The Intimacy Bus
by Janet Charman

Janet Charman’s latest collection, The Intimacy Bus, is a generously candid exploration of grief, desire, gender, sexual identity, and ageing. Following her previous collection, The Pistils, which was published nine months after the death of her long-term partner, The Intimacy Bus is a more explicit illustration of that loss which serves as the impetus for many poems here. The first, ‘in absentia’, opens:

they sent a form letter a month or so after
inviting me
to a candle-lighting ceremony
in remembrance: those two hospice nurses
who at the point they knew you had a week to live
or less
became insistent on rationing your pain relief

This grief is not meek or reverential – it’s refreshingly alive and angry, never forgetting the ugly (and often banal) details of death. Loss burrows into every corner of the poet’s life. ‘Companion Piece’ uses slant rhymes and brisk, short lines to create a jagged picture of the house the poet shared with her partner:

if the winds are blowing
in the right direction
with my pension
you won’t smell my treason
and hate of cleaning
leaving me this house
this dirty house for which
i paid my half
though always
the lawyers
made sure it came with
his name first

It will come as no surprise to those familiar with Charman’s work that she has no time for stale heteronormativity and its imbalanced power structures – she rejects the ‘phallic upper-case / first-person’ pronoun, using the lower-case ‘i’ in every instance – yet she’s rarely self-righteous while she chips away at it. It’s something she can tease without always needing to challenge head-on. Take ‘Ken comes out’ as an example of this play:

though they may claim
he is gay
let me just mention the thing
they’re forgetting which is
whateva
since Ken was made to quell
for Mattel
the anxieties of parents
who notice that Barbie is not the least bit
interested
in men

In the end, Ken spends ‘yet another / night on the tiles’ while Barbie and the human girl who is her ‘primary […] love interest’ are ‘submerged dreamily’ together in the bath. Instead of another poem about girls ripping the heads of dolls, Charman gives us something rarer, eschewing rage and jealousy for fervent female companionship.

Throughout The Intimacy Bus, Charman’s speaker is bemused by the age- and gender-based archetypes others try to fit her into. If someone – be it a stranger or her own child – attempts to tell her who she is or is not, she wriggles free of their categorisation immediately. One entry into the catalogue of such attempts is titled, ‘you can write about sex but can you have it?’ and includes an exchange between Charman and a child who asks her, ‘are you a granny?’ She replies, ‘i’m an Amazon’.

Meanwhile, ‘coming out at 68’ illustrates the vulnerable act of vocalising a queer identity to those who may not expect it of you, or who may not even believe you at all. The poet’s parents have already died; her daughter laughs and says ‘no / you’re not’. Still, Charman steps into this fluid, still-forming identity:

so here i am
lowering my ego boundaries
to become a self-fragilising
partial subject
let it all pour in
—the lesbian heterosexual
heterosexual lesbian

Many of the poems in The Intimacy Bus – ‘49 fragments’, ‘18 sex treats’ and ‘27 episodes from modern life’, to name a few – take the form of arrangements of bulleted notes or loosely connected vignettes. Structure is not so much the propulsive force of the collection as it is an organisational tool; it’s Charman’s voice that keeps us moving through each line and each poem. It never feels as though a form has been imposed on any poem here, or that any poem knows what it will be before it is finished. Line lengths bloom and shrink. Staccato beats, abruptly enjambed, fire out a raw monologue in a narrow column, while in the next poem, a cinematic love scene ebbs and flows into lines that span the width of the page.

—this is the scene i watch over: that watches over me
you two throwing down soft kisses
quick quick—slowly catching up
the kisses offered back
until you’ve said everything soft kisses can say
then you try harder

Charman’s tonal variation, from stern to gentle, frantic to languorous, makes this collection a deeply sensuous experience for its reader. There are moments, however, in which the connecting fibres within those loosely structured poems become flimsy, the multiple subjects and objects blurring and perhaps eluding a reader who craves more of a through-line, or at least to know who is speaking, who is being spoken to.

Meanwhile, a few poems here, those not pinned down by concrete detail or directed to a specific, fleshed-out ‘you’, feel a little slight – vague gestures towards what could have been granted more interrogation and texture. Maybe it’s only because so much of this collection is generous in its imagery and narrative that I felt short-changed by those briefer, more abstract pieces. Yet even in brevity Charman often finds depth, as in the six short lines of ‘unspoken’:

all the horrible things of which
i never write
so
I know you
must have
locked rooms of your own

There’s a symmetry to this poem: if you folded it at its midway point, it would almost mirror itself. Charman opens the poem in her own life, closes it, and relinquishes it to the person she’s addressing – a subtle and complete acknowledgement of the ultimate unknowability of her subject’s life. Charman offers up a great deal of candour in this collection and all those that have preceded it, but she stops short of telling us everything. It feels trite, perhaps even boring, to put it this way, but she strikes me as a responsible poet – one neither willing to gloss over what is complex or ugly, nor eager to reveal too much for shock value. These poems are honest, not gratuitous.

Much of Charman’s poetry is sparse, but don’t mistake this for coldness. The warmth in this collection comes not from an easy, welcoming tone or a romantic image but from the trust the poet places in her reader not to flinch away. And though there’s harshness here, it is matched with tenderness. In a flurry of assonance and idiosyncratic syntax, what’s gentle and bright feels urgent, too:

as light as sun the waiting for delight
your touch—the wind to my hat
i wind a weighting scarf
and hold you
fast