Litnet

Title: Halfborn Woman
Poet: Colleen Higgs
Publisher: Hands-on Books, 2004
ISBN: 0620319755

Although Colleen Higgs has been writing and publishing individual poems for many years, Halfborn Woman (Hands-on Books, 2004) is her first collection. The title, taken from Adrienne Rich’s poem “Upper Broadway” (in The Dream of a Common Language), an extract of which also serves as an epigraph to this collection, suggests the central theme of this book: a woman’s search for identity and the development of a whole self. This search is enacted through a poetic reflection and examination of her relationships, both familial and intimate.

In Halfborn Woman, Higgs’s project is thus an autobiographical one, as the opening poem of the collection, “autobiography”, makes explicit. In this poem, Higgs confesses that “[she] like[s] to turn back/ it’s a compulsion/ to look back with longing and regret”, and because she’s “been a writer since [she] was eight”, she “turn[s] back” in the form of writing (13). But despite her writing about “absence, loss, grief” which “ink[s]” these emotions and experiences “into [her] cells”, there is still a “relief [in] writing”, in being able “finally to speak the unspeakable/ exposing its pale naked tendrils” (13).

In the collection it is Higgs’s familial and intimate relations which form the source material for her autobiographical poetry. We are thus introduced to her absent father, who “left [when the poet was] five”, and whose absence “was the weight and shape of the telephone directory in the phone/ booth at Zoo Lake” (18); to her mother, who “always sleeps in the afternoon” (17) and whose “life hurts like liquor, like broken dinner plates” (22); and to her stepfather, who “liked to drink” (54), “his glass of cane and coke on the formica/ his voice thick and dark with anger” (19). The poet wonders about “the mystery of [her] [step]father” (52) and searches for “enough clues” “to come to terms with” her familial history (54). After discussing her mother’s attempts “to take her [own] life” and her stepfather’s “drink[ing]”, she confides:

Sometimes I hear her scream – just as I’m falling asleep.
She cries in the dark, an animal calling for others of her species.
A young animal calling for her mother.
A mother crying for her young.
A sentry warning the herd of danger, of a hunter, a predator nearby.
The door is locked from the inside that is the clue. (54)

Among these detailed familial portraits of “absence, loss, grief”, “a memory of my parents, circa 1977” stands out for the gentle poignancy of its conclusion:

She’s at the table too, but it’s afternoon
she’s drinking tea, smoking cigarettes
her children crowd her in the kitchen
she’s counting on something

more
than this. (19)

The humorous prose poem “plumbing – a short history” provides visions of a litany of past lovers as they literally and metaphorically “tr[y] to fix the dripping cold-water bath tap in [the poet’s] flat” (29). We meet Nico, “efficient and able-bodied”, “wield[ing] a large shifting spanner”; Tony, “bright and a bit broken, full of talk and smiles, which went a long way to covering up the emptiness and sadness also there”; Gilbert, whose “wife found out about the affair and mounted a campaign which was the personal  equivalent of ‘desert storm’ to terrorise [the poet] into giving him up”, although “[t]his was overkill on her part, as [the poet] wasn’t trying to hold onto him”; Patrick, a “journalist for a German news agency” with whom life seemed “thrilling, glamorous even”, at least until he “los[t] control and [hit] [her]”; Denis, for whom the poet was moving out of her leaking apartment, and “[a]ll [of whose] taps worked”; and finally Paul, who “didn’t have a chance to try to fix the tap in [her] flat as [she] only met him since then”, but “knows about plumbing, rewiring, building, plastering, and painting” (29–32). Despite this apparent confidence in Paul, with whom the poet was then living, this history of ill-fated love affairs ends with a wry appeal to collective feminine acceptance and understanding:

This is not to say [Paul] always does the plumbing jobs that need to be done. The gas shower geyser packed up six months ago, at first he tried to fix it, even bought a new geyser. Then it seems he gave up. Since then there have been other dripping taps and windows that don’t close. You know how it is. (32)

Many of these relationship poems are moving in their delicate honesty. In one poem she suggests:

Whisper your name to me
I’ll tell you mine in return
get drunk with me
and let’s feel no remorse. (48)

In another she writes:

You complain of walls and gaps
as though I’m an incomplete building
one the workmen went home off on Friday
and didn’t come back to, ever, any Monday to complete.

being happy is not a thread       or a quilt       or a road
it’s like bees buzzing on a hot afternoon
separately, then disappearing. (49)

The poem “in retrospect” speaks volumes with its exquisite emotional restraint:

i guess
i didn’t play
my cards right

probably
because i didn’t realise
we were playing cards. (35)

Using emotional restraint, delicate honesty and wry humour, Halfborn Woman details the journey of the poet towards a more complete self. The book’s overtly confessional style might not appeal to all readers (or critics), but the genre of poetry-as-memoir is a vital one, and Halfborn Woman, neither self-aggrandising nor histrionic, is a valuable addition to it.