Notes from a shipwreck

Jessica Mookherjee

(Nine Arches Press, 2022)

Review by Naomi Foyle

In Jessica Mookherjee’s accomplished third poetry collection, Notes from a Shipwreck, the sea, its treasures and disasters, becomes a vast, multi-faceted metaphor for interconnecting concerns, ranging from lovesickness to ecocatastrophe. Mookherjee knows that no island is an island; this deeply historical book sucks what is instead global cargo into mesmerising linguistic tempests. Wisely placed, the substantial end notes illuminate the poems and allow the poet’s surreal imagery to whirl free of contextual moorings. In the title poem, a speaker called by others ‘just a bloody foreigner’ testifies from the heart of a hallucinatory storm:  

The Captain asks me to cook Bengali fish and pray

to the Hindu sea god, Varuna, god of rain. Lightning strikes

us, I thought he knew where we were going? Salus Populi

he blusters in Latin, says he thinks he’s packed enough

limes and lemons. I must stink wearing this foul plastic.

The poem floods time and space, sluicing hard between Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) and the minke whale lost in the Thames in 2021, between the underwritten history of exploited Indian sailors and the presently sinking British ship-of-state – an end note points out that at the start of the pandemic then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson quoted the Roman statesman Cicero: ‘The health, or welfare, of the people should be the supreme law’. Corrosive realities, from empty PPE cupboards in hospitals to species extinction and the legacies of colonialism, haunt a collection which defiantly seizes beauty from the bomb cyclone of shared existential crises. Mookherjee oscillates skilfully between innovative and traditional forms, jostling regular stanzafication with free verse and prose poems; she largely eschews end rhyme in favour of subtle internal music and snatches of song. Numbered stanzas and intimations of prayer further suggest a desire, however futile, to order the wreckage of the world. 

Against this entropic pull of a disordered world, a decolonial Shakespearean thrust channels the book’s ambitious flux of thought and form into a potent dream of narrative sequence, centred on a family which, in moving from Bengal to England to Wales, has seemingly violated a religious prohibition against Brahmins ‘crossing the black water’. The daughter feels cursed and homeless, perceiving her mentally fragile mother as a brittle tiger, her father a pessimistic Prospero who knows the tsunami is already here and the only lifeboats are books. Mookherjee’s speakers voraciously absorb this lesson in staying afloat: ‘Eating With Hands’, a poem saturated with domestic threat, quotes, as portent or protection, Ayurvedic texts – ‘Through the mid-finger comes fire / Through the ring finger comes water’; in ‘Black Water Shanty’ a ‘broken girl’ replies to Rimbaud’s ‘The Drunken Boat’ (1871) by vomiting in the wake of the morning-after pill; ‘If John Clare was my Father’ poignantly concludes ‘… I would be home’; the book’s final poem, ‘The Caller’, refashions an avian Indian legend in ghostly counterpoint with English and Welsh poetry, Mookherjee’s ‘lung-song sharp’ coinages summoning Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘dare-gale skylark’ (‘The Caged Skylark’, 1877) and Dylan Thomas’s ‘sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea’ (Under Milk Wood, 1954).

In the ‘black water’ of grief, poems are precarious harbours: the speakers in Notes from a Shipwreck constantly struggle against a feeling of being at sea, in ‘the wrong country’. But though Caliban lurks, usurped, in the margins, killing the lark, Mookherjee’s mutinous Miranda ‘turns magic tricks learned from stranded books’ – her cracked, dissonant, scintillating notes powerful charms against drowning.   

https://ninearchespress.com/publications/poetry-collections/notes-from-a-shipwreck