Stranger, Baby by Emily Berry review – deeply moving study of loss

Emily Berry’s second collection opens with an epigraph from Sigmund Freud. “The loss of a mother,” he muses, in a letter in 1929, “must be something very strange …”. It’s a peculiar – and peculiarly unsympathetic – quotation, conveying as it does the sense of the great psychoanalyst examining the condition of motherlessness with lofty detachment, and viewing the afflicted not as objects of empathy or even pity, but of clinical curiosity. But in her book-length interrogation of her response to the loss of her own mother, to whom the collection is dedicated, it is this strangeness to which Berry cleaves, articulating and then wrestling with it in an attempt to make sense of a situation that is fundamentally senseless; to exert control over an event that could not be controlled. “If it was up to me, I would not have her back,” she says, defiantly, in “Sleeping”, one of the many poems in the book that investigates her dreams, before blankly acknowledging, in the next line’s brief, bitter staccato: “It is not up to me, and she is not coming back.”

Relationships are familiar territory for Berry; her debut collection, Dear Boy, ran the gamut of them to great effect. But while Stranger, Baby returns to the first collection’s personal-interpersonal territory, it is focused solely on the poet’s relationship with her mother - and the poems themselves appear to have been subject to a similar pruning. Where those in her first collection were sprawling, arch and metaphorically lush, these are honed down and pared back; slight, sharp slivers of verse that pierce like lances, quick and deep. The book is punctuated by a series of concrete poems laid out in narrow lines down the length of the page, only a few words wide – and it is these tightly harnessed compositions that deliver some of the richest and most impactful moments. “I filled a bowl / with a little / water,” she says in “Aqua”, one of the collection’s finest poems, in which the line breaks and lack of punctuation permit meanings to multiply, while at the same time the internal rhymes and half-rhymes braid the whole together, “praised / it slightly a feeling/ of daughterliness / came over me / I adored her / of course water / cannot hold / an imprint she / kept repeating / it’s no use you / can’t help me …”

There’s water everywhere in these poems: they’re rain-drenched and wave-swept, filled with mermaids and rivers and tears. But of all the iterations of water that she presents here, it is the sea to which Berry keeps returning. Freud – that arbiter of mother-child relationships – looms large over the collection, furnishing Berry with the imagery and language that allow her to grapple with her loss; in his dream-etymology the sea stood for the mother, and Berry, for all her self-awareness (in a series of four poems in the centre of the collection she grapples with Freud directly) is powerless to resist. She communes with tidal waves; stands at “the dangerous shore” in a bid to be “like the shells on the beach, rubbed smooth and cracked open”; cries “the way the sea cries when it has swallowed a river”. “I wrote: The sea! The sea! As if that might be a solution,” she says in one poem, even though the fatalistic title set out at the head of the page - “Everything Bad Is Permanent” – shows that she knows it is not.

This acknowledgment of the limitations of imagery represents the flipside of Berry’s engagement with Freud. Although she mines his language and shares his fascination with dreams, allowing her poems to wander in and out of their shadow territory, she resists his pitilessness and determinism, and recognises that his theories can only carry her so far. The collection’s glancing references to therapy are largely negative. “Imagine trying to pick up a piece of the sea and show it to a person,” she says in “Picnic”, the discursive, image‑rich second poem. “I tried to do that / All that year I visited a man in a room / I polished my feelings …” She’s aware of the irony; the accusation of inauthenticity that she levels at the therapeutic process is applicable to poetry too, and it’s an accusation she considers directly when she observes that “there was a feeling / but I wrote it down and it ceased to be a feeling, / became art”. But ultimately, it seems, poetry represents for her a means not of sanitising or decoupling from her feelings, but an attempt to gain necessary control over them. These poems, with the carefully curated metaphorical vocabulary and taut adherence to form, are a way of managing the chaos of loss; of offering it back to herself in a fashion that becomes acceptable. For her readers, they’re more than simply acceptable – they are highly intelligent, deeply moving poems that provide a new lens through which to consider grief.