These wonderful, original and sustaining poems were written while Sean Borodale cooked (rather as his first book, Notes for an Atlas, recorded his London walks – streets rather than a stream of consciousness – and his second, Bee Journal, his bee-keeping). One imagines him in his kitchen, and wonders how it must have been to have pen next to pan, the challenge of it all coming to the boil together, of poetry stewed, sieved, weighed, leavened – and served.
I love the culinary vigilance, sight and insight, the ear for sound effects (“I heat the pan. It happens quickly;/ the cadence is furious”). I hugely enjoyed tasting/reading, and felt an unforced rejoicing at the luck of finding myself at Borodale’s table. But there is also a submerged absurdity, unacknowledged and possibly barely recognised. There are moments when the precious takes hold, as in Preparing Potatoes, in which the humble spud gets unexpectedly promoted. “They are the gloomy dead, potatoes,/ along the walls at Mycenae.” It is splendidly pretentious. The high-risk intensity and folding in of classical references into the recipe won’t be everyone’s dauphinoise.
And what is he cooking? On the menu: jam, damson ice cream, homemade bread, elderflower champagne, chicken stock, pancakes, bream, toast and honey. It is, on the whole, gastronomically choice (aside from the leftover fish finger that charmingly ends the collection). And anyone who has peeled an apple will warm to the opening Stewed Apple. I love his reference to “the factory of my hands”, and recognise – as every apple stewer must – the moment when apples “sag in the pot’s sweat”.
At its best, Borodale’s poetry has the beauty of a still life (a Chardin, say) but is anything but still. The volume’s opening quotation from Bruno Latour reads “the slight surprise of action”. And these are dynamic poems. Cooking is about transformation, and Borodale wonders at its mysteries and the actions that lead to change. The poems are intimate and sensual. He obsessively considers the bringing of outside in – the life of ingredients. There is a startling cross-examination of salad: “This curly fan I tear into pieces, is endive, for example,/ thin, wet wasting sunlight; its bitter participle.” There is another about mint (Raita): “It’s potent, lying there gassing on the table”. In a third, about diced venison, he asks: “how does it smell?” and answers: “Dry grass matted with blood, mud, pollen, urea.” As a cook he is something of a hunter. In Apple Jelly (On-going), he writes: “Test on a cold spoon the hot, sly, wild juice.” It is “sly” that catches fugitive life.
The writing is an attractive combination of formal and casual, sometimes dressed for dinner, sometimes in apron. Borodale comes from a fine arts background, and his homing in on a kipper (from a fantastical philosophical journey of a poem) is especially painterly:
“butterness glazes in platelets of yellow,
a tortured ochre, sienna, a carotene,
a dismal scorched edge;
its innards’ pink alabaster flakes,
glints in its eyes’ inset obsidian”.
Those for whom he cooks do not come into comparable focus. Yet they signify, as in Visitor (With Gift), who brings “a fillet of pale meat” – and himself. In Globe Artichoke, eaters are “staring” like “rooks” in a tree. They are shadows – enigmatic garnish. The endings are often fittingly inconclusive for a poet more interested in process than resolution. Cooking involves so much hanging about and watching – the kitchen a waiting room. Borodale’s enticing poems, like his apple jelly, are “on-going”.
Human Work is published by Jonathan Cape, £10. Click here to order it for £8
Globe Artichokes by Sean Borodale
Today, dropped artichokes
into brine to sit for an hour.
Weighed down under the heavy plate,
three earwigs struggled to be buoyant.
Humans flare from their soils.
So bring to the boil,
the nudged, grey, inner sanctum
of the flower.
The water is black, the eaters wait:
staring,
sat in the trees of their nerves
like rooks.
