There is always the temptation to tell it like it wasn’t when a subject is painful. Words can tinker therapeutically, be balm, re-dress – and redress. What impresses most about Ellen Cranitch’s courageous second collection, Crystal, on the subject of her husband’s addiction to crystal meth and its devastations, is her steady rigour in not compromising, not ranting or taking flight, as in her poem Trust, which is claustrophobically reduced to an exchange of glances and a lack of boundaries. There is, throughout, a – crystal – clarity.
Her unexpected starting point is three lyrical poems about Pierre Bonnard’s paintings of his model Renée, who killed herself when he married Marthe, and who is painted in an increasingly abstracted way in the works she is considering. “It is a terrible feeling, to be becoming less distinct,” she observes. There is a slight weirdness in her empathic starting point if only because it borders on a love song to herself: “that strange image I must own” who is “all iridescence”.
But strangeness proves, in other poems, to be Cranitch’s strength. The work, often written in piercing anguish, recalls Emily Dickinson’s line “after great pain a formal feeling comes”. Her formality is dignified, moving and sure. The unfashionable rhyming is refreshing, as is her grasp of form (especially in her sonnet Actaeon, in which the abject suffering of a noble deer is symbolic of humiliation). But there is elsewhere an occasionally strained poeticism to her choice of words “lambent”, “limpid”, “sapphire” – language getting a needless upgrade. And the use of imagery involving crystal seems overworked.
This is a collection that makes you feel fascinated, grateful and troubled as the terrible tale unfolds. But it is good to know that her husband, now in recovery, and their sons have given Cranitch permission to tell this story. And what has been a curse in life turns out to be a gift on the page: a real subject. What’s more, she has an admirably educative intent to step away from her pain to teach us about addiction. The only problem is that the employment of impersonal pieces – including textbook quotes – can seem starchily at odds with personal poems about chaos and pain. And though she is presumably following a personal learning curve, in The Question of Intention, she goes into academic overdrive, writing about how different criteria pertain to “the addict”.
Shifts of tone can be satisfying but the best poems here are the personal ones that relive her terror, bewilderment and wrongfootedness. In Strickeen, a mountain in County Kerry, Ireland – only an “e” away from stricken – there is a gripping description of a car journey with her husband, a fastening of seatbelts that is more than literal and shows how it feels when your mind is not your own because of a suffering cohabitation with someone else: “A mind can be placed in the vice of another mind and the screw tightened at the same time as a personality is prised apart.”
Cranitch is a believer in the medicinal power of literature and stirs some lit crit into her poetry – a high-risk undertaking that includes the scrutiny of JH Prynne’s poem Against Hurt but redeems itself through a simple concluding line: “The lines about pain take it from me.” But when, in Words, she maintains that language “strains to become/not merely to represent”, although superficially convincing, I feel unconvinced. Experience unendingly pursues language, often in vain. But what is clear, in the same poem, is the comfort that can be derived from careful wordplay:
Think of how that verbal crystal,
‘ice’, can multiply;
how it packs into ‘malice’
its cold, vengeful heart.
• Crystal by Ellen Cranitch is published by Bloodaxe (£12). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
Trust by Ellen Cranitch
How many times did I ask him, are you using?
How many times did he deny it when he was?
He looks into my eyes as he lies.
My eyes register the lie.
His eyes register my disbelief.
His eyes communicate his anger.
At the perversity of this,
My eyes express rage.
We are trapped in the labyrinth of the gaze.
