When I read this collection, in a single flinching sitting, it felt like I was with Matthew, sharing a sofa and a drink of tea or perhaps something stronger: knees touching, her hands gripping mine, as if to infuse these words right through my palms and wrists, to send them coursing through my veins.
It’s like she is passing on some kind of primal wisdom, something momentous and emotional, impressing on us the importance of retaining and using what she tells us, what she has learned.
The poems are personal – reflections on the past and present versions of herself and other significant figures in her life. It is a record and account of her journey from then till now, with many poems containing an overt stratum of philosophical ideas, like ‘Fuck The Id’ and ‘When Nietzsche Gret’. In the former, she reminds us: ‘you can’t see the sun / by avoiding the rain’.
Much is about childhood, womanhood, and motherhood, and the grief and struggle built in to these spheres of existence: ‘I observe, / dissect pleasure / between the last good thing / and the next’.
And: ‘To grans who doled out tough love like / family allowance, just enough to keep her going’.
Donna Matthew encourages her audience to use her metamorphosis as inspiration, a call to bluntly examine our lives and reinvent ourselves too: ‘If we are lucky, we die twice. But the first time, we must kill a version of ourselves.’
Remembering Myself is out now from Seahorse Publications. Available here.
