NICHOLAS WHITEHEAD Reviews
Disturbance by Ivy Alvarez
(Seren Books, Wales, 2013)
Birds are supposed to fall
silent. Clocks are supposed to stop, their second hands frozen at the exact
time the trigger was pulled. Anyone who has watched someone die knows this.
Anyone who has lost a loved one to a violent death has felt the same thing. Why
does the world carry on? Why doesn’t it even flinch? Doesn’t it know?
Disturbance focuses on a scene of triple death—the result
of a bloody domestic incident. Far from standing still, the world actually
moves up a gear. Police cars arrive, then a newspaper reporter. In time, the
local priest, coroner and estate agent all play their parts. These are the
professionals who, to a greater or lesser extent, deal with death as part of
their working lives. Then there are the family members and the neighbours. This
may be the only violent death that personally affects them. For them, life will
never be the same again.
With a handful of main
characters and a dozen lesser ones, the book should be a full-length novel. And
in a way, it is. We see the characters’ inner torment; we learn about what
happened from different points of view. By the end of the book, the reader has
a well-rounded picture of the aftermath of a tragedy as well as an insight into
the ways different people behave in extreme conditions. But the story of Disturbance
is told in only 78 pages. Alvarez has condensed all the insight and character
development of a novel into 44 poems. The way they are arranged, including
repeat appearances of the main characters, provides all the narrative we need.
The fact that most of the poems are written from an individual character’s
viewpoint means that perspective can shift with a refreshing frequency which
would be irritating in the narrative flow of a novel. We are accustomed to
riding with authors as they tell the story. We are in the passenger seat as
they accelerate, swerve, brake and switch lanes. Whatever twists and turns the
storyteller makes, it’s still a linear experience and the author is in driving
seat.
Telling a story in poems
releases the reader from the author’s control. Instead of a line that we follow
from start to finish, we have a series of gems. Each one can be held up to the
light and contemplated, appreciated in its own right. We might spend five
minutes on one gem before moving on. And we might spend the rest of the evening
on the next one. Most of them work as stand-alone poems in which Alvarez dodges
clichés and stereotypes to find something new and often disturbing. In “A
Priest thinks on his future,” we catch the clergyman in a private moment
before the well-attended funeral service.
If I handle this
right
this might make my
name:
a double
murder-suicide
does not happen
every day
- not among my
parishioners, anyway.
Should I say,
‘This is a testing
time
For me as a priest
…’ ?
Alvarez examines each
character with the same penetrating and uncritical gaze, revealing the flaws
and virtues of ordinary people caught up in something terrible. She is
calm and unflinching in her description of horror—blown-out brains are ‘a blood
halo’ and the body of a dead boy, lying outside, is found:
his arm by his
side
the frost on his
skin disappearing
his frozen look of
surprise
Nothing escapes, not even
mundanity. The estate agents put the house—the crime scene—up for sale.
It’s 15,000 below the usual guide price. Five thousand for each dead body.
But 5,000 what? In a story
with poetic attention to detail, the sense of place is strangely absent. It’s somewhere
in the western world, somewhere with BMWs and coroners’ courts. But we’re not
told much else. There are pine trees so perhaps it’s Scotland. A shotgun is
12-gauge, not 12-bore, which suggests America. But then there’s petrol rather
than gasoline so we’re back in Britain again. Then the boot of a car is called
a ‘trunk’, so we don’t know where we are.
In a 400-page novel, we
know there will be inconsistencies and much of the text will be there for
little more than narrative thrust. But in a poem, we assume that every word has
been carefully chosen and we read each word with due care and attention. So we
assume these inconsistencies are there for a reason, perhaps to indicate that
the action takes place in Australia, where Alvarez used to live. But if that’s
the idea, why avoid the use of dollars for prices? Why refer to the
‘emergency number’ instead of 000, the actual Australian number? One might
expect the absence of any sense of place to make the aftermath of the tragedy
more universal. But in poetry, we see the world in a grain of sand, humanity in
a tear. Vagueness doesn’t help. We need the specifics to get that universal
connection.
In every other respect,
that detail is there, doing its job. Details resonate with our memories and
strike chords in our hearts. In the opening poem, we are right there in the
coroner’s court.
Members of the
family wept
as the coroner
read out
her pleas for
help.
Nothing softened
as they cried.
The wood in the
room stayed hard
and square.
The window clear.
The stenographer
impassive.
The spider under
the bench
intent on its fly.
And there’s the universal
truth. The unthinkable has happened; waves of shock and grief are blasting out
from you at full volume. But the wooden panels don’t creak; the clocks don’t miss
a beat; trains continue on their tracks. How is anyone to bring these
experiences together? For each person who faces it, the challenge is both
unique and universal. It is this aspect of the human condition that Alvarez
reveals in Disturbance—the struggle to reconcile the devastating with
the mundane.
*****
Nicholas Whitehead is a
former crime reporter who now works as a mediator in conflict resolution. He
is also a performance poet.
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