The Wrong Person to Ask
Marjorie Lotfi
Review by Sean Wai Keung
In uncertain times we often turn to poetry for illumination. At the same time, this sometimes means that poets are turned to for answers even when there are none. The title of The Wrong Person to Ask, the debut collection from Marjorie Lotfi, is therefore fitting. Lotfi’s poetry embraces uncertainty, spanning continents and histories, often grounding itself in the wider connections between people and places. There are repeated motifs of photography, both familial and global, for instance in ‘The Last Thing’, inspired by Sergey Ponomarev’s 2015 image of migrants landing in Greece. This relationship between poetry and image could very easily feel fragmentory and unfulfilling, but instead with Lotfi the opposite is true and the collection highlights interconnectivity between time and space. This can especially be seen in ‘The End of the Road’, a lifetime-spanning poem in which the lines between memory, imagination and reality blur:
Even in this lack of light she sees
her mother at the window, one hand
on a hidden hip, looking beyond
Other parts of the collection contain recurring sea and lighthouse motifs, with inspirations taken from the Slate Islands amongst others. One of the strengths of these poems is that when read within the context of the whole collection, what could easily have been ‘Slate Island poetry’ instead becomes part of something larger. For instance, ‘Number 9 Cullipool’ ends with a quote from Luing fisherman George MacKenzie, ‘If you find yourself in the sea, / too much has already gone wrong’—within the individual poem this quote points to the changing landscape of the fishing industry, but it resonates even deeper when considered along with poems like ‘The Last Thing’: ‘… he keeps / his shoes for shore, flings the coat overboard.’
The effect of this is to encourage the reader to rethink their perceptions. In a world as connected as we are, what does ‘belonging’ mean? Within the context of migrations both chosen or forced, what does ‘exile’ really mean? The Wrong Person to Ask challenges us on what we expect from poetry, and poets, in an elegant and unforgettable way.
Published by Bloodaxe