Over centuries, the Japanese haiku masters gave us the most perfect expression of lightness in verse. Consider the example of “The Old Pond”—the most famous of all haiku—written by Matsuo Bashō (with English translation by Robert Hass):
Furu ike ya
kawazu tobikomu
mizu no oto
The old pond—
a frog jumps in,
sound of water.
This sort of lightness is a difficult quality to carry off in a poem of any length greater than a few lines, especially in English. Dexterity, exactness, simplicity—many qualities may stand in for it, and they often must, for English verse has a certain accented heaviness, and even more so when it rhymes. But true, almost ephemeral lightness is difficult to capture and even more difficult to sustain across the breadth of multiple poems.
However, in a debut collection entitled Memory’s Abacus, Anna Lewis has shown her immense skill in penning lines of such delicacy. In this, she is aided by choosing shorter forms (almost none of the individual selections are longer than a page). Amongst the proffered verses there are, naturally, some with comparatively more weight than others. These offer an important contrast, drawing attention both to Lewis’ capable poetic range and to her stylistic excellence. Moreover, the collection is divided into three parts, with the middle part comprised of a cycle of forty triolets (“Reveries of a Mother on Foot”). This central sequence of short, interlocking poems—each employing the repeated lines of the triolet form—literally centres a formal simplicity that aids the overall impression of stylistic lightness.
For the purposes of review, two poems have been selected from the first and last parts of the work—the titular “Memory’s Abacus” and “Cemetery Visit” respectively. Nevertheless, the middle part—“Reveries of a Mother on Foot”—deserves especial mention for the excellence of poetic craft on display across its forty triolets (an eight-line form, where the first line is repeated in the fourth and seventh lines; and, the second line is repeated in the terminal line). Each poem in the sequence begins with the terminal line of the preceding poem, thereby linking the triolets together; and, the final line of the final poem is also used as the first line of the first poem, making a genuine cycle. Moreover, Lewis occasionally modifies the terminal line for use as the opening line of the next poem in the cycle, sometimes with surprising and delightful effects. It is to be hoped that another review will undertake to focus on poems of the praiseworthy middle section, for they are richly deserving of attention.
“Memory’s Abacus”
Lewis’ skill with poetic intricacy is not exhausted by her linking of individual verses, Dante-like, into an extended cycle. The titular poem in her collection, “Memory’s Abacus,” appears at first to be an example of shape poetry. As the nineteen lines move down the page, they increase in length to the middle point (in the tenth line), before decreasing in length to the final line, which is only three letters long. The visual result is a sort of sideways pyramid. But in fact, something much more interesting is taking place, bound up with the title of the poem and its content alike. Unusually for English verse, the poem is written in syllabic verse. The first line contains one syllable, the second line contains two, and so on until the tenth line—after which each line contains one less syllable, until the final, monosyllabic line ends the poem.
This structure is not an exercise in arithmetical prestidigitation, but rather thoughtful poesy that intimately marries subject matter and form. The narrator explains that, “Our / grandmother taps on the / Christmas tablecloth as if / there lay memory’s abacus.” In this way, her ten cousins are called to mind and individually named, although they are “Dispersed now or dead.” The poem reaches a maximum of ten syllables in a line, before iteratively decreasing, thus mirroring the linear increase and decrease of cousins up to ten in total as they are each born, and then as each dies.
There are more aspects of “Memory’s Abacus” which are designed to convey this sense of counting: the “Christmas tablecloth” singles out a date on the calendar to which people frequently count down (in the sense of ‘how many days until Christmas’), but also from which they count up (in the tradition of the twelve days of Christmas). Moreover, the cousins “reunite as a line of names / along her swollen knuckles.” This economical description elaborates on the tapping of the table, indicating that first one finger, then another, is used to tap out each name, until all ten fingers and thumbs are so employed—along with their associated knuckles—in the same way that a child counts to ten using the fingers and thumbs of both hands. This childlike counting connexion is also caught in the reference to the cousins as “her childhood kin,” reinforcing the fact that this aged relation was once young, as her cousins were—indeed, that there was a time before their conception, and that there has come a time after their lives.
The reach of memory and its reliance upon the concrete and the physical (here literally embodied in the tapping fingers and the swollen knuckles) is another vital theme. The ‘abacus’ of the title is subject to the grandmother’s manipulation—the use by the hands. She taps on the imaginary counting mechanism and thereby recovers the memory of each cousin in turn, raising the paradox of the imaginary-yet-concrete thing: the abacus of memory is not really there, although the grandmother taps on the table “as if” it were. It is her fingers and knuckles which reify both the counting and the memory, becoming both abacus and family tree alike. The fingers tap, the names line up, and she recalls them all, bringing each simultaneously to mind and to hand: “For each she accounts with- / in the span of her / grasp.”
Despite its complexity, the gravity of its content, and the impeccable precision of word choice (the use of “grasp” in particular), “Memory’s Abacus” conveys a sense of absolute effortlessness in execution—the lightness of touch that allows a substantial image to be expressed briefly and yet linger, developing in the mind upon reflection and further thought. With each revisiting of its nineteen lines, some new intricacy is discovered, some further connexion is revealed—and all without ever giving the impression of having been overwrought.
“Cemetery Visit”
A symmetry of structure, key to “Memory’s Abacus,” is also present in “Cemetery Visit,” a poem found in the third and final part of the collection. This poem of twenty-one lines is divided symmetrically into two stanzas of ten lines each, with a single line on its own, in the middle, enjambed on both sides the better to connect it both to what precedes and what follows in equal measure. Although the lines are in blank verse (with some metrical substitutions), the same lightness of touch prevails, albeit to a degree less prominent than in “Memory’s Abacus.” This is because of the iambic metre of the lines, which impose a regularity, and concomitant gravity, to the accentuation.
That gravity is appropriate given the subject matter, which is about the narrator’s visit to her father’s grave—her father because, in this case, the narrator is the poet: the poem is subtitled “for my father.” As in “Memory’s Abacus,” it is names that are the first touchstones of memory, with the first line reading, “And here we are again, before your name.” On this return visit, the speaker orients herself according to the name “engraved in simple letters” on the headstone. Here, the name is not merely an instrument of recalled memory, as in “Memory’s Abacus.” It is something much more: it commands orientation towards it as the thing that makes a tombstone identifiable and personal, the thing that connects it to a specific person and makes it legible and understandable. If a person may be represented by a tombstone, then the engraved name is the vehicle by which that representation is made possible, like a magical script which conveys life. And there is a presumption of life, for as the last line testifies: “We greet your name and wait for greeting back.” Even the fact of death is elided—or perhaps is recognised as no fact at all—when the speaker is before the name.
The greeting of the name is no futile expression of hope, doomed to go unanswered and to become an occasion of doubt and despair after the action of the poem has concluded. Indeed, the possibility of a tragic meaning is precluded by every line in the poem, which further engraves the written word that is its subject. What begins with the name written on the headstone continues with the father’s handwriting:
on envelopes, in print or shaped by hand,
on all our fluttering, pink permission slips,
on checks financed by hours at your desk
and tendered to us as gifts to ease our way,
on books you wrote we only somewhat read
to which we now return in search of more—
Thus both the first and last stanzas end with the search and expectation of finding more: to hear an answer from the graven name, and to find more writing left behind. When the second stanza shifts to naming the flowers that grow around the tomb, these are not nature’s refutation of the speaker’s quest for more memory, but rather its creative fulfilment. These names, too, are remembered, as “pressing sunlight warms each letter’s path” upon the stone. They add to the experience of memory and become a part of it. Nature breathes new life into the moment in which memory is recalled and simultaneously formed anew.
The visit to the tombstone is not a static moment frozen in time—a dead event. It is a living part of the memory-making process; the father and the daughter continue to make new memories even in the context of the grave itself. It is for this reason that when the speaker’s eyes are fixed upon the engraved name of her father, she finds that it “seems almost to more than name you now.” The name is more than a name; as in “Memory’s Abacus” it is the instrumentalisation of memory itself.
Death and resurrection
These two poems—so intimately caught up with the ideas of memory, family, the passage of time, and mortality—might easily have become heavy with the burden of existential considerations. After all, it is no easy thing to say memento mori and mean it, even in the sure and certain hope of the resurrection. But Lewis has a special lightness of touch that allows her to take even the weightiest topic and to put the reader in mind of it without its customarily associated burthen. When Memory’s Abacus arrived on 1 May, the anniversary of my own father’s death, there was a moment when I quailed before it; and when I came to “Cemetery Visit – for my father” that evening, I had to swallow a lump in my throat before I read on. But by the end of the poem, I felt not grief but tranquillity, and came away grateful indeed for what I had read.
