The Price of Happiness by Nikki Robson
The Price of Happiness neither holds back nor wastes a word in its tale of a marriage from unsettling omens ("Goodness, I'm weeping said Mum") to full-blown violent coerciveness ("the sore in the wall/where the dinner was thrown") and out through the numbness and the decree absolute to the glimmers of a new life ("it crackled like fireworks,/illegal for so long"). You barely take a breath before you're holding it in shock at the damage we do each other in the altogether too close up of a dysfunctional relationship. It is a tribute to Nikki Robson's skill that this is accomplished without sentiment, catching our attention and our compassion entirely through telling detail and command of phrasing - these poems are constantly quotable in their exactitude - "my label of a husband"; "my mummy-smile"; "this Vitruvian boy" - and are nowhere more moving than in their grasp of the impact on the children: "[I] tried to describe the end of her world/as the beginning of another".- W. N. Herbert
"The divorced cannot/bury their dead." Nikki Robson scours that truth, asks where it leads. We are used to graphic detonations of trauma, but here, the poet, well able to apply her "mummy-smile', layers words, finds metaphor, draws deeply on sources and places. Unfolding her narrative, she never neglects a poet's first responsibility: to language. These poems haunt as mere shock cannot. - Beth McDonough
The Price of Happiness is very visceral and very contemplative.
"The divorced cannot/bury their dead." Nikki Robson scours that truth, asks where it leads. We are used to graphic detonations of trauma, but here, the poet, well able to apply her "mummy-smile', layers words, finds metaphor, draws deeply on sources and places. Unfolding her narrative, she never neglects a poet's first responsibility: to language. These poems haunt as mere shock cannot. - Beth McDonough
The Price of Happiness is very visceral and very contemplative.
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