Wit and wordplay are key in Moira Lovell’s poetry

Late in October, Moira Lovell, well-known in Pietermaritzburg as a poet, writer, teacher and, to readers of The Witness, a book reviewer, launched her fifth collection of poems titled Notes.

This elegantly produced collection of more than 50 poems shows Lovell’s skill as a crafter of, or as she describes it, a player with, words. There is also her characteristic humour and wit, even where the subject matter is ostensibly dark.

Some poems are about poetry and its power to speak calmly and rationally, an example being Soliloquist:

Having few listeners,
The poet delivers his thoughts
In a soliloquy on the page,
The way, on stage, Hamlet reviews
The state of his soul, the soul of the state,
Finding the one wretched, the other rotten,
While outside the crowds raise
To the rank of demigod the ranting demagogues,
Hoarding all the syllables of their sophistry
In the dusty storerooms of their heads.
If only they would hear, instead, the poet,
Unpacking his soul, unpicking the state,
If only they would try his words and test them,
They might just concede that the poet is
The author of infinite dialogue.

I ask Lovell, in view of the increasing popularity of spoken and slam poetry, how she feels about this more “ranting” approach.

“I opt for careful, highly wrought poetry,” she says.

“But at the launch a number of people said they so enjoyed hearing some poems read aloud. They felt as though they accessed the poems more.”

Lovell feels readers have to be careful how they read poetry. She says when she writes, she plays with the sound of the words, and if someone reads silently, they may miss that aspect. But while she accepts slam poetry has a place and a following, she will stick with the written word.

Lovell quotes a statistic that claims only 1% of the population reads poetry, though she admits that may be just a sour poet’s reflection.

“But it must be accessible,” she says.

“There’s no point writing something readers can’t understand.”

Martin Amis said of James Joyce that the writer must respect the reader, and Lovell firmly believes the poet has to combine accessibility with wit and wordplay.

This wit and wordplay are important parts of Lovell’s poems. For her, words are lively, amusing things to play with, and the words themselves can sometimes create the humour.

An example is her Defence of the Hadedas — not every suburban dweller’s favourite bird, particularly when they strike up in the early morning. But for Lovell, they are infinitely preferable to living under the flight path of incoming planes.

Defence of the Hadedas
(following accusations of noise pollution)

Accused of littering obscenities
Across suburban skyscapes, we defend
Our vocal scores, intended to be sung
Fortissimo, as written by the Great Composer, who, despite the common view,
Is not averse to dissonance and din.
Or, maybe if you so prefer, cacophony
In birdsong might be evolution’s work.
Complaints, we feel, should be directed at
That plucked and painted pseud, the avion,
(Attempting to be classed as avian,)
Which regularly takes a direct flight
Across the territory reserved by us
In manicured upmarket yards beyond
The city centre stench, where we can strut
And grub, deworming lawns, or perch among
Majestic trees. Stiff-winged, unflappable,
Intoning in a constant drone, it dips
Its beak imperially and heads towards
Its nesting zone. It clearly bores the sun,
Which cannot nuance silver monochrome,
And lights, instead, on us, transforming grey
To opalescence. When we feel its warmth
We rise like jewels, a necklace in the sky —
Not crude of speech, but loud with ecstasy.

Many poems in Notes convey a sense of time passing, of the frailty of life. Lovell admits she has always been conscious of transience. Her second collection was Departures, dealing with emigration and death.

“It’s something I have always been concerned about, and that feeling does get stronger as you get older,” she says.

When she first submitted this latest collection, Jackie Kalley, her publisher at Otterley Press, said it was too dark, so she jettisoned some poems and replaced them with lighter ones. But even where the subject matter is dark, the trademark humour is there. As Lovell says, she is not a confessional poet, writing about her own angst, and even when she does the wit still comes to the fore.

One section in the collection deals with the Covid-19 pandemic, which for so many people made the sense of time passing and fragility worse. Over the months of lockdown, people became homebound, which gives an event like the well-attended launch of the collection the sense of being a rare cultural celebration. But in the lockdown days, Lovell says she wrote a lot, capturing those strange times when the usual noise around us all was silenced.

“I’m pleased I could capture those moments, turn that world into words,” she says.

“A poem can become a word album, like a photograph album.”

Notes is a collection reflecting the world in which we live, with both its good and bad aspects. There are poems about friends, the weather, the seasons and the wider world.

To end, here is a poem that speaks to us about what we are experiencing right now: the return of the rainy season.

The Weight of Wetness

At this first hint of sunlight
We peg our sodden spirits on the line:
They hang moodily, redolent of damp towels.
The day cannot be warm or wild enough
To tumble them dry.
Perforce we must forever wear
The weight of wetness.