BOOK REVIEW: TOUCHING SHARKS IN MONACO BY BELINDA RIMMER
Touching Sharks in Monaco was the joint winner of the 2019 Indigo Dreams Publishing pamphlet competition. Belinda Rimmer’s poems explore family life and ties, memory, imagination and ecology, capturing small moments and big impacts, and examining these through nature’s quirks.
Rimmer opens the pamphlet with the poem, ‘water’ in which she writes, ‘i shall be friendly and let each gaze / touch my honest surface’. But as memory meets imagination in later poems, Rimmer makes us wonder what is real, and what is invented. Rimmer captures the blurred boundaries between the two in ‘Circle in a Spiral’. The narrator’s brother goes missing but ‘is found at once / in a neighbours garden / lost in a game of make-believe.’ The play on the words ‘lost’, and the distortion of imagination as both play and escapism, are just a taste of the subtle cleverness of this pamphlet.
As is suggested in the title, physical touch is an important motif of these poems. Reading this in a world of corona virus only serves to make these physical connections more significant. On blistering stinging nettles, Rimmer writes, ‘Nothing else has touched her this way’, while human contact similarly ‘blurred and burned’, Rimmer describes reaching out to touch a shark with the palm of a hand and wearing red to deter wasps. All of this plays on the relationship between humans and nature, and the danger of touching.
Another meaning that Rimmer gives to the word touch is ‘theft’. In a short but powerful poem, she describes:
A flash of movement,
hands lifting my skirt –
blue and bought from Chelsea Girl.
A stolen look at my knickers
and fourteen year old legs
dotted with disco-ball light.
I've never quite forgotten it –
The poem ‘swap’ holds two stanzas and stanza two reads with the same lines as stanza one, but in reverse. This poems is deeply clever, and explores a similar theme of stolen touches. I can’t do this poem justice quoting it here, so you will simply have to go and read it for yourself. It’s powerful, and not an easy read, but that brings us back to powerful.
The interplay with humans and nature, their differences, and what we can learn is captured most perfectly in the poem, ‘Belly button’. Rimmer describes, ‘trying to find a fragment of my mother / inside my belly button.’ Instead, she finds a seahorse which teachers her ‘to forget the whole nurturing business / focus on making my own way as his kind must do / or get what you need from books’. Rimmer reminds us that male seahorses give birth to their young, while neither the mother nor father care for the new born. Rather than this being sad, Rimmer transforms this discovery into a way to move forward.
Overall, Touching Sharks in Monaco is an engrossing read that pulls you into tiny moments with each poem, magnifying them into detail you didn’t realise you were missing. Rimmer’s poems each stand out with their own voice, but together there is a story here worth reading and learning.
Written by: Beth O'Brien, Mad Hatter Reviews
Published: 27th January 2021
Touching Sharks in Monaco was the joint winner of the 2019 Indigo Dreams Publishing pamphlet competition. Belinda Rimmer’s poems explore family life and ties, memory, imagination and ecology, capturing small moments and big impacts, and examining these through nature’s quirks.
Rimmer opens the pamphlet with the poem, ‘water’ in which she writes, ‘i shall be friendly and let each gaze / touch my honest surface’. But as memory meets imagination in later poems, Rimmer makes us wonder what is real, and what is invented. Rimmer captures the blurred boundaries between the two in ‘Circle in a Spiral’. The narrator’s brother goes missing but ‘is found at once / in a neighbours garden / lost in a game of make-believe.’ The play on the words ‘lost’, and the distortion of imagination as both play and escapism, are just a taste of the subtle cleverness of this pamphlet.
As is suggested in the title, physical touch is an important motif of these poems. Reading this in a world of corona virus only serves to make these physical connections more significant. On blistering stinging nettles, Rimmer writes, ‘Nothing else has touched her this way’, while human contact similarly ‘blurred and burned’, Rimmer describes reaching out to touch a shark with the palm of a hand and wearing red to deter wasps. All of this plays on the relationship between humans and nature, and the danger of touching.
Another meaning that Rimmer gives to the word touch is ‘theft’. In a short but powerful poem, she describes:
A flash of movement,
hands lifting my skirt –
blue and bought from Chelsea Girl.
A stolen look at my knickers
and fourteen year old legs
dotted with disco-ball light.
I've never quite forgotten it –
The poem ‘swap’ holds two stanzas and stanza two reads with the same lines as stanza one, but in reverse. This poems is deeply clever, and explores a similar theme of stolen touches. I can’t do this poem justice quoting it here, so you will simply have to go and read it for yourself. It’s powerful, and not an easy read, but that brings us back to powerful.
The interplay with humans and nature, their differences, and what we can learn is captured most perfectly in the poem, ‘Belly button’. Rimmer describes, ‘trying to find a fragment of my mother / inside my belly button.’ Instead, she finds a seahorse which teachers her ‘to forget the whole nurturing business / focus on making my own way as his kind must do / or get what you need from books’. Rimmer reminds us that male seahorses give birth to their young, while neither the mother nor father care for the new born. Rather than this being sad, Rimmer transforms this discovery into a way to move forward.
Overall, Touching Sharks in Monaco is an engrossing read that pulls you into tiny moments with each poem, magnifying them into detail you didn’t realise you were missing. Rimmer’s poems each stand out with their own voice, but together there is a story here worth reading and learning.
Written by: Beth O'Brien, Mad Hatter Reviews
Published: 27th January 2021