ISBN: 978-1-915108-06-7
Published on 21 November 2022
Rejoice?
I’ll show you rejoice!
(But I’m a liar
I’ll show you chairs
inside a pickle jar
which have nothing to do
with rejoicing
and which will only engage
you for a second (or less)
as if they were an image
flitting by
in one of your pretty dreams
which are nothing
to do with me
but when you wake up
you’ll feel me by your side
for the briefest of moments
because I’m good at that)
*
Tessa Berring’s Folded Purse is a rigorous and playful study of the known world and its ultimately unknowable things. Within its folds, poems call to, sometimes quarrel with, each other as images (a warm spell, an outdoor cow) slip from one poem to another. Some of these poems offer miraculously vivid excavations of such everyday objects as the humble scatter cushion, while others ache with the longing to touch, really touch, ‘everything everything everything.’ In a recurring dream of swimming pools, the speaker trembles underwater ‘without a doubt’, but doubt propels the questing energy that fizzes through this work like ‘an incohesion of soap bubbles/ rising through a surface.’ (Ellen Dillon)
What is inside a folded purse? Maybe a secret, a dollop of cream, or a bird. Tessa Berrings' new collection is full of objects and beings that hide and reveal their true selves depending on the intensity of a gaze, or the weather. Mutable perspectives – are we looking up at the clouds from below, or gazing into depths from the sky? Terse and sharp, a pair of tweezers picking apart the minute grains of reality, the poems also bloom into transcendence and drift away with uncanny spirituality. Desperate and funny, fierce and tender, Folded Purse is the unforgettable whispering of a poet who has her heart in one hand and spikes in the other. (Marina Dora Martino)
Folded Purse by Tessa Berring
Suspense
So there was
a table
and at each corner of the table
there was
a little head
on a tiny spike
Below the table dangled
a thin wire attached
to a soft yellow sack
which swang
between the table legs
as if it wanted to
hit the wall
on the opposite side
of the room
and burst!
The little heads
on their tiny spikes
did not hold
their breath*
About a Ceremony
But I don’t
mean candles
I mean cotton buds
and intimacy
I mean silicone tipped
tweezers
(if you really need to)
And soap
in an apricot flannel
They’re all
in this folded purse
made from buffaloes
and antelopes
shot dead*
Film
I’ve forgotten the whole story
with the hair that a man
could not locate
on his tongue
How I could not bear to watchhis parted lips
his searching finger and thumb
How the camera lens
stayed glued
around his mouth
for more than four minutes
and not to the figure
of a woman on the ground
with the dropped margarine
in the brown-yellow light
Nobody saw her get up
and walk away
Did anybody see her get up
and walk away?Folded Purse is Tessa Berring’s second collection of poems. Her first, Bitten Hair (Blue Diode Press), was published in 2019 and was highly commended in The Forward Prize. A pamphlet, Putty, was published by If A Leaf Falls Press in 2022.