Foxglove Country
Sometimes I like to hide in the word
foxgloves - in the middle of foxgloves.
The xgl is hard to say, out of the England
of its harbouring word.
Alone it becomes a small tangle,
a witch’s thimble, hard-to-toll bell,
elvish door to a door. Xgl
a place with a locked beginning
then a snag, a gl
like the little Englands of my grief,
a knotted dark that locks light
in glisten, glow, glint, gleam
and Oberon’s banks of eglantine
which closes in on the opening
of Gulliver whose shrunken gul
says ‘rose’ in my fatherland.
Meanwhile, in the motherland, the xg
is almost the thumb of a lost mitten,
an impossible interior, deeper than forests
and further in. And deeper inland
is the gulp, the gulf, the gap, the grip
that goes before love.
Staring at an isolated word, or repeating it aloud, over and over, is a brain-game that can disrupt the cosiest family of letters, and sometimes suggest curious re-alliances. In this week’s poem, from Zaffar Kunial’s second collection, England’s Green, the word chosen for such an adventure is “foxgloves”. Kunial begins by gently imagining the pleasure of hiding in the middle of his word, where “the xgl is hard to say”. It certainly is: I practised it when no one was listening, and made a sound part kiss, part hiss and part gulp. It sounded like a protest against “the England of its harbouring word”.
Kunial unwraps the “small tangle” he has delivered, by means of foxglove-related symbols with a dangerous, folkish undertone: “a witch’s thimble, hard-to-toll bell, / elvish door to a door”. The word becomes the floret, and you can feel the presence of the plant’s hierarchical-seeming spire, and its raked clusters of darkening interiors. England as Foxglove Country embodies both sweet and toxic privacies. Much of what follows in the poem suggests ways of opening the “locked beginning”, the code, of xgl.
The X-lock leads straight to the “snag” of the” “gl” – and the complexity of “a knotted dark that locks light” into (rather than out of) certain words. These illuminations are related by the speaker to “the little Englands of my grief”. That word “grief” stands out, initially bare of detail. The diminutive “little” may suggest childhood, a time when humiliation and pronunciation can coincide. Most adults can remember the frustration of trying to pronounce words their mouths simply couldn’t get right, though the words they managed to utter were actually more difficult to pronounce. There’s a deeper and more insistent kind of exclusion, though, lurking in the phrase “little Englands”.
Literary enrichment follows the light-bearing “gl” words conjured in line 12. The foxgloves are enchanted into “Oberon’s banks of eglantine” and, although the gul of Gulliver is “shrunken”, it too opens out, and becomes the word which “says ‘rose’ in my fatherland”. Both words “fatherland” and “motherland” are beautifully rediscovered here, newly flowering in the marriage-knot of countries the poet inherits from his parents, his mother’s England and his father’s Pakistan.
A maternal image for the foxglove flower seems to be tucked into the “thumb of a lost mitten”. We can imagine a child whose mitten fell off because he wasn’t able to put it on properly, since the thumb, like the xg in “foxglove”, was pushed askew and flattened inside the mitt.
That earlier “grief” is obliquely recalled in the list of the penultimate line – “the gulp, the gulf, the gap, the grip” – but the poem, as if impelled by the idea of the grip, has farther to go. The word “glove” signposts a familiar rhyme-word, one which might entrap the unwary poet. Kunial is never unwary, and, as brave as he is stylish, ventures beyond “an impossible interior, deeper than forests” to secure the glove’s inner rhyme-word “love” – italicised, to remind us that it, too, has been extracted from the unpacked letters of “foxgloves”. As this opening poem suggests, England’s Green is a complicated kind of pastoral which, like the words we stare at or constantly repeat, undergoes many metamorphoses and delicate reconstructions. The collection is reviewed here by Carl Tomlinson.
