Classic Hair Designs
Every day they are dropped off
at Classic Hair Designs,
sometimes in taxis,
sometimes by daughters,
often by middle-aged sons
in sober coats,
who pull in tight by the kerb,
stride around to the door,
and offer an arm.
How important this
almost last vestige
of our animal pelt is.
How we cherish it –
the Egyptians’ braided bob,
those banded Grecian curls,
the elaborate patterns of Africa,
the powdered, teetering pompadour,
the sixties’ long shining fall over a guitar,
and the fine halo
of my almost-blind
ninety-two-year-old neighbour,
permed and set
in the style
in which she stepped out
with her young man
after the last World War.
Sometimes, a poem is a slip-road to a familiar scene which, viewed from the new entry point, registers with surprising freshness. Something the reader already almost knows is brightened by internal recognition.
Philip Larkin was persuasively good at this kind of “look again” poem, and so is the Irish poet, Moya Cannon. Classic Hair Designs, from her varied new collection, Keats Lives, reminded me a little of Larkin’s The Large Cool Store. But Cannon’s speaker is very different from the bedazzled male innocent in M&S, proclaiming “How separate and unearthly love is / Or women are …” as consumerism meets eroticism in a lather of “baby-doll” nighties. In relaxed sympathy with her subject, Cannon demonstrates what’s down-to-earth, tender and innately human in the purchase of beauty. Her reference to evolution in the “almost last vestige / of our animal pelt”, and the widened horizons of hair artistry shown in the middle stanza, add context richer than high street fantasy.
The pathos of her subject dawns with the revelation in the first stanza that the clients who are regularly “dropped off” at the Classic Hair Designs salon are of a particular generation. Suddenly, even the “dropping off” casts a darkly punning shadow. These are very elderly women, needing to be shepherded to their appointments by solicitous grownup children. The punctilious parking and subsequent gallantry of the “middle-aged” sons is observed with a particularly precise and tactful humour.
In one of the periods evoked in the second stanza, the ancient Egyptian faces were painted in profile. The poet’s technique is similar to the Egyptian painter’s, perhaps. She lists only a few of the most notable hair fashions, briefly but vividly outlining them in adjective-noun patterns appropriately stylised and symmetrical. I particularly like the different, elliptical structure of “the sixties’ long shining fall over a guitar …” – a beautiful extension of a line. And then, after the stanza break, separated by a comma that might almost be a single, plucked chord on the guitar, the hair thins, shortens and swiftly ages to become a “fine halo”.
I’ve studied many such haloed heads, usually in back-view on the bus, admiring the clean whiteness of the curls, feeling sorry for the tiny patch of pink scalp showing through, and wondering at the energy and sheer optimism of a pensioner with such a high-maintenance hairstyle.
For the almost-blind neighbour in the poem’s final stanza, though, the perm is a triumph over lost sight and time. Through the quaintness of that old-fashioned term for dating, stepping out, the poem encourages us to imagine her not only as she is now, but as she was as a girl, “after the last World War”. The hairstyle that dates her and fixes her in time reconnects her to what may be her most cherished and personal sense of self.
