By Giordano Durante

Tepatoa & Olathe, the debut poetry collection by Sheridan Povedano, was launched in March. The poet produced the book as part of the Gibraltar Cultural Services’ Writing Initiative.

The collection contains a host of bold and experimental poems which, according to the blurb, are “set against the current concerns of material consumption, the industrial and the digital.”

The poem titles fix the coordinates of Povedano’s poetic world with identifiable locations and shops from the poet’s native Gibraltar: we encounter ‘Eastern Beach’, ‘Harding’s Battery’ and ‘Dorothy Perkins’. This rootedness in the local means that these works are not poems that could have been written anywhere, but lyrics that draw from and interpret the Gibraltarian experience.

Of course, to praise this aspect of the book is not to say that Gibraltar is a place that stands out above all others as a subject for poetry, or even that all local writers have a duty to feature their hometown in their work; what the local slant in this collection guarantees is that the poet remains in touch with her surroundings—she focuses closely on the concrete rather than yielding to the temptations of a bloodless abstraction that can mar so much poetry.

In the poem ‘Tepatoa’, Povedano explores how the modern world of instant communications can alienate while, at the same time, allowing for moments of tenderness: “I took a picture of it / Sent it to you on Messenger”.

Numerous poems talk about desire, loss and isolation in an unfiltered fashion, free from restraints. There’s a real sense of the poet’s self-consciousness and vulnerability that emerges in poems that tackle body image like when the speaker of ‘Eastern Beach’ contrasts “your Caleta summer bod” with her own “baby-red burn”.

Sometimes Povedano favours cryptic little lyrics whose meaning branches out into myriad paths, helped along by her skill at effecting a sudden shift in tone and direction or crafting a striking image. For example, birds are described as “stapling above with their song”, and, in a later poem, the moon is likened to a black tulip’s shadow “drooping / Space-grey and surrendering.”

The reader will note a series of recurring images and themes which serve to give the collection a satisfying coherence. Moons, mountains, apples and diamonds appear repeatedly, almost as if they were the identifiable motifs in a musical work.

There’s an admirable concision of expression in this collection, evidence of felicitous editing and a strong poetic instinct that recognises the tough lesson that less is, usually, more. This approach is helped by a clipped or abbreviated syntax and, as a result, no poem outstays its welcome thanks to what I assume has been a long process of judicious pruning.

Among the other formal virtues of Povedano’s poems are their artful use of line breaks. In ‘Photoshop’, for example, a disturbing and yet ambiguous note is struck by delaying the key word:  “the house is / medicated”. The poet’s sense of the importance of such matters is noted in the very last poem ‘Line break’ which argues, aphoristically, that poetry can only exist “If you cut it off at the line.”

Clever wordplay abounds, too, with Povedano adopting a throughly contemporary approach to language where words have slippery, shifting meanings and “silicone” in one line can quickly become “silly cone” in the next.

The darkness of some of the material, lyrics that touch on mental health problems and those in-between hours of quiet suffering, is in a complex interplay with ideas of light and the natural world. Even then, however, Povedano’s view of nature is not always comforting but is witness to the scars of human depredation: hills are “severed” and a storm is seen as “feeding flowers’ bones” in ‘Landscape’.

I also enjoyed the echoes of other writers from the canon. Whereas T.S. Eliot in ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ has Lazarus declaim, “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,” Povedano writes “I am / Lazarus, so what are you asking from me”. There were also, to my mind, traces of the influence of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar in some of the poems mentioning illness and hospitalisation.

In the particularly strong poem “Sleep”, a playful, nursery rhyme-like opening—with the first two lines riffing on “sleep”, “weep” and “sheep”—turns into a lyric that is too dark to be a lullaby for children as we enter the disenchanted and insomniac world of adulthood ending with: “for even in my sleep, I lie awake.”

In ‘Cetrizine’, time stands still and the speaker talks of a “failed attempt” and a “failed painting”—are these the first error-prone steps towards a stable self? How can such steps be blocked or delayed by immaturity and illness? In this poem, the fragmentation of the self that is under construction is made vivid by lines that are broken across the page.

Poetry, in this collection, is more than amusement—it is partly a form of therapy, a tool with which we can hack away at ourselves. For Povedano, the production of poems assumes a salvific power:

‘I had to deal with it

With my pair of hands

and a coffin load of poems’

Readers will be consistently surprised by this collection which resists pat summaries and upends expectations. I look forward to seeing where Povedano goes next after this strong debut.