Painter, retired civil servant and the eldest child of Lucian, Annie Freud launched her poetry career with funny, often highly sexualised light verse. Now at 72 she has published her fourth collection, Hiddensee – a book that locates her quite differently, as a former student of comparative literature whose imagination is furnished with European high culture and who is, it turns out, a highly accomplished literary translator.
Hiddensee is named after the sandy Baltic island that has been a traditional resort of German writers and artists. In English it’s also of course a richly suggestive compound: poetry, after all, tries to perform acts of divination on the unseen. There is also a suggestion of hide-and-seek, the fort-da game her great-grandfather famously analysed. But the book makes sure you know all about the actual island, and what it represents to the author, because Freud has provided us with an endnote. In fact, this book has a total of 18 endnotes, and superscript numbers are sprinkled across the poems in a way that’s either irritating or refreshingly unexpected, depending on your taste.
Personally, I’d have preferred them more concise and unnumbered. But they do play an important poetic role, adding further texture to a work that is fundamentally multitextured, and the richer and more unconventional for it. After a frontispiece oil by the poet herself, Hiddensee is divided into three sections: New Poems, Cancer Poems, and 13 poems in French by Jacques Tornay, with Freud’s English translations, and her afterword introducing the distinguished Swiss poet and his work. More unusually still, the book’s first two sections are also bilingual. Two of the three Cancer Poems, for example, are written twice over, in French and in English. This section also includes a found poem of Sigmund Freud’s diary extracts from the last months of his life. Or are they compiled? Reconstructed, even? Here’s one place where a note by Annie Freud would really help the reader: the cause and date of her great-grandfather’s death are well known, so what is she showing us here? Genius at bay? Graceful understatement? The velocity of tragedy?
It would help, too, because the poet also evinces graceful understatement in her own poems about cancer – and throughout the darker shadowed pieces in this collection. “On the Shortness of Life” closes: “In days to come, be there, be there, / put your sweater on against the cold. / We’ll get there step by step.” This is modest, gentle: and, though addressed first of all to a partner, universal in its embrace. We’ll all “get there step by step” together, as the pandemic has shown. The tercet is also, in its ability to tell us something by going in several apparent directions, a small masterclass in the art of synthesis. Likewise “The Lions of Chemo”, which ends: “At one / moment the field of my entire vision / was filled with a lion’s yellow skin.”
Synthesis and transformation: poems about difficult experiences turn them into art. Other poems in this collection transform family members – “Uncle Marcel”, her mother-in-law – and even the poet’s self into characters; and memories into stories. Amid all this putting in order, one poem in particular stands out. “Why I Am a Painter” is a profession of vocation that could speak just as well to poetry: “I’d be unfaithful / to everything that’s dear / for [its] sake […] I love the infinite pains / the near-madness it takes […] the feeling / of intoxication.” This sophisticated book speaks to its maker’s “infinite pains” and – I hope – to her intoxication too.
• Fiona Sampson’s Two-Way Mirror: The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Profile) will be published in February. Hiddensee by Annie Freud is published by Picador (£10.99).
