet the poem’s concerns are very real. It is a hostile world in which the narrator is verbally abused for being too heavy and too stupid until that earth-shattering, or in this case silence shattering moment, when a bird tells her ‘There’s only one of you.’ Its significance is emphasised through the description of the bird as ‘a totem carved in a tree’ symbolising the significance of these words for her sense of identity and self-worth. It should be a seminal moment for her, but she ‘froze’. To take on board the words of the bird, to genuinely believe in the value of one’s uniqueness, when the world is undermining you, is hard.

Gallery 3 explores aspects of love such as infatuation, falling in love, devotion and the need for accommodation. Yet running through this section is that continued struggle for self-worth and its impact on relationships. In Telford’s Warehouse, despite an intense night of passion, Finch writes, ‘’It’s uncanny/ how when you told me you had a date/ with a beautiful woman the next evening/ my heart fell.’  The narrator interprets her lover’s statement as an indication of her lack of commitment and her desire for someone better. It is ambiguous whether her lover is meeting someone different the next day, or, as I like to think, is referring to the narrator when she uses the phrase ‘beautiful woman’ and is expressing her intention to see her again the following day. Regardless of which is true, her response suggests the fragility of her self-esteem.  We find this again in That Coin when she writes, ‘Like a one-armed bandit on triple seven/ I rattled out the stories of my life// and still you said yes to a coffee I wouldn’t make/ and paused on the bridge over the canal/ to kiss me.’ The image of the one-armed bandit, suggests the nervous speed with which the narrator talks about herself, but it also implies that she has not earned the affection of this lover through merit but through luck, that the connection is despite who she is and how she is acting rather than because of it: an interpretation that is consolidated by the use of the word ‘still’.

In Gallery 4 we find the poet exploring other emotions, as varied as courage, resilience, confidence and possessiveness through the vehicle of dreams and nightmares. My favourite poem in this section is An Apple for My Mum. It is a poem about filial love and respect for a mother, symbolised through the gift of the blue apple and exemplifies another distinctive feature of Finch’s work: its sensory quality. The colour of the apple is compared to that of a boiled sweet, gel toothpaste and nail varnish. In the case of the former, she writes: ‘Did you ever suck and American boiled sweet – a blue one/ slip it into your mouth/ hold it admire it/ before sliding its smoothness back in/ and licking the wet sugar coating from/ the pads of your thumb and index finger?’ The sensory description conveys the colour. taste and texture of the fantasy apple in a vivid, relatable way and contributes to its symbolic value as a token of thanks and filial love for her mother. There is something unexceptional yet physically comforting and infinitely pleasurable in this description that makes the effects of a mother’s love for a child tangible. The narrator wishes to return those feelings: ‘all the way to her house/ excitement held my stomach captive/ as I imagined her biting into it.’

The final gallery, Gallery 5, Finch describes as exhibiting ‘finality’. Whereas the preceding galleries have focussed on the nature of living and being, here the poems deal with endings, with passings and with the transient nature of life. In Deathwatch Beetles the relentlessness of time passing is captured by the comparison of the sound of the beetles to ‘a metronome/ counting the minutes/ in tallies of six’. This idea is picked up later in the poem when Finch uses the comparison of an hourglass: ‘She imagined them fixed on the trickle/ of sand/ falling through life’s timer’; exhilarated/ by that final rush of grains.’ Significantly this passing is not something to be mourned: the beetles are dancing and celebrating. That, however, is only one way type of response to the passage of life. Do Geese See God? offers a very different response: ‘Without answers; there are too many questions./ The head cannot tell the heart how it feels and/ to remind yourself it hurts,/ you dry your eyeballs on a hotel hand towel.’ There is no consolation here, no certainty of a life after death. The only certainty is the pain of grief. Even memory offers little consolation, it is too unreliable (A Pelican in Dancing on the Patio).

I hope this short tour of Welcome to the Museum of Life has shown that it is a cornucopia of delights. It is full of surprises, never predictable and always engaging. Like any museum there is much to be discovered here that illuminates the human condition. Congratulations to Sue Finch and to Black Eyes Publishing for an exceptional collection that deserves a wide readership. At a time when so many poetry presses are going to the wall, it is encouraging to find a small publishing house continuing to provide a platform for such quality work. 

Sue Finch’s first published poem appeared in A New Manchester Alphabet in 2015 whilst studying for her MA with Manchester Metropolitan University. She won second prize in the ‘Wild Words Single Poem Contest’ in 2020 with Flamingo, a poem that went on to be included in her debut collection, Magnifying Glass, and to be recorded for iamb. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Black Bough Poetry, and nominated for Best of the Net in 2023 by Broken Spine.