No Good
by Sophie van Waardenberg

The cover of this poetry collection depicts a beetle crawling on a slice of apple. This is a great clue: apples can symbolise wisdom, love, fertility, temptation, knowledge. Beetles are rich in symbolism too: transformation, protection, resilience and renewal. They represent strength and inner fortitude. These symbols are worth thinking about when reading these poems – they can serve as a phoropter does during an eye test, with its numerous lenses that manipulate the way we see the same letters.

No Good is Sophie van Waardenberg’s debut, and in it she revisits her childhood, the death of her dad, and the blooming and withering of a romantic relationship. But despite the title, these poems are hopeful and aspirational – Van Waardenberg can’t help but see the good in the world. Even when things are no good, she is tender and understanding; she waits patiently for the weighted vest of depression to come off, wills her appetite to start up again, earnestly wants to taste all of life with her ‘wet wishing mouth’. These poems see people for who they are – ordinary, average, fallible – and don’t expect anything more. We may not rise to the occasion of love, or death, but we exist importantly nonetheless, each of us falling and getting up and then falling again. We grow; people die and so do relationships. There is a great kindness in these poems. Many readers may find comfort and nourishment here.

At the heart of the book is a series titled ‘Cremation Sonnets’, and this is where her writing is the most powerful, both technically and emotionally. Van Waardenberg is an editor and reviewer (she writes excellent poetry reviews on this platform), and her editorial eye for exactness makes for a smooth, clean reading experience. Her unexaggerated tone is particularly moving in the writing of her dad, where each heavy moment cuts through clear and cold, like a saline drip in the vein.

They counted out your time left and you spent it
without any extraordinary grace.
They tried to say you’d exceeded expectations.
Maybe in efforts towards love
but not in dying. Maybe in brightness of thread,
consistency of hat, the line of song
bent in horsehair–not in dying. Maybe
in commitment to the wristwatch. To the spirit.
To the ocean. Not in dying. We thought
you’d always laugh while you were speaking
but you wore brown pyjamas you didn’t choose
and you spat out grape seeds and stopped talking.
Then you couldn’t love me.
Then you died. Then they burnt you.

The ‘Cremation Sonnets’ remind me of Helen Heath’s poems about life after the death of her partner in Are friends electric? – they, too, are matter of fact, not romanticising nor heroizing death (or the person), simply observing and noting. It’s the simplicity that makes it so heart-wrenching — the starkness of an enormous grief in the bland everyday. When grief is so heavy that it is ineffable, you can only talk about its surroundings, the administration. One sonnet ends mid-memory:

When in the night the ambulance beam came searching
I rolled over I dreamt of nothing I did not believe
in the freezing of bread I did not believe in the end
until it was I drank water endlessly
from a plastic cup in a room where nobody

These poems are, on the surface, light, warm and shimmery – Van Waardenberg is self-deprecating, whimsical, humorous; she is endearing as the hopeful, clumsy, girl-next-door type of character – and they can be read as youthful, modern-day poems of cities. But they are also poems about navigating the world through pain and grief, of having to still do the everyday things (like get out of bed and be busy) that the world expects from us.

Van Waardenberg makes astute observations, and she reads the room well, never entering the realm of the histrionic. She is unafraid to be simple – and this lack of pretension shows her confidence as a writer – with lines like ‘the mornings so morning’. We can see that so clearly – some things just are what they are, no similes or metaphors required. She also uses great ‘non-poetic’ words, such as ‘this stonking blue afternoon’.

Van Waardenberg is gay and writes of her relationship with a woman, but no one is unscathed by the patriarchy – she writes of not loving her body, of how hard it can be to share her body. The body is full of embarrassments and failures, and ultimately the greatest failure is in dying. But in the end, this book is about forgiveness – of the self, the lover, the body – and in a world infested with constant reminders that we are not good enough (in our selves, in love, in dying), this is a spectacular, special thing. In ‘The Getting Away’ she writes, ‘I’m rotten and roiled / and no good, truly—truly no good at all’ but at the same time she wants to ‘be a jolly human’. She is propagating stems, tending to plants, says – in ‘Hymn to Twee Possibility’ – that I am almost ready for this life’. The apple, then, is not rotten. The beetles on and within the book are there because the apple is sweet and satisfying.

The poems are geared towards a ‘getting away’ – from the city (New York?) or her relationship, but also the sadness, loneliness, the heaviness, her girlhood. Towards the end of the book, in the poem ‘Membrane’, there is the image of ‘one preposterous light’: this, to me, symbolises the death of those attachments and memories that cause her pain. The breakdown of her relationship precisely and vividly portrays the domestic occurrences that eventually lead to the fading of love and patience. Things get old, people are predictable. She predicts the demise of the relationship long before it is over: ‘It’s something hot and sinister and spinal, then, / that pushes the fond away.’ In the film Before Sunset, the character Celine talks about how people get to know their partners too well over time – the same stories at dinner parties, the same jokes – but rather than find that boring, she loves it and finds comfort in the predictability. My reading is that Van Waardenberg is like Celine – she sees the poetry in mundanity, in routines. She is not easily bored because she finds new ways to look at things. Her poetry (and use of imagery) demonstrates an amazing attention to detail.

In the final poem she asks:

How do we go on. No, really. When it’s over

all the time? Drop what’s spent, lick up
the blank air, why lie, it tastes almost good

inside this wet wishing mouth. And something’s next.
Here I go reaching, I cannot help myself.

In the whole of No Good, there are just two mentions of an apple. In ‘The Getting Away’ it is the memory of appetite (‘the perfect quarter of apple’). One ‘Cremation Sonnet’ begins: ‘Satisfaction as in apple. Unbitten/or bitten full ring’. Van Waardenberg longs for something whole and balanced – she wants to want, she wants to live. And so she goes, taking her loving with her.