Stuffed Monkey and Other Considerations

Helena Nelson savours Kathy Pimlott’s pamphlet 'After the Rites and Sandwiches' (The Emma Press, 2024)

Poetry takes you to some odd places. This particular sequence tells a story, a story that connects with several others (or at least it did for me). It opens with a sudden death (the poet’s husband), goes on to rehearse the administrative tasks that fall to the living partner, the resonant experience of new widowhood, and then addresses the ongoing mixture of grief and reflection. What was the married relationship really like, warts and all? What does it mean to have had it, and now to have lost it? None of this is sentimental. All of it, by virtue of skilful understatement, is moving.

It took me into my kitchen, where I found myself baking “Stuffed Monkey” (the title of one of Kathy Pimlott’s poems). The poet’s late husband was the first in her family to try making this oddly named cake, “which no-one has ever had – before he made it”. After his death, she makes it herself from the book he used, and it brings her to tears. It’s a Jane Grigson recipe: 

Jane says to make the dough ‘as if you are making pastry.’
I think she means rubbing in with fingertips, bringing together.
I could say ‘as if I’m suddenly so specifically lonely.’

The experience of making this biscuity cake is so real you can touch it. I had to make it myself – because of its intriguing name, of course, but also to honour Kathy Pimlott’s husband whom I never knew, and Jane Grigson, many of whose recipes I did know, and in memory of Jane’s husband, the poet and botanist Geoffrey Grigson, once literary editor of the Morning Post and founder editor of New Verse and (as such) a scarily influential person for the young Dylan Thomas. 

This is a good poet, with a clear and distinctive voice … she reaches places other poets do not go

It may not be our poems that outlive us. It could be an obscure connection with a cake with an odd name. This one has nothing to do with monkeys, of course. The name is probably, I learn, a corruption of Monnickendam, the Dutch-Jewish family who made and sold the confection in the East End of London a century or so ago. Everything connects, doesn’t it? The poet finds herself thinking about the whole business of connections in ‘Merlin in Mapperley Park’. She has a mobile app designed to identify a bird by its song. This leads to a bit of humour when the app tells her there is a “great bittern” in the back garden, though it must have been the boys next door drumming:

[…] Of course, it raised doubts re the app’s accuracy
but I choose to believe and rejoice in the small, plausible birds
in this suburb’s trees and hedges. 

What a beautiful phrase: “the small, plausible birds”. This is a good poet, with a clear and distinctive voice. She has done her time. She doesn’t make a fuss, or draw attention with some ‘innovative’ method or other. No erasures, no occlusions, no forward slashes. She merely insinuates gentle, conventionally punctuated phrases into your head. And yet … she reaches places other poets do not go.

I made Stuffed Monkey, while thinking about all this. In fact, I’ve just consumed the last sliver with my coffee. The cake was a success in this house, something truly different, although I might tweak it a little next time. A good recipe is worth experiment, although it is, just as Pimlott describes it, “stolid, a good traveller, / […] Sure of a welcome.”

These poems are good travellers, too, though delicate and unusually haunting, and not in the least stolid. I am not entirely cavil-free, though. For me, the opening and closing texts were dispensable, unlike the arresting second and second-last pieces, with which, for preference, I would have started and ended. But there was another more disconcerting snag with design (not a fault in the writing). I felt the second poem could and should have started on a left-hand page so that the whole thing was visible in one spread. On first reading, I assumed wrongly that it had ended two lines too soon, not the first time I have been caught like this with poetry. I paused in the wrong place, re-reading and thinking about what I assumed was the final statement. And though I was now forewarned, I was caught out in the same way by ‘How to be a widow’ and ‘Death Admin II’. Even ‘Stuffed Monkey’ looks at first glance as though it concludes at the end of its first page. ‘Merlin in Mapperley Park’ is the only two-pager to benefit from one spread. (Reading a pamphlet backwards can have advantages.)

It is a particular privilege and pleasure for this reader to surf such delicate, precise waves of understatement

But that aside, the sequence didn’t go where I expected – in a good way. There was a death. Naturally, I anticipated grief and reflection. But not sharp, critical honesty about the dead person, quietly asserted, unflaunted. In ‘Merlin in Mapperley Park’, it isn’t surprising that the poet is “likely to cry”. Nor is it unusual to find her reflecting on how she might once have phoned her husband in the morning when away from home, or that thinking this makes her sad. The surprise comes in the way she slips in why she might have phoned him at this time. It was when he’d “have been / sober”. There were difficulties, yes. There had long been difficulties:

When I whisper to myself that I miss you, it’s not entirely true.
It’s the potential for things to have been better, the days before
it became so messy.

After a death, it’s not just the loss, and the process of grieving. It’s the curious process of looking carefully at what precisely what has gone, evaluating the relationship. Because part of oneself has vanished, and it’s necessary to proceed without it, at the same time as appreciating and appraising the loss. “It’s tangled”, Pimlott says in ‘Not Like That’. She communicates the pain of absence, but also its curious richness. This is clear, too, in ‘The Passing Visit’: 

A friend came by from Brussels and we talked of our dead
or rather about what they leave behind, the stuff in storage,

the binding strands. I told him more than I’d told most,
of how (and I said, then rejected, the word tumultuous),

how textured our long, long marriage had been and by textured
I meant bumpy, dropped stitches, amateur darning.

It takes a fine wordsmith to give her reader not only an apposite word but also one she’s chosen not to use. Except it’s still there, isn’t it? The marriage was “textured”, and “bumpy”, and “long” and “darned” and “binding” and “tumultuous”. And now over. I find it hard to convey why the long-line couplets of ‘The Passing Visit’ seem to me so unusually evocative, or how what is not said is so powerful here. But the subtlety stays with me. Suddenly I am surprised again (just when I thought I had plumbed the depths of this poem) to realise the “you” in the fourth stanza (quoted below) means this is a conversation not only with the living, but with the dead. That innocent title, ‘The Passing Visit’, has layers. It is a particular privilege and pleasure for this reader to surf such delicate, precise waves of understatement:

[…] I told him

how often you fell in and out of love and how I left and returned
more than once. Perhaps because I didn’t care enough, I said.

And perhaps I didn’t. There was something he wasn’t telling me
but the sun was out and we walked the courtyards and backways

of the neighbourhood, crossed the bridge, watching the sky whiten
and the coloured lamps in the trees come on.

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Helena Nelson is a poet, critic and founding publisher / editor of HappenStance Press. She’s also Consulting Editor for The Friday Poem. Her first collection, Starlight on Water (Rialto, 2003), was a Jerwood / Aldeburgh First Collection winner. Her second was Plot and Counterplot (Shoestring, 2010). She also writes and publishes light verse, including Down With Poetry! (HappenStance, 2016) and Branded (Red Squirrel, 2019). Her most recent collection is PEARLS: The Complete Mr & Mrs Philpott Poems (HappenStance, 2022).