Cox, Bella, Sikiliza, flipped eye publishing, 2023. ISBN: 9781905233823. £4.99
There is a popular perception of modern younger poets (and more generally of modern younger people) that we are a self-obsessed bunch. This is a perception especially strongly held, I find, towards those poets whose work is frequently performed, or which blends generically with theatre or music, the idea being that ‘spoken word’ is a medium that deals more in earnest discursiveness and self-assertion than in the (impliedly) subtler and more mature world of ‘page’ poetry.
Those inclined towards this view will likely find themselves smirking when they see that Bella Cox’s debut pamphlet opens with a poem, ‘Your Autobiography Without You In It’, which could (uncharitably, in my view) be read as confirmation that poets of this generation want nothing more than to be told that the world revolves around them: ‘Do they go on to eat without you?’, the speaker asks, having contemplated a world where the doorframe has ‘only one height mark notched into it’ and the food in the house is ‘mostly beige’.
Of course, this type of reading would overlook two important things, the first of which is that Cox reveals herself, in this and other poems, as a deft explorer of the exilic condition: the sense of one’s location in the world always being precarious and provisional, of coming from many places but never being entirely ‘at home’ in any of them (‘Which home do we mean? / Here is anywhere you do not wish to be,’ as the title poem puts it).
Through this lens, the focus on the strange contingency of one’s life, and how easy it might be to imagine oneself out of it, becomes more intriguing and multi-layered. Certainly, later poems like ‘Sikiliza’ (quoted above) do seem more prepared to see the bathetic side of the poet’s discontents, and whether they might be symptomatic of another kind of creeping privilege. In that same passage the speaker recalls wryly how they ‘ache for the scent of jasmine every day / until [they] have it,’ and then find themselves ‘yearning for / silly Western things like app-dialled food / deliveries, fast internet speeds.’
Reading Cox, I found myself reminded somewhat of another collection meditating on this condition released this year (and which I also enjoyed), Customs by Solmaz Sharif. Certainly, both poets manage to capture the frequent loneliness and anomie that attends much of the modern experience of living between multiple worlds and cultures, though in Sharif’s case more time seems to be given over to exploring the ‘frugal musicality’ (borrowing a phrase from Julia Kristeva) of this state of being.
One suspects that this has much to do with the fact that Sharif’s poetry, more than Cox’s regards this condition of exile as more-or-less permanent, almost ontological, and where a ‘return’ of any kind is impossible (the ‘home’ of this poetry, one feels, may no longer exist, or have ever existed). There is beauty in being ‘without the kingdom’ but it is fleeting and provisional, a bounded place where the act of watching a lover get dressed while still in bed is ‘a little city where / I’m most grateful to be alive’ (‘Without Which’). There is a rage here at the injustice of being a ‘poodle’ attending on the appetites of a rich Western audience (‘Patronage’), but it is often kept at a steady simmer, rarely coming to a boil even in more obviously adversarial poems like ‘The Master’s House.’
Cox’s rage, when it does come out, is also what propels her into a fundamentally more optimistic place than Sharif, and this is the second critical component of her poetic voice: the notion of self-assertion as a necessary corrective, even a means of survival, in a predatory world. At the centre of Cox’s pamphlet is the long prose poem ‘HOWL,’ where the speaker’s subjection to many acts of dehumanization become the catalyst for a purgative, defiant opposition: ‘I rip a growl from my throat for the man on the street… demands the bartenders fix their damn door. I tell the lover to leave.’ It is where the poet’s voice approaches its most direct and earnest and, for me, least interesting, though it is also a necessary keystone in the arch of the pamphlet overall. Here, the speaker recovers a sense of solidarity with a global historical sorority, another range of ways to think of ‘home’ which offer their own chances for liberation: ‘I think of my grandmother, of every groaning woman before and after her. Imagine them all rising as one beneath the full moon, loud and unafraid.’
If here, in its more didactic moments, was where I found the pamphlet less engaging, its ideas less originally and powerfully expressed, I was nevertheless richly served elsewhere. Cox’s voice, at its best, has a sensuous intelligence that moves deftly between a variety of registers at once, and not simply when it is shifting into Spanish or Swahili. In her hands the same English which ‘can sound so curt and stiff’ can be restrained, or cold, or venturesome, or loving, and her confidence in her craft is clear. ‘A surgeon should be human,’ one speaker remarks in a blackout poem from a Margaret Atwood novel, and Cox has, at times, a marvellous touch for knowing when to probe the tender spots, and when to hold back. The earnestness which I sometimes found less impactful sits alongside some truly compelling writing, with ‘Sikiliza’ in particular pulling me along with the speaker’s growing joy in their own self-knowing in a polyglot dance:
‘anoint the walls of your skin with coconut oil mafuta ya nazi / make it ritual / learn your body’s language le langage de ton corps / listen sikiliza to your gut / pay attention atención to your blood / become cartographer of your states / move to your own winds bougez à votre guise / Here Hapa you are all that you need / Here you can build aquí puedes construir your own mosaic’
I was particularly delighted to notice that a reader need not necessarily choose between incorporating or ignoring the scored-through English sections when reading this poem aloud; the rhythm, and the poem’s sensual music, comes through either way. It’s here that you realise Cox’s skill as a poet is most obvious when she makes the fullest use of the tools that she has perfected through her performance career – that her familiarity with, and love for, ‘spoken word’ is a wellspring of, and not an obstacle to, complexity and conceptual richness.
If the pamphlet format perhaps doesn’t quite allow Cox the range to interrogate these themes as thoroughly as one might like, all that really tells me is that I want to have more of these poems to read. No doubt when Cox has the time and space to do the same formidable work on her written corpus that she has done for her performed one, we are all in for something special. For now, this remains a glittering promise of her potential as a poet, and something that makes one very eager indeed to see what subsequent collections will bring.
Tim Kiely
You can buy Sikiliza here.
Tim Kiely is a criminal barrister and poet based in East London. He is the author of three pamphlets of poetry: Hymn to the Smoke (Indigo Dreams), Plaque for the Unknown Socialist (Back Room Poetry) and No Other Life (VOLE Books). His work has also appeared in South Bank Poetry, Under the Radar, Magma and Ink, Sweat & Tears.
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