Woman of Sticks, Woman of Stones

Beryl Baigent is a poet; her published collections include Absorbing the
Dark, Hiraeth: In Search of Celtic Origins, Triptych: Virgins, Victims,
Votives, and Mystic Animals.

The stark nonreality of photorealism on the cover of Nicholls’s second
book gives the reader an indication of what is to come. The arrested
motion of the figure in Alex Colville’s Woman at Clothesline, and her
trancelike state, graphically depicts the Stepford-wife aspect of
domestic life.

The book is organized into three sections. The title poem, which is
found in Section 2, The Woman in the Wall, emphasizes the dichotomy
between the woman’s “dream of saints and elongated bones” and the
way she actually feels as she lifts her “squat, unsaintly bones / from
the bed, prepar[ing] for another / day on earth.” Like Section 2,
Sections 1 and 3, respectively titled Disturbances and The Hour of Five
Weathers, are each prefaced with a quotation from 12th-century Christian
mystic Hildegard of Bingen, suggesting that readers may want to explore
the visionary aspects along with the “reality.”

Readers may enter Nicholls’s world in passive lethargy and experience
the perfection of the “Biodome,” in which “light itself / changes
on our cue” and the persona is propelled “through the world / as if
on a moving staircase.” The white siding of the house, laundry on a
line, “drowsy women, pale, and still,” and the face of a “Crash
Test Dummy” appear and reappear in the cold, shadowless light of day.
But after the initial spiritual stasis, surreal images of dream whales
being driven back with forks and knives, “blood-red imprints” of
hands crawling over the door, and a piano rising out of the open sea are
more akin to the images of Dali than those of magic realism. Nicholls
tells us that “in the dark, suddenly everything / has a sense of
possibility.”

Questions are asked. Is the poet a mystic like Hildegard, or is she a
“Domystic”? Is being “a feather on the breath of God” a mystical
vision or just another way of submitting to patriarchy? Nicholls does
not give the answers. She wants her readers to be hooked into the poems,
just as her cover artist involves us in the painting through the device
of the woman’s raised right foot, which is stepping out to meet the
reader/viewer.