In the introduction to her first book of poetry in 12 years, Patricia Lockwood states that, “For almost a decade … I had not been able to hear it. The poems that I wrote would not end … too much was happening, there was a different kind of attention being paid.” It wasn’t that she didn’t want them to arrive. From Cave Painting: “And does she still write poems? / Not a whole one since I had been ill. / Five years. I kept saying I was / Doing it privately. So private even / I didn’t know about it.”
In that intervening period, Lockwood’s status has jumped from interesting US poet famous for the viral sensation Rape Joke to literary superstar: an acclaimed memoirist and novelist whose freewheeling, antic style is for many the internet’s maelstrom lassoed and put back on to the page. Who else can claim to have turned an audience with the pope into a biting comic essay?
So her return to poetry is a genuine event, and across Agate Head / Stone Soup there are countless moments that remind you that her poetic voice is unique: charming, whimsical, intimate; able to deliver images of great beauty, piercing philosophical insights and glimpses into a creative life behind the public persona. Readers of her memoir Priestdaddy will be pleased to see her father reappear in a few poems. “That my father has been drinking … / Always something new with him, / But I must say I didn’t see / 5-600 dollars’ worth of fine olive oil coming.”
Agate Head / Stone Soup is presented tête-bêche – head-to-tail in French, the volumes upside down and back-to-back. And while this might appear to be a frippery, the two collections have enough differences in texture to warrant it. Agate Head feels the more public-facing, while Stone Soup wrestles with more existential concerns, as beautifully rendered in Babies Born Remembering: “Screaming in the airport. / What do they remember – / Night flights, riding birds, / Being a set of wings / Themselves, a soul, an updraft.”
Both collections are inspired by stones, gems and metals of all shapes and sorts. Lockwood has been collecting fossils and minerals from an early age, and she and her husband have spent time learning metalsmithing, too. This gives her rich territories to explore. In Margaret De Patta, “Quartz wants / To be a window, wants a woman to appear. / We have properties, we are non-precious, / Wood horn bone and hair.” In An Agate a Day, we get to see her and her husband cutting agates, a hard stone with bands of different colours: “The trick is to hold the miracle steady. / We are the first to be seeing this. Ever. / Together. What happened to you? / We croon, after each cut.” It is notable that agates are associated with a sense of grounding and balance; an attempt to counteract all that other “attention”.
There is a detectable technical shift in Lockwood’s poems also. Many of the poems in 2014’s Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals featured long lines, allowed to run on and gather momentum to their epiphanies or punchlines. Here her lines are more staccato in feeling, jumpier in syntax, as in Not Seeing Glass Flowers: “To grow. Was it that / They looked real? I asked everyone. / Or was it something more? Max Beckmann’s painting is still a horror.”
It means a spikier initial impression for many of the poems. This ultimately works in their favour, as the thoughts accrete, moving in unlikely directions, before resolving into a revelation of some force. “Artists, no one really / Knows where they come from, / They fall a long way from the sky / And land zigzag” as Forged in Fire has it.
Neither collection is flawless. At one level, it is impossible to get away from the autobiographical detail, and so some of the poems become a form of higher gossip, our noses pressed up against the glass of fame. Sedarising, for example, comes across as smug rather than amusing.
And there are occasions when an object under discussion cannot bear the metaphorical weight being placed upon it. Polish Flint is an offender here: “The perfect ring I had married myself with / (Of Polish flint) was pried apart as I fell. / In slow motion, it seemed, surrounded / By tourists, with enough time to think / Of everything.”
But these are small bumps when time and again Lockwood leaves you with the distinct impression that she can magically make the profane into the profound, the holy into the hilarious, as she does to most brilliant effect in Monastery Icons: Windows into Heaven: “It’s sounding a little bit / Like you can order a whole husband / From this catalog, as long as his name is The Lord / And you are a PRAYING VIRGIN NIGHTLIGHT: / Just what we need in these challenging times.”
• Agate Head / Stone Soup by Patricia Lockwood is published by Bloomsbury, (£18.99). To support the Guardian buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
