Catch of the Day
My therapist shakes her head.
It’s much more complex than that, she says.
Even if I begin hesitantly:
– It seems to me, I say –
mimicking her style of hypothesis,
dangling before her some tadpole of my own analysis –
I’m wrong again in this.
Life cannot be scooped up like a fish.
Afterwards she sees me out.
My car is parked beneath a gumtree
and I want to say:
It seems to me what we are looking at here
is a white Toyota Corolla parked beneath a gumtree.
Just to have one moment with no ambiguity!
To feel – even once – that I’m right,
that I’m holding – however briefly – the thing that slips away.
Beneath the eucalyptus
my Toyota sleeps in peace
but it is not a fish.
No. It’s much more complex than that.
The Cape Town-born poet and fiction writer, Finuala Dowling, published her New and Selected Poems, Pretend You Don’t Know Me, with Bloodaxe last year. Her work, already highly acclaimed in South Africa, has proved a rewarding new discovery for British readers.
Her technique may appear effortless, and suggest the audience-friendly colloquialism of spoken word poetry, but there is crafted precision in her writing. Her monologues avoid the performance poet’s frequent over-reliance on cliches and catchphrases, and there’s always an edge of sharp self-awareness to the humour.
In this week’s poem, the underlying figure is a familiar one: “Life cannot be scooped up like a fish.” Certain ideas and forms of knowledge become slippery and difficult when you try to grasp them. Dowling refreshes that well-trawled analogy by various means.
Her handling of dialogue, especially as it embodies the dynamics underlying the therapist-client relationship, is particularly effective, and provides the connective tissue of the poem. It opens with the therapist’s careful comment, “It’s much more complex than that,” and for a moment we might think that the speech-style of the therapist will be the object of an extended satire. There is an element of satire, of course, but everything really is more complex. In a way, the poem is a three-hander, including the therapist, the speaker and another, quizzical version of her consciousness.
Dowling is skilled at tonal variety. From “mimicking” the therapist’s “style of hypothesis” in line four, through her proclaimed self-doubt and anguish (“Just to have one moment with no ambiguity!”) the speaker reaches the last line of poem to present, unitalicised, the statement as her own. Power-relations have shifted, but the relationship between the speaker and the analyst have emerged as a sharing of wisdom rather than a comic or humiliating exchange of roles: “Beneath the eucalyptus/ my Toyota sleeps in peace // but it is not a fish. // No. It’s much more complex than that.”
That “fish” analogy is consistently and ingeniously revised. It informs the punning title, Catch of the Day. A particularly enjoyable “twist” on it occurs when the speaker describes herself “dangling … some tadpole of my own analysis.” Wanting but failing to “hold the thing that slips away” is fundamental to the poem’s strategies. It’s the honesty-expressed difficulty of the quest which is the real “catch”. What is held, and held in balance, is contained by the poem itself. This is a very ingenious and enjoyable “catch”.
