Anchoress

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.

This collection of prose poems and lyric pieces is part mystery and part
elegy, recorded in the stream-of-consciousness voice of Peter Hull, a
biologist who scrawls in his notebooks the story of his life with his
lover, Helen.

The story begins with a prose epitaph on the loss of the beloved.
Peter, now “a half-man who can’t sleep, who doesn’t own his
dreams,” recalls stories told to him by Helen and her sister France,
detailing birth-to-death experiences. The sisters, who are rarely apart,
are presented as twins, mirror images, and flowers (“a tendril round a
stem”).

Helen’s voice becomes interwoven with the voices of the whales Peter
hears on tapes in the lab; both are dead, and “you cannot outrun the
dead.” Peter’s lab notes become an analysis of Helen’s “private
words,” which reveal the universal tension between science and a
creative mind that “loves the variations.” While Helen refers to 69
as “oroboros,” raincoats as “condoms,” and her guitar as
“Bird,” Peter uses chemistry vocabulary to describe Helen’s
creativity: “She titrates language / to its basic elements.”

Sustaining the mystery are a number of compelling questions: How does
Helen die? What happens to France? Can Peter survive? Helen is portrayed
as the anchor that draws Peter into a cosmic web of connections. For
Spalding, if a butterfly flaps its wings in the middle of an Amazonian
rainforest, it definitely does affect the cosmos.