Robbie Coburn, Ghost Poetry (Upswell Press 2024)
Ghost Poetry‘s back cover blurb includes a discreet trigger warning:
Always vulnerable, and often confronting and harrowing, Ghost Poetry is a beautifully crafted and important work that will scar the reader.
I agree that these poems are beautifully crafted and confronting, but I wouldn’t say I was actually scarred by them. They do deal with tough subjects – self harm, addiction, the mental health system, suicidal ideation, miscarriage, abortion, rape and more. But there are also horses, a love-poetry thread, and always the sense that the poetry is doing much more than giving vent to pain and suffering, and not at all playing for shocks.
Some of the poems are presented as accounts of dreams, of nightmares really, and many others have a dreamlike quality. Perhaps more accurately, in many of the poems the border between waking and dreaming is blurred so that the emotional intensity and weird logic of nightmare suffuses the daylight world. Sometimes the speaker seems to be a ghost.
A partial list of the titles in ‘Blood Ritual’, the first of the book’s three sections, gives an idea of what I mean: ‘Dream of Human Sacrifice’, ‘Oblivion’, ‘Dream of Scarification’, ‘Cutter’, ‘Dream of Suicide’, ‘Bloodletting’, ‘Dream of Abortion’, ‘I Dreamed I Saw You on a Bridge’, ‘Asylum’. I’m not being entirely flippant when I say it was a relief to read the opening lines of ‘Poetry’, the final poem in the section:
I am tired of these poems;
you can only write your own death
so many times before
you begin to plan for its arrival.
The second section, ‘Wreck’, is filled with horses, and love poems. Again, there is a lot of pain, but also moments of delight as in ‘Foals’, where the poem’s speaker addresses a loved one. You don’t need to have been around newborn foals or calves to be moved by the poem’s final lines, though you may need to have been in love:
as I followed you
your gumboots making a space
for our feet in the wet grass
like two newborn foals
teaching one another
how to walk.
If I had to name a single subject (always a bit of a mug’s game) of the third section, ‘Straw Horses’, I’d say it was love for someone in pain:
I want to touch your tortured bones
as if my hands were gauze.
But my practice of looking at page 77 demonstrates that it’s not just the loved one who is in pain. ‘Love Poem to a Razorblade’ is not the only one that deals with flesh being cut, in other poems mostly by knives, in dreams, and the flesh not necessarily that of the speaker. Here the subject is definitely self-harm:
It’s a hard poem to write about. As I was drafting this blog post, an article by Rose Cartwright in the Guardian Online threw me a lifeline. It included this:
‘What happened here?’ a colleague asked innocently on set, pointing to the scars on my arm.
I was the poster girl for OCD, Guardian 13 April 2024
‘I used to cut myself,’ I said. I didn’t tell her how recently.
She glanced around. No one nearby to rescue us. ‘Really?’
‘Really,’ I said with a reassuring smile.
There was an awkward silence, which I didn’t fill, since the explanation I would have once filled it with – ‘I was mentally ill’ – no longer felt right.
This poem sets out to bridge that awkward silence. You will read it differently depending on the experience you bring to it. For myself, I’ve never had a compulsion to self-harm, at least not of the cutting kind, and my relevant experience is limited to conversations with parents of young ‘cutters’. One of the main things I’ve gleaned is that communication is problematic: the young person can’t talk about what’s happening and/or the person wanting to help can’t bear to hear what they’re trying to say. That difficulty is at the heart of this poem.
I don’t know if Robbie Coburn is writing from his own lived experience, or as an extraordinary act of empathetic imagination. Either way, the poem calls on the reader to attend to a voice that is rarely heard.
Love Poem to a Razorblade
Anyone who has ever been addicted to anything harmful – cigarettes, ultra-processed foods, chocolate – recognises the paradox. If, as a person with high blood pressure, I were to write ‘Love Poem to a Fried Dim Sim’, the tone would be different: despite the best efforts of nutritionists, a fried dim sim habit is only mildly stigmatised, certainly not seen as ‘mental illness’. But the paradox is similar. The behaviour is doing me no good, but I am drawn to it. It’s not too much of a stretch to call that love.
The first lines are full of possibilities:
As a child I knew
I could keep you hidden.
I turned away from the past
and saw your mouth open
and cover me.
First there’s secretiveness. This isn’t about guilt. It’s not ‘should’, but ‘could’ – there’s a kind of power there. But the question hovers: ‘Hidden from whom?’ From someone who would punish or shame the young one, probably. The next line provokes an allied question, ‘What happened in the past that I had to turn away from it?’ As I read it, the speaker had an (unspecified) unbearable experience as a child and, unable to turn to a human for comfort, somehow turned to the razor blade, to self harm.
I struggle to visualise a contemporary razor blade with an open mouth, but those from my childhood, and I’m guessing from the much younger Robbie Coburn’s, could be flexed so that the opening along the middle would open out. All the same, it’s impossible to visualise this ‘mouth’ covering someone. The lines are after an emotional truth rather than a visual image – the possibilities of the blade enclosed the young person in a protective cover against whatever he was turning away from.
you told me love wasn't a word
to be spoken
but a scar cut into the surface
of the body.
anybody you love in this world
will mark you.
A human comforter would have said something (‘It’s all right, ‘You’re OK,’ ‘This will pass’ …). The razor blade’s ‘mouth’ had no words, its message is conveyed, recorded, imprinted, by action.
But there’s more to these lines than that. They don’t dwell on the act of cutting – the welling blood, the pain, etc – which happens in the moment, like a word. The message is in the aftermath, the enduring scar, in the surface of the body but also in the mind, an expectation that love will involve damage. But not necessarily damage! In another context that last couplet could have a completely benign meaning: isn’t it true, and interesting, that if you love somebody they have an effect on you, leave a mark on you? Here, though, ‘mark’ carries a strong negative meaning.
I believed you;
each promise immovable,
every moment between us
carved into permanence.
The message from the razor blade is that those effects and marks are solid, scarlike, immovable, permanent. If there’s grief or humiliation in a relationship, you will remain grief-stricken or humiliated forever. As it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be. It’s not just self-harm that lodges such messages in the mind, of course. Don’t we all have moments in our childhood that have created templates for how we expect the world to always be?
even when you were taken
you have never left me –
It’s childhood experience that has been described so far. ‘When you were taken’ implies an intervention that stopped the self-harm, possibly at an early age. But the effect of those moments persists.
the blood was ours,
every night we were alone,
silently holding you in secret.
In this last triplet, having reflected on the long term effects of cutting, the speaker can at last look at the moment itself. Only now, can he name the blood, and evoke the (creepy) romance of the moment. I think of the song from Calamity Jane, ‘Once I had a secret love‘, and though I can’t articulate it I know that I’ve been taken somewhere.
While writing this, I have had to walk away from the computer every now and then and breathe for a while. You can feel the poet’s steely will as he holds his mind to this subject, honouring its complexity.
It’s a gruelling book, but rewarding.
I am grateful to Robbie Coburn for my copy of Ghost Poetry.
Me fail? I fly! 