Against Falling

Linda Anderson, published by Liverpool University Press

In Linda Anderson’s Against Falling, the past, present and future are both smudged and looped. Memories mingle across boundaries, on the school yard, through french windows, and alongside bramble thickets and hedgerows to present a tangle of hauntings. Posed at these precipices, the question “what does my body know/ carrying my old selves with it? The river rushes past” (‘Rede’) is asked. Here, shades of self become splintered across time and inside recollections; life’s offcuts are simultaneously happening, have happened, and are yet to happen: “Unknown. It’s all still to happen, as you look out, while the ghost inside you beckons” (‘From Memory’).

Against Falling deals also in both the unsaid and what silences can say. Poems are unwritten but remembered: “You follow the poem you did not write/ but could not forget” (‘Feather’). Silences are ripe, and heavy with potential resonances. Anderson considers the departure and arrival of language, exploring presences inside absences to ask “But doesn’t silence also make space for language to be anticipated or, afterwards, to linger?” in ‘Autumn in Majorca’. 

This investigation permeates particularly ‘Notebook 1’ and ‘Notebook 2’: these poems punctuate the two sections that divide this collection and take the shape of considerations of the poet’s own notebook writings. Drawing on figures like Woolf, Varda, Cixous and Dickinson, Anderson explores chancing on unexpected connections, the nature of fragmentation and unmoored memory.

In the first notebook installation, there is a dreamt lost notebook in a tree as if a nest: Anderson circles round to it, writing “My dream of a nest - a nest of words, a place created with bits and pieces, gleanings and foraging. Holding what inside? The dream doesn’t say”. Against Falling maps the passage-ways in between memory, time, and aging. These poems operate in fragments, whispers and shadows, slipping in and out of focus where “little things replay” (‘From Memory’) and “a story is not just a story” (‘Dear Life’).

Reviewed by Rose Schierig.