Anamnesis

Iona Lee

Review by Calum Rodger

Iona Lee’s eagerly anticipated debut collection Anamnesis begins with ‘Taking a Thought for a Walk’. Picking up on painter Paul Klee’s description of painting as ‘taking the line for a walk’, it’s not so bolshy as to comprise a manifesto but, with characteristic tentativeness, may be read as a statement of poetics for the poems to follow. For Lee, ‘Words are not necessarily true because they sound good. Nevertheless, I believe in the poetry of that, like I believe in a painting’s horizon’, later noting how Klee’s ‘once depictive paintings disassembled themselves […] into a peculiar Eden.’ The analogy between poetry and painting is drawn in all its contradictory complexity—does a disassembled painting even have a horizon? And if not, what then to believe in? And yet, by a certain quality of care (perhaps even faith), it can be crafted so as to feel—indeed, be—‘true’ regardless. Such is the draw of Anamnesis: the topics of these poems range across biography and history—from girlhood to womanhood, from nature to technology—and in modes of memory, media, magic, myth. Yet they are underpinned throughout by an impressive and vital consideration of the thorny knottings of art and life, and their respective ‘truths’.

For Anamnesis is a very philosophical collection, albeit one which—thankfully—favours fond feeling and a little tomfoolery over hifalutin discourse. This is most explicit in the humour of lines such as ‘When I first learned of solipsism, I looked straight to camera’ and the pure existentialism of ‘Object Theatre’:

You are instructed
to draw your feelings as a tree.

You spend a lifetime contemplating
deciduous or evergreen.

Yet these quotidian quandaries are everywhere, as in the ‘peculiar Eden’ mentioned above: a ‘true’ Eden would afford no room for ‘peculiar’ feelings, but as Lee elsewhere notes, a ‘garden is not nature-shaped.’ It’s fun to read the collection alert to these little quasi-oxymoronic constructions—‘numinous plumage’, ‘grand carelessness’, ‘threadbare treasures’—as they seem to encapsulate the impulse which drives the whole collection: to find the horizons of truth of this abstract painting we call living. Hence the unforgetting of the collection’s title: the poems are as performative speech acts—perhaps even spells, as in ‘Spell for Revelry’—which exist, to quote the opening epigram, as ‘tether[s] tying me to being’.

All this is to say that while the philosophy of Anamnesis is questioning and provisional, its craft, by contrast, is confident and assured. Alongside its overarching temperament of earnest (if quizzical, and occasionally critical) wonder, it makes for an immensely rich volume of poetry doing what poetry does best—‘numinous plumage’ indeed.

Published by Polygon