Beverly Rycroft set to become a word-of-mouth poet predicts Finuala Dowling

by Colleen on Aug 20th, 2010

Beverly Rycroft is a poet to keep an eye on. Her book, missing was launched at Kalk Bay Books on the 17th July to a packed house. Last night, the 19th August we had a city launch of the book at The Book Lounge. Finuala Dowling introduced Beverly warmly and with enthusiasm on both occasions and talked about her work. As Bev’s publisher I hope Finuala’s predictions are right and the groundswell of admiration for her work grows and grows.

Most authors hope to be heard of via word-of-mouth. It’s slower than the big hype some writers get, but a lot more sincere, with a long tail. Beverly Rycroft is set to become a word-of-mouth poet, mentioned on picnics and in passing by real readers who have not been able to put down her debut collection, missing.

But overnight sensations are not made overnight. Bev has worked for years on these poems. The first notes towards the collection that became missing were made over a decade ago. I thought it would be interesting for you to hear about her development from my privileged point of view as her poetry teacher, though “teacher” is a debatable word to use in relation to a natural like Bev.

I first met Bev when she arrived in my summer school poetry class in 2007 – she snuck into the back row, the way people do when they’re contemplating running away. She wrote a poem called “What I learned from you”, which you will find on page 26 of missing. It usually takes me hours to teach someone how to write a poem with a great title, a poem that grips you right from the start, but Bev got that effortlessly:
Initially, I learned
nothing
from you.

That was because I already knew everything.

The poem moves through a description of what she knew – how to drive wearing a seatbelt, how to change a loo roll – before conceding that he DID have something to teach her: how to persuade a child to eat snoek pate, to dance rock n roll, sing along to Neil Diamond. This how Bev’s poetry draws us in, makes us want to read and not stop reading, because she seems to be just speaking to us, normally, conversationally. Then suddenly, there’s the devastating punchline:
You taught me that no amount of pres-stick will fix a broken garden gate
how to blame someone else when I lose my keys
and how
if we really had to
you and I might
just
manage without each other

I said, “Bev, that is a good poem,” and later that day she was found wandering down University Avenue chanting, “I have written a good poem; I have written a good poem.” But then once she’d started, she didn’t stop. Poem after poem they came, instinctive in their “rightness”. Because Bev is equally assured in the techniques of comedy and tragedy, it was sometimes a bit like listening to a stand-up comic taking a shortcut home through a graveyard.

Summer school ended and Bev started to attend workshops in my home, bringing her fan and her shawl because her thermostat isn’t what it used to be. These accessories were also useful on rare occasions when I was struck dumb by a really bad poem by a participant: Bev would shake out her fan and rearrange her shawl and generally create a theatrical diversion until I had recovered myself. I remember her reading the poem “Homing” to us, and me thinking, just knowing, that she would publish a collection one day. There is a sense, in the poem “Homing” of the poet reaching out for a word or an image and the perfect word or image is right there, coming tamely into her hand. I’m thinking of “the rippings of previous stitches/still dangling like milk teeth” and later, pinning the birds’ wings and pushing them into the “patient air”, and later the birds stitching “unerring as needles, through the silky sky”.

I came to expect that Bev would bring good poems to us, but instead she brought stunning poems. I once set an exercise to write a poem on the theme of breastfeeding. I remember opening the document Bev sent me and being completely knocked out. You can see the poem now on page 75. She used my instruction as her title, and the poem started simply, flatly, magnificently “no.”
I can’t
I never think of them.
Although there is one there,
I never think of it.

It is terse. It is like a punch. It is all written in lower case. I often asked Bev about her use of lower case – are you sure that’s what you want? I asked. But I understand, she wants to write without the capital letter because life knocked the majuscule out of her.

I should say something about Bev and stoicism, which is something she says she hasn’t got but she has got. It’s one of those poetic paradoxes. When I give Bev a chance, she will read you her poem “What life is really like” and you’ll know what I mean when I say that Bev writes of her experience of facing death with vulnerable stoicism or perhaps stoic vulnerability. It is an astonishing poem: the imagery of the garrotted pigeons working like a massive but quiet engine beneath the surface. I cannot read it without wanting to weep.

Whitman said that we can’t have qualities in our writing that we don’t have in our personalities. Many poets write poetry so bad that you could only love it if you really love the poet. But with Bev it’s the other way around – to read her poetry is to love her, for her wit, her zaniness, compassion, insight, humanity, hilarity, strength and profound capacity for love.

Maupassant said that most of us ask writers “Make us laugh; make us cry; make us think, make us imagine” and so on, but that very few of us ever say to the writer the one thing the writer needs to hear: Carry on … write whatever suits you, in the way that suits you. Bev, you have made us laugh, cry, think and imagine … please, please: CARRY ON.