AN OVERFLOW OF POWERFUL EMOTIONS

Poetry can be and has been many things. We use it to express emotion, to capture memories, to entertain,
to argue, to paint pictures and to heal. The poems in this anthology are deeply personal. In the
introduction Marguerite tells us that growing up she was not encouraged to speak her mind, and as a
result she “had always turned to writing as a way of self-expression”.

So we might say that what we have in this collection is poetry as testimony. Writing is clearly a way of not
only capturing and documenting experience, but also working through it. The note of ‘healing’ is struck
from the very start with a quote from Psalm 147 – ‘He heals the broken hearted’. The first of the five
sections of the book is titled ‘My Heavenly Father’ and three of the four poems in it, testify to the writer’s
deep faith and gratitude for God’s grace in bringing her through the valley of the shadow of death on
more than one occasion. The fourth poem is one of those that are most poignant, as they express the pain
of the loss of loved ones stolen by death: ‘I remember Mama’; ‘Daddy’s Promise’; ‘Meet you by the River’.
In that poem, there is such an anguish in the contrast between the carefree, playful nostalgia of the
childhood friendship and the trauma of the accident that puts an abrupt and unexpected end to it.

The ‘echoes’ of the title refer to the reverberations of emotion and experience but also direct us to
resonances and ripples from literary texts and the Bible. There is Lamming’s “castle of my skin” in “Undress
Me”, along with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “scarlet letter” – that prominent mark of shame that an adulteress
is condemned to wear while the father of her bastard child remains protected and masked by hypocrisy.
Anger at double standards and abuse both physical and psychological is another emotion that resonates
in this collection. We hear biblical and liturgical echoes in ‘For I have Sinned’ where that formula of
confession is skilfully used with biting sarcasm to obliquely accuse the “Great One”, that other person,
who by implication is far more guilty than the accusing (and confessing) persona, but who seems to be
above public reproach by virtue of their title and position.

Also from the Bible comes the figure of Judas, a personification of betrayal, in a poem in which the speaker
is accusing, as she often is, but at the same time recognizes and acknowledges the complicity of her own
vulnerability: ‘I was already desperate for a mate / So in my weakness / I reached out to touch him’. This
painful honesty is one of the strengths of the collection. The poems reveal pains which had been hidden,
as by the mother protecting her children from some of life’s harsh realities, hidden from the outside world,
but captured and processed in the writing.

Motherhood is a recurring theme: the love for the child from conception, the hope for the fulfilment of
dreams, the tenacity and conviction in triumph over trials, the enduring protection even in the face of
abuse. At the end of ‘What Love Begets’ the writer echoes the words of Robert Haydn, black American
poet in “Those Winter Sundays”. In his poem he is reflecting on the actions of his father whom as a child,
he had found cold and distant, but as an adult he has a different understanding of what motivated his
father’s dutiful actions: “What did I know, what did I know / Of love’s austere and lonely offices?” These
words of another poet come to the aid of the mother in agony, trying to come to terms with her own
child’s “indifference”.
The collection closes with an epigraph from Shakespeare and his character Ophelia (from Hamlet) is
evoked in ‘Poisoned Fruit’. Throughout as I read I am reminded that the writer is a student of literature.
Who else could create lines like “Lest I forget how my hands were wrought / with neglect”? Much of the
music is from the use of rhyme and the diction of the King James Version: “Sublime thou art.” But the
language range is by no means narrow. We also have the plain, directness of “lying bastard” and at least
one poem exclusively in creole and cussing:

Mi nuh like di liad dem

Who tan up in front ah Paastah
An recite di words: “For Better or Worse’
Is what dem tek marriage fah, doa?

Yes. There is a fair amount of anger, pain and vexation in this collection. But there is also the pleasure of
beauty in nature, affection and compassion towards animals, the thrill of sexual desire and intimacy.

Reading this collection I am reminded of the words of British poet William Wordsworth from over 200
years ago: ‘Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. It has its origins in emotion…”, in
emotions that we all feel. In the poem “The Human Connection” Anderson recalls her own memorable
experience as a student of literature:

My teacher asked me if I am human …

For if you are human, you would feel
the range of emotions
Literature evokes in you and in me.

Marguerite has responded to the charge to share her writing. To conquer fear and allow others “walking
on the hot sands of pain” to find encouragement in her story. As the title suggests, the writer is baring her
soul and (now) with publication, exposing her pain, hurt and anger. It is a woman’s story: reflections,
dreams and desires, sexuality, impressions. Publishing is an act of courage. May we, her readers, prove
ourselves worthy of her trust.

Literature is the mirror of life.

Hold it up in front of you,
Let it tug at your heartstrings,
Let it see you oppose the things
Which have so long made you hardened
And indifferent.

Carolyn Allen
August 2022