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A Bird Can Sing Fresh Song
Swimming Lessons
The Donor’s Daughter
A Bird can Sing Fresh Song
is a current project about familial pressures that threaten mixed marriages.
Whatever Isobel feels about her children's relationships with Asians is insignificant by comparison with what seemed at the time, extreme moral pressure from two entirely different families. One Tamil and Hindu, the other North Indian, north London and Muslim. Neither finds it easy to accept their child's liaison with a different and therefore perplexing culture, let alone a different religion. Each attempts to control their child's life at a time when the younger generation want Western style independence. Parental dramatics lead to conflicts of loyalty.
Communications within the Asian families has an attractive, though complicating flamboyance caused by hordes of 'Aunties' (the extended family) who show simultaneously, sympathy with each generation!
Poems by Isobel, her children, granddaughter and in-laws move through three generations, from one time scale to another and one continent to another.
Poem from the sequence -
Widening the Sky
My daughter married a Tamil
and his mother went dumb -
there is a close-up of her beating
her heart against a wall.
ii
My son has an Asian lover
who dances rattling rain.
Same old story, her family
trip over their tongues.
iii
Water spits from silted drains
as the monsoon reproves
iv
until grandchildren smile
from peppercorn eyes.
The Donor's Daughter
was the Afternoon Play, broadcast 3 June 2003.
It concerned the then highly topical issue of donor insemination. Barry, a film maker from Toronto currently making a film about DI, and David, an international lawyer living in London, find they share a father, but is he Derek? Along comes Shirley, a Teacher conceived at the same (Mary Barton's) clinic in London. Hopes are raised before being dashed when successive DNA tests turn out negative. At its heart, the play is a journey, both symbolic and literal, its markers the e-mails, trains, stations, meetings and swab tests that led to the final resolution. Three threads, poems, a drama read by actors, and recorded voices of donor-conceived children interweave.
Review
Envoi No 134
ENVOI will need no introduction to most readers of poetry magazines, having established a solid reputation since its beginnings in 1957. The poetry that lingers most in my mind from this issue is Sally Festing's sequence from THE DONOR'S DAUGHTER, in which she writes about the long term emotional effects of sperm donation. Sally Festing will know something herself about this, having grown up with a father who was one of the earliest donors:
home.clara.net/nhi/mg0033.htm
Swimming Lessons,
was Radio 4’s Friday Play, broadcast in September 2005, repeated September 2006
It is based on a sequence of poems in the voices of a mother and her daughter with interlocking drama by Tina Pepler .
Elisabeth Mahoney of The Guardian, wrote 26.9.05
The drama highlight of the weekend wasn't The Rivals (Radio 3) ... Instead, the elegiac, emotionally charged Swimming Lessons (Radio 4, Friday), with its blend of evocative poetry, harsh reality and heartstring-tugging music from Faure, was the most terribly haunting thing.
A recurrent theme in this play about a young woman with anorexia was the weightlessness and freedom of being in water, while its characters searched for the psychological equivalent through poems, music, and memory. "What if somewhere in our unconscious minds," ponders Grace, the anorexic, "we are living somewhere else as well as here?" Each character is trying to escape the fallout anorexia has had on the family. "Everything is about food," says Grace's sister, "all the time. Even the silences, in all our lives. She makes it that way." I liked the honesty of Tina Pepler's writing and the imaginative ways it twined around Sally Festing's poems. "Nothing is the shape it should be." Grace's mother observes. This play, though, which left me in tears, was perfectly formed.
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