A Swan’s Neck on the Butcher’s Block, by Jenni Fagan review: 'blood on the page'

This collection of poetry, her seventh, feels like its companion piece, as if the powerful feelings dredged up by reliving these experiences and writing about them calmly and devastatingly in Ootlin have earthed themselves here, along with newer battles: long-term health issues, bereavements. “I don’t know why so many of my people are gone when I had so few to start with,” she writes, with gut-wrenching clarity.

Many of the poems here are raw and immediate; often they are written in the first person; some are combative and angry, others achingly sad. Sometimes, it feels like there hasn’t been room (or perhaps time?) for the niceties of poetic craft: it’s a direct line from pain to pen, it’s blood on the page. 

Short poems such as ‘Badger’, ‘Swan Song’ and ‘The Taker’ are powerfully concise, the others range in length up to several pages. However, it’s sad to see poems of both kinds marred by simple proofing errors: misplaced commas, the apostrophe in “three hail mary’s”, the misspelling of “bouquet” (in a title and throughout the poem). 

There are several strong list poems: ‘Things said by XY chromosomes’ gathers lines spoken by men with barely a beat between: “Do you like the flowers?” and “If I saw you in the street I’d want to rape you”. ‘She Played the Trombone, You Know’ is a different kind of list: of the joyful experiences which anchored her to the present moment.

There are beautiful individual lines: “I lay out the long swan of my body”; “saltwater riddles loose sullen nails”; “I met Order in a cafe and tore up her itinerary”. And we know enough of Fagan’s craft and her originality to conclude that she has chosen to do things differently here and has her reasons.

At times this book feels like a cry of pain, or a scream of fury, and we cannot deny her either. Underneath, though, is a determination to affirm life, to sing Nina Simone songs in a stairwell, to take her place in the world. Another list poem, ‘Struggles’, lists everything she “struggles” with, but ends with the lines: “I am struggling to live/ I am struggling/ I am”, defying what has gone before simply by continuing to survive.

Swans weave their way through these pages: the swan she dreamed of becoming when she was a child; the swan of the book’s title, vulnerable in a toxic relationship; the swan scanning eBay for a typewriter with “keys big enough to jab at with her wings”. For, she says, this swan is not a mute swan: “as a female she is called a Pen,/ which is funny, to her, as she picks it up, to start writing.”

A Swan’s Neck on the Butcher’s Block, by Jenni Fagan, Polygon, £10.99.