The poet’s uncompromising second collection, about her husband’s addiction to crystal meth, is fascinating and troubling
here is always the temptation to tell it like it wasn’t when a subject is painful. Words can tinker therapeutically, be balm, re-dress – and redress. What impresses most about Ellen Cranitch’s courageous second collection,, on the subject of her husband’s addiction to crystal meth and its devastations, is her steady rigour in not compromising, not ranting or taking flight, as in her poem Trust, which is claustrophobically reduced to an exchange of glances and a lack of boundaries.
Her unexpected starting point is three lyrical poems about Pierre Bonnard’s paintings of his model Renée, who killed herself when he married Marthe, and who is painted in an increasingly abstracted way in the works she is considering. “It is a terrible feeling, to be becoming less distinct,” she observes. There is a slight weirdness in her empathic starting point if only because it borders on a love song to herself: “that strange image I must own” who is “all iridescence”.
This is a collection that makes you feel fascinated, grateful and troubled as the terrible tale unfolds. But it is good to know that her husband, now in recovery, and their sons have given Cranitch permission to tell this story. And what has been a curse in life turns out to be a gift on the page: a real subject. What’s more, she has an admirably educative intent to step away from her pain to teach us about addiction.
Shifts of tone can be satisfying but the best poems here are the personal ones that relive her terror, bewilderment and wrongfootedness.
Cranitch is a believer in the medicinal power of literature and stirs some lit crit into her poetry – a high-risk undertaking that includes the scrutiny of JH Prynne’s poem Against Hurt but redeems itself through a simple concluding line: “The lines about pain take it from me.” But when, in Words, she maintains that language “strains to become/not merely to represent”, although superficially convincing, I feel unconvinced. Experience unendingly pursues language, often in vain.
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