NOTES FROM THE DEMENTIA WARD
Poems by Finuala Dowling

Published by Kwela Books

Review for Fine Music Radio by Joan Hambridge, Professor of Afrikaans Literature & Creative Writing, University of Cape Town
(translated from Afrikaans by Paul Wise)

In her third collection, Notes from the dementia ward, Finuala Dowling maintains the distinctive approach that characterised her debut, I Flying, and second collection, Doo-Wop girls of the universe. The latest collection comes from Kwela, in conjunction with Snailpress. The second appeared under the prestigious Penguin imprint, which proves that she occupies a special place in South African poetry in English. The first was published by Carapace. (Dowling is also a formidable novelist, for example What poets need and Flyleaf.)

I like Dowling's work. The perverse humour, the Dorothy Parker cynicism, the playing with techniques (such as rhyme - internal and hidden rhyme), the astringent conclusions - that often hit you right in the stomach.

The first collection dealt with the life of a divorced woman, her child and how she experienced poetry as a refuge. That collection rightly won the Ingrid Jonker Prize.

In the second collection, there is the quest for freedom: you become one of the "doo-wop girls" in search of a straight man in Cape Town.

Here, then, are poems that test and challenge the decorum of acceptability: how the intimacy police do not like the risqué image or expression. We remember, do we not, how a critic requested Anne Sexton to put her private confessions in quotation marks.

In the second collection, which took the Sanlam Prize, the family is seen as the refuge, a theme she exploits further in the recently published Notes from the dementia ward. Here she explores the decline of the beloved mother, the death of a brother, the experience of Cape Town with its natural beauty on one hand and awareness of the displaced and outcast on the other.

And yet Dowling's sense of humour does not desert her. She gives her mother the floor and, behind the grotesquely humorous approach, we experience the pain.

Your parents, after all, are your identity, even if you do rebel and revolt against these bonds of blood.

In a moving verse about the relationship with the parents, "Hearts of stone", we see why Dowling's poems are so successful. There is no self-pity; no, rather a rock-steady look at her appreciation of the two failing figures. The father figure listens to Brel's "If we only have love"; he is an unrehabilitated alcoholic. The mother, in turn, is immune to the father's cry through Brel. She reads to the children from the classics - and the ironic conclusion ("and we wept for little Nell") activates the pain that the children experienced, and continue to experience, from this unfulfilled bond. The actress mother carries on acting throughout, even in the institution.

In the elegy "Daniel don't die alone", the suffering of a person who does not want to share his Aids history and consequent decline with his family is described in a deeply moving way.

Through the taxi metaphor ("Daniel caught a taxi to his death because / he didn't want to disturb his family or bother his friends", 42) the painful solitariness of his death is described. So if you die again, don't call a taxi. Call someone in the knowledge that you cannot do it alone.

The poems exploit rhyme (hidden and end), are conspicuously spoken-word verses, almost musings, but are technically accomplished. These are verses that have been well put together.

Perhaps there is a less acerbic, sharp Dorothy Parker approach here. The mother's death and farewell seem to have mellowed the poet.

Yet there is the verse in which she professes that a poet is worth more dead than alive! ("My fellow writers").

And there are jocular turns as well: the metaphorical use of worms and what that might entail for us, or a conversation with a brother who uses a porcupine as an alibi for knocking down a gate.

And how does one sum up one's life?

You die. You go to the dentist.
You take your car to the mechanic.
You look out of the window.

Or might there be more?

In a verse about how destructively the experience of the mother's decline has affected the poet ("How I knew it wasn't me"), the suicide of a young girl is described. But that girl who died jumped into the sea in the poet's place - even though she can persuade her brother verbally, and us through a poem, that it was not she.

Here too, Google cannot supply the answers for the pain that you experience.

All the world's a stage - not so? - she concludes in "Mere oblivion".

Finuala Dowling is one of the most important voices of South African poetry in English today.