Photo credit: MARIEPALBOM PHOTOGRAPHY | Interview by Beth Mcaulay
“You might say that writing this poem was an act of unwinding”
The Invention of Rope
In the dark, she measures a length, pulls until it breaks. The child beside her is patient, uncertain, blinks as she winds it twice around his wrist, loose enough, tight. She ties a knot, the ball in her pocket. I’ll keep the rest here until you return, she says. There. You are safe. In the morning, she lets the child go. The woollen loop on his wrist is a compass to circle, twisting around. It smells of sheep, grass, home. Rope binds what might be lost, what comes apart. Sailors know it shrinks in good weather, lasts best when wound right, and knotted, it is stronger. This might be a lie. Yet, when old rope rots, the knot remains, a lasting fist, clenched, from its length, released. Is this strength? Rope is the oldest promise. It has been found in the dark, in painted caves, beside sharpened stones, hollow bone flutes. It is bark-twisted, flax-hanked, vine-plied, skeined and coiled, dry as age. We do not know the order: blade first or rope. Needle or thread. Hole or healing. Which is the first impulse? We can guess. They say rope was invented by a drowning man conjuring, arms outstretched, imagining the horizon ahead, the distance to the shore, or was it a woman, watching from the rocks, throwing her voice out towards him? From its net, a gathering safety to haul him home, or birds taking flight, singing. You can connect the dots, imagine that line like a muscle, a strength between them, see how it started. Rope, conjured by longing, comes to hand, holds together, binds. In your fingers, it is almost wood, almost hair, dry, wet, steady. Some days, clean as fresh leather, oiled and new. Others, tanged with salt and sweat, stained with soil. There were days we used ropes to lower coffins to the depth, raised buckets from the well’s dark ring, sounded our tower bells at dusk. Ropes were passed hand to hand or flung out bravely to span distance when we built bridges, flew kites or tethered stone anchors before there was chain. Then, we tied the dog to a ring in the yard, threaded a loop to hold a key, hung mirrors from a nail in the hallway where it caught the coined afternoon sun, made a place of emptiness, the twisted rope rug sleeping by the door, waiting. And now? And you? What rope connects us when we are kept apart? Not even telephone wires these days, those outdated lines, like promises, old knots half-remembered. Eye splice, half hitch, grog sling, cat’s paw, star knot, blood knot, bend. Words shut away in a book, fists on the shelf, binding what is already bound, finding… but enough. I feel the grief I felt before, and we’ll go on, you and I, at a distance now, taut some days, or slack as we are.
How, if at all, did the tradition of fairy or folk tale influence your writing process and style? What was the significance of assuming a mode of storytelling whilst composing your poem?
The poem starts with a storytelling voice, but the idea of writing it started with a photo in a newspaper. There was a young refugee child sitting in a boat and he was wearing a piece of string tied around his wrist. I imagined his mother tied it there. And that was the beginning.
This poem also contains echoes of research I did for my latest novel, The Aerialists. One of the characters is a skilled seamstress and is hired to make hot air balloons and balloonists’ costumes. Spending time in her world, I ended up thinking a lot about ropes and threads and, in this poem, I twisted that into questions of invention and origins and the power of imagination.
When I was writing this poem, I began to feel like I was balancing a coiled thing in my hands, a kind of unwieldy spiral that looped around itself and, with each turn, I felt it change and reach further. You might say that writing this poem was an act of unwinding.
How, if at all, did you seek to interrogate matters relating to home, or local cultural inheritance?
I wrote this poem during lockdown so maybe it’s inevitable that ideas of home should creep in. Like everyone else, I was locked home, but also locked away from home because I spent lockdown in Cardiff with my husband and children, and the rest of our family lives in Canada, which felt like the other side of the moon. So, I knit a lot. It felt good to have something physical and comforting to hold onto and also something productive to work on. I had learned to knit as a child and grew up in a house of knitters, so there’s the idea of cultural heritage and received tradition. Home and heritage is where we start and as a poet, I’m always returning there, although sometimes only metaphorically or slant.
The final stanzas of your poem indicate a disillusionment with the methods of communication and connection within modernity. They also refer to ‘Words shut away in a book’ – was a consideration of historical, obsolete, or forgotten language influential in your selection of language for this poem?
The poem ends with the pain of isolation at our failure to communicate honestly. The modern world’s speed and distraction has amplified this failure, as does our constantly shifting vocabularies, but the failure itself is nothing new. For all our human gifts, we haven’t yet cracked clear and open communication. Maybe that’s what drives us to write poetry. We look for a way to explore and hold onto what we know and to share it however broken our words might be.
But I think this poem is also about the power of words. I describe rope as a thing invented by necessity, but you could also call that need longing. In my poem, rope becomes a promise, a physicality conjured between two people, and a useful device in moments of courage, grief, even patience. And what else are words? Words give our feelings solidity, and that’s what makes them exciting, dangerous, and essential. So, yes, there is disillusionment, but also a sense of hope that lingers.
