Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit
by Emma Neale

When we tell a lie or when a lie is told to us – however small it might be, and for whatever purpose — something fractures within us. A lie is a turning point. That’s what Emma Neale’s new collection of poetry, Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit, teases out – the confusion, trauma, ‘twisting and wrenching’ that lies inflict, and the truth that can be found within them.

Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit, takes its title from an early English naval ballad, its rhythm like that of the taunting playground rhyme, ‘Liar, liar, pants on fire’. This spirit of play, of childhood squirming and dissembling, is entangled in many of the poems here, which often take up the vantage point of Neale’s child-self as she navigates her earliest deceptions. One of these childhood poems, ‘Like girls were hot soft scones’, captures a clash between earnest girlhood questions and Sunday School teachings:

Church people thought girls were like hot soft scones
and Sunday School teachers were the glinting blades
avid to fillet us, spread blame like seed-pitted jam
gritty and sticky on our skins — but why feel responsible
for what Adam had lost, what Eve had done?

To be a girl is to be descended from Eve, the first human deceiver – at least, that’s one reading of the Bible, through which a hefty load of shame can be passed down. The sing-songy, monosyllabic depiction of what a girl was thought to be (a ‘hot soft scone’) is threatened by the ‘glinting blades’ of this knowledge, this guilt. But, through curiosity, Neale – as that girl, as this poet – challenges that power structure:

If I took a pinch from a playdough man
to make a playdough woman
they smelled, tasted, squashed back down the same.
Weren’t they both just clay?

Other poems take as their subject matter children Neale witnesses or cares for, including not just the speaker’s own children but those in proximity to her. There is an empathy, throughout Liar, Liar, for the lying child – the child who has started to work out how to defend themself, or who has begun to understand that lying can be a way to get what they want. Neale depicts with dramatic flair the bewilderment of being a child who has begun to reckon with the power of lies: ‘denial and contrition struggling’ inside the speaker’s child self ‘like demon and angel too colossal to hold inside my skin.’

There’s a similar empathy for the adult who lies to, or about, children. Neale is acutely aware of how lies are used as shelter. In ‘Terribly involved’, the speaker sits at her son’s hospital bed, her attention caught by a crying baby one bed over whose parents are nowhere to be seen. When she asks the nurse, ‘Is it safe to hold him?’, the nurse’s euphemistic response is a kind of lie, standing in for a cruder truth:

Best not, she said. The parents might not approve.
Half afraid to hear, I asked, Where are they?
At home, she answered. They’re just not terribly involved.

Neale spins new language when she needs it and has a particular affinity for compound adjectives: shoes are ‘street-dusty’, chocolate is ‘age-scuffed’, and blackberries are ‘wasp-kissed’. At times, the diction and figurative language are so baroque they threaten to collapse a poem’s narrative — for instance, a group of boys kicking a ball around in the park have voices like ‘glitchy doorbells’, ‘rusted harmonicas’ and ‘crude [quiz show] buzzers’ all at once, an indistinct hullabaloo.

Other poems, however, pare their language right back to its coldest and cleanest, particularly those that tackle misogyny and gender-based violence. In ‘My Blank Camouflage’, Neale dissects an experience of date rape and suggests that the survivor-speaker’s power, her ‘last arsenal’, is ‘[a]wareness. I knew him. I can name him. I am witness.’ Against a horrific act, a simple fragment of language, a name – though kept unsaid – is power.

And there are times when language is a distraction, insufficient. It can break the delicate magic of a half-imagined moment. In the poem ‘If you saw a miracle, would you speak of it?’, the speaker seems to witness an impossible, cryptid-like creature on the riverbank, but is slow to share this vision, instead protecting it from being ‘noosed […] in a rope of language’. Language is similarly fibrous and similarly inadequate in one of the collection’s most pastoral-leaning pieces, ‘The moth-eyed Steeplechase horse’:

I want to hold this morning
under an agapanthus sky
with a gentle, moth-eyed horse
as if the thread of language
could ever weave a hide
against the hook and ache of loss

If language is unreliable, what can we trust in poetry – arguably the ficklest and flightiest of written forms? Does any of the work in this collection resonate with truth? Surprisingly, it all does. There is a sturdiness to an Emma Neale poem. Though so many of the pieces here contain lies, they themselves don’t attempt to evade their reader. When you enter a poem in this collection, you know where you are, understanding bewilderment without becoming bewildered yourself. Neale shows you in, shows you the shape of things, presenting the poem’s central figure – be it a well-tended rose or a serenade by Tchaikovsky – immediately, then exploring that conceit with satisfying thoroughness. We come to expect that Neale will show us, tenderly, what we need to understand: this is how it looks, how it sounds; this is the core of it.

Neale is not interested in using poetry to dissemble or evade: her project is more generous. Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit comprises her attempts to make sense of untruths, to heal old misunderstandings. She is aware, though, that the truth rarely exists, and never in binary opposition to a lie. No matter how prudent our attempts at telling the honest version, every story loses accuracy when spoken or shaped or passed along, and power and privilege always play a part in that unravelling – as in ‘Genealogy’:

omissions from history are they lies, evasions, age’s amnesias,
the inability of children to listen        in time
the refusal of adults to be perfect museums
of themselves
is every white genealogy poem                      an erasure poem
is every postcolonial poem an erasure poem            will we ever be fair
and true and clear

But throughout this collection, Neale consistently digs for the truth that might be buried by the lie. In ‘Spare Change’, contemplating an incident on the London Tube, her speaker tries to reconcile a stranger’s request for help with another stranger’s advice not to show sympathy: the injured man has done this on purpose. Here, it is not the lie – embedded in the plea for money – that causes pain. The lie is, in fact, the purer form of communication. It is the other’s lack of care that truly bewilders:

One man so strung out he’d self-harm for cash.
Another so jaded he’d cauterised compassion.

Decades on, the memory opens
and reopens in the same raw place.

As if I could heal anything
as pernicious as indifference

I am at it again with the saline and sutures
of these ink-black glyphs

needle and stitch
needle and stitch.