25/07/2024
We're very pleased with this review of Elvire Roberts' pamphlet "North by Northnorth" from Cheryl Moskowitz, in "Magma" 59 (2024)
Elvire Roberts’ debut pamphlet, "North by Northnorth", is a masterclass in laying bare originality and stripping away poetic convention. Roberts is a q***r poet from the LGBTQ+ community in Nottingham. Born in Yorkshire, she spent her early years in Zambia, has an MA in Creative Writing from Nottingham Trent, works as a signed language interpreter in forensic, mental health, academic and arts settings, and has completed a first degree in Chinese studies at Cambridge University.
I was intrigued by the title and made conscious of the many mythical and political associations gathered around the word ‘North’: North, of course is the direction a compass needle normally points; the Global North distinguishes economically advanced societies from those that aren’t; the North Star always leads to home. Or does it?
In "North by Northnorth" Roberts bypasses all that and veers wildly off-compass in search of something newer, stranger, q***rer, less familiar. These are poems that explore fragility, the natural world, metamorphosis in human, animal and mineral form, as well as the supernatural, the spiritual, and the psyche. This may sound like an impossibly intellectual expedition, and it is, but what is most remarkable is the inventiveness with which it is undertaken. Each page presents a surprise, something new to puzzle over and to learn from.
Roberts writes playfully and invites the reader to play along. There are poems here whose sections are segmented by dotted lines marked with scissor symbols, suggesting the work is there for cutting up and messing about with, should we so wish. This is visual poetry. The six-line sonorous verses in ‘Beautiful demoiselle’ are laid out inside hexagonal shapes and tessellated into two flower shapes across a double spread – a fun job for the designer and a delight for the eye of the reader too. The word ‘demoiselle’ has several definitions: a) a small, graceful crane; b) a damselfly; and c) slang: an unmarried girl or woman. Is it mad that I also saw the word ‘mademoiselle’ stripped of its own (mad)ness, as an invitation to lose my mind and not search too hard for logic?
Language, so many languages - from all corners of the globe - feature here. Some real, some invented no doubt, although perhaps their origins are all due north of where our usual encounters take us. In places, certain letters seem to be formed of hieroglyphs, but I trust this poet, and sense that everything has been mined from a true source, has purpose and is waiting to be drilled for deeper meaning.
Queerness is at the heart of this pamphlet. "North by Northnorth" leads us into uncharted territory. One could spend days, even weeks, getting lost in its pages and still find things to wonder at and discover. Take one of the titles for example, ‘Syzygy’. In astronomical terms, this refers to the alignment of three celestial bodies in a gravitational system. In Jungian terms, ‘syzygy’ is the integration of the anima and animus, male and female aspects of the conscious self. Elsewhere I found it as the name of an artwork by Columbian artist María Berrío depicting three women aligned and transforming a fourth into a half-bird hybrid. Roberts’ ‘Syzygy’ appears as a block of text bisected diagonally to form two triangular (winged) configurations, the left in roman, the right in bold. Mirroring? Opposites? Even the title inverts itself at the end and becomes “Ygyzys”. The effect is soaringly joyous, as is the whole of this fascinating, quirky, and deeply intelligent work.
