The absurd appeals to her …

A review of my second collection Nothing serious, nothing dangerous was published in The North, issue 64.  It was written by the poet Jane Routh.  Some extracts below:

‘When she is able to make this sort of sidestep into gently absurdity, Fokkina McDonnell lends a frisson of the surreal to her poems about memories and family and her considerations of ageing and travel and works of art.’

‘Several poems deliver what their titles might not lead you to expect, such as ‘My husband on his seventh birthday’ – a young boy ‘who sits and wonders about God / the Devil, those Christian brothers’.’

Describing Elsewhere

Noel Williams, the Review Editor for orbis, posted this positive review of Nothing serious, nothing dangerous in #192, Summer 2020.

The dominant tone here appears descriptive, with a frequent use of declarative, factual statements. Such pieces will be strong – if the statements are apposite, if the images they report are striking, if the language used is precise, accurate, sharp. Al are characteristic of Fokkina McDonnell’s writing:
This wine is reticent: pale laundered bedsheets
stretched over grass and the grittiness
of wooden crutches, tethered monkey.
[60,000 gallons]

However, the purely descriptive poem is actually a rarity. They work well, but can feel a little disappointing when measured against the book’s usual kind of writing: those which set up an exact descriptive situation, but then shift it with a surreal turn:

paper notice on the mat.
Small birds are a comfort stone
to be carried around in a sombrero.
[Almost complete poems: encounters with twelve birds]

or offer an ending which pushes us gently but firmly into the path of an oncoming implication. The title poem documents an encounter with an ‘official’, then concludes: ‘Many years ago, my mother / pushed a Jehovah’s Witness into a pond.’

Much of the power of these moments comes from the unexpected disjunction of statements which, independently, might feel relatively mundane, yet together, create dissonance, or significance. Or both. They provide little puzzles for the reader to solve, although generally giving no immediate solution.

Certain classes of imagery and selection recur, and in some cases, such as birds and seas, seem to have particular significance for the author. As she is a woman of more than one country, it’s perhaps not surprising that the boundaries of water are important, whilst birds are association with both flight and freedom, although perhaps more significantly, with movement towards the strange, other realms into which we are given a sideways glance. This connected imagery enriches the work as a whole. Perhaps a little less convincing is the repeated use of black and white, both of which seem frequently mentioned, but without any strong significance as far as I could judge.

Memory and forgetting also figure strongly. Some of the memories belong, I think, to imagined personae, but others are clearly those of the poet, for whom forgetting seems a pervasive worry:
‘There will come a time / when I no longer remember / the words for body parts…And I’ll wonder if the larynx / is also a bird.’ Throughout, as here, she poignantly conveys that troubling anxiety, yet wryly amuses in the same breath. Clever writing, in plain clothes.