First published in the Times Literary Supplement
The Ache of Appetite is firmly rooted in the everyday, as the opening “Home Remedy” suggests: “if life’s a loaf, a poem is a slice”. Yet Rachel Hadas hesitates to make sharp divisions in her real or imagined experiences:
A poem need not be a diary
entry or letter, dream report, or shred
of the observations of the day,
nor thumbnail answer to what someone said.
The poems that follow work through many of these forms, as Hadas recounts a dream about her doctor, meditates on a set of coasters and weighs Keats against Kafka while giving blood, all with journal-keeping closeness. The sense of an event, meanwhile, is staved off in the more self-conscious poems, with abstract titles such as “Attention”, “The Flow” and “Event Horizon”.
Hadas’s preferred mode is the list, running details together without explaining their relations to one another, and often doubting their reality. Starting with “A sneeze; a gull; an argument”, detail accumulates in “Event Horizon” until the eye is lost in “Remorseless foreground, / no one thing more real than any other”.
Slicing life’s loaf is not just problematic but also painful in the second half of the collection, as Hadas comes to terms with her husband’s early-onset dementia. After the “dream logic” of a chance meeting with his doctor at a railway station, Hadas is recalled “to a maimed mind / Back to a lopped life”. Writing a poem is a way of reclaiming excised experience, though falsifying memory is among its risks and it is, the short “Mnemonic” warns, all too easy to “Abstract the daily / quota; spread out; re- / distribute into parcels of energy”. Hadas is, instead, at her best when dispensing the “strong medicine” of wry humour—contemplating the loss of her husband and parents she jokes, “I’m nothing / if not an equal opportunity misser” — making light of the new language of illness and officialese that has “infiltrated” her “glossary”.
