Peckham Blue: Artful poetry and compelling autobiography
April 5th, 2007 | by Ben Hoare |The subject of adoption carries much potential for poetry and autobiography alike. In Peckham Blue (London: penned in the margins, 2006), Susie Gordon shows herself to be adept in both forms, employing the inherently ambiguous nature of poetry to explore the inevitably unstable sense of personal history arising from having been adopted.
Like many of the best auto/biographical works, Peckham Blue actually consists of two narratives. On the one hand there is the story that Gordon uses her imagination to reconstruct: the story of the father she will never meet, and his life in South London. But she also tells us the story of the story, recounting her journey to Peckham to retrace his steps. ‘Photographs’ is an account of a meeting with her aunt in which Gordon’s sense of the past consists of what she can glean from pictures. It is a detached account, where the only details we are offered are physical: “everyone with mullets, jackets with big collars”. Gordon seems aware that photographs do not offer the full story, showing instead “holidays and flings and one-time friends”. This is, perhaps, not the narrative she wants to know about. On the facing page we find ‘Wedding Day’, a reconstruction which goes beyond photographs, telling the story as Gordon imagines it.
The emotional charge of the collection comes largely from the opposition between physical proximity, as the poet treads the same ground as her father, and temporal distance, as she ultimately shows that her reaching back in time to this unknown character is a feat of the imagination rather than a physical reality. This interplay is present from the outset, when Gordon describes her experience of walking into Peckham from the station for the first time:
He walked this way and stepped these streets,
treading thumb-pressed fag ends underneath his feet
years before I came here.
The idea of retreading her father’s steps is repeated throughout the collection. By the time we reach ‘On Peckham Rye’, the penultimate poem, the sense of distance from her father has become yearning – “I want to walk beside him here (…) two reflections making clear that he is with me, I with him” – as Gordon walks alone on Peckham Rye, “past windows that once gave out his reflection”. Here, she is not simply treading the same ground as her father: she is almost a substitute for him, since it is now her reflection that is seen in the windows.
Despite all the photographs she is shown and stories she is told, Gordon’s most compelling depictions of her father come from her own imagination, which in this particular narrative must substitute for real memories:
He’s smoking a Marlboro
in the photograph I’ve seen,
but in my mind’s eye it’s a roll-up.
This difference between reality as documented by photographs and what Gordon’s “mind’s eye” can see serves as a reminder that her own imaginary narrative is the only one she will be able to tell with conviction. The poem ‘A Cigarette with my Father’ enforces the unstable nature of such a narrative, in which she imagines the man either “rattling down the last of his second neat whisky” or “drowning his moustache stubble in Guinness froth”, but is unable to decide between the two. Like Jon McGregor’s novel, So Many Ways to Begin, the collection explores multiple possibilities, seemingly conscious throughout that whatever stories we are told can only be imagined, constructed, not remembered. In a moving conclusion to the poem, Gordon imagines “how it might have been / if things had gone his way”, and depicts herself as a baby “on a mild Catford day, / looking up and seeing smoke from his cigarette / blooming in the air as he rattled some toy above me”. This imagined, alternative memory seems to indicate the start of a coherent developmental narrative – a child’s earliest memory, perhaps, or a moment influencing her later development. Imagination again provides a substitute for reality, which can offer no such coherence.
But the collection does more than simply reiterate ideas about lost origins. The South London landscape is recognisable, and she namedrops locations (Peckham Rye, Blackheath Common, Brixton, Bellingham) in much the same way as “Every street in those postcodes / is x-marked with my aunt’s rememberings”. This is also a tale, then, of Gordon’s attempt to know “this place that would have been home”, and “the spread of grubby plantains” on Peckham Rye contrast powerfully with “the windy seafront” of the Lancashire coast, where Gordon grew up. In many senses, this work is about exile: indeed, the poet repeatedly uses her own sense of exile as a means of fusing her experience with that of her father. It is also with an outsider’s eyes that Gordon sees Peckham and its environs, and her depictions of the suburbs are valuable for that very reason.
Perhaps I am moved by this collection most of all because of its autobiographical value: we can never know exactly how we are influenced by our parents, but nevertheless I have always been privileged with a story of origins to tell myself. This work explores what happens when that story is fragmented or unclear, and I feel that poetry, which often presents ambiguity, paradox and instability, is the perfect medium in which to do so. Gordon’s writing also benefits from its understatement: far from melodramatic, it plays its emotional cards wisely, turning them over perhaps when one is least prepared. It is a subtle, moving, and vibrant collection: an artful piece of poetry and a compelling autobiography.
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