The Birds, The Rabbits, The Trees by Briony Collins (Broken Sleep Books, 2023), review by Giuseppina Brandi.

 

 

 ‘I hope you read this one day and find a cold shard of a memory 

 that, […] you recognise and it cuts you.’ (‘Fantasy’ by Briony Collins) 

 

 

Just imagine this: What does it mean to write to a mother who will never read what you are writing to her? The Birds, The Rabbits, The Trees (Broken Sleep Books, 2023), is a collection of free-verse poems, twelve of which are letters the poet has written to her mother, one for each month of a year in which she was in an abusive relationship. This book, arguably, represents a search for meaning and truth in a life affected by grief.

 

Collins’s work, once again (following her poetry debut Blame It On Me’) returns to the themes of abandonment, identity, and pain for the loss of her mother. This time, she uses even more evocative and visceral language, leading the reader through a poetic landscape where life and death merge constantly, where mouths fill with earth and the poet wears ‘death like perfume dabbed on delicate skin’ (‘Petrichor’).  

 

‘I’m in a coffin’, she asserts in November, and the image of the grave recurs through the poems, in line such as ‘The open grave of my mind / Where I meet you every night of my life’ (‘December’). Engulfment and being buried alive is a theme throughout the collection, as in the poem (‘Do I’) in which the poets writes: 

 

‘Our new flat is in the basement 

 The ground above us  

 

[…] 

 

If I shut the window I will die 

The ground above me 

 

[…] 

 

If I go outside I will die’ 

 

There is something in these verses that forces you to hold your breath because what you are reading pushes you to edges, psychological and physical, to stare down into the abyss of grief. 

 

This sensation of being caught up in the vortex of words is amplified by the almost total absence of punctuation, which also contributes to making the dramatic events that follow one another during that year - days, months, seasons - a whole. The lived experience is dense; time is muddled in the narration. 

 

Each month poem takes place in a surreal, imagined landscape of the forest, where ‘Rabbits forage in my black peripheries’ (‘February’) and rush from ‘thickets to us / Thrashing and digging us down until / We are nowhere’ (‘April’). Even if the Forest is not a traditionally welcoming, comforting place, it is nonetheless the place where the poet can, in a sort of way, reconnect with her mum: ‘I wait for you in the forest’ she writes in (‘June’), and again ‘There is no fear in our forest’ in (‘July’). The forest is the place the poet longs to inhabit, the place where the mind seeks refuge when the gap between real and ideal experience is too wide to cope with:  

 

‘I flee to the forest 

… 

In the forest opening, there’s a hole 

I climb inside to hide’ 

 

(‘August’) 

 

 

The absence of the mother is heavily felt and from this absence Briony Collinss draws out a presence; the absence takes shape, crystallises: from 'A vision of your hair' to 'Mane that settles in the dirt', from 'Blue dress on a bone-white body' to that 'copper dream'.  

 

In ‘What a difference a mother could make’, Collins writes: 

 

I’m tired of her being dead  

[…] 

I long for her  

Lessons on how to love 

 

How to leave 

The season rains her absence’ 

 

 

 As we can see, the poet regrets not having had her mother to teach her the lessons of love and life and how this lack fed into vulnerability and a dysfunctional relationship. So, in between the month poems, we meet pieces that tell us the story of the abusive relationship the she was going through, in which she also explores the themes of loneliness and violence. This is not a gentle book but the journey through the enormity of grief, which arrives at a destination, to a  state of self-awareness. We hear through the pages the cry of someone who wants to be heard (‘An epiphany against death / I’d live any life but this one’ (‘Epiphany’)).  

 

The loss is transformative, it’s not a question of getting over it or healing. It’s a question of learning to live with this transformation. And in the end of that year the poet goes beyond the forest (‘What is real’) and the rejection of the toxic relationship – ‘I’m going to be okay’ (‘January’). I like how this change is marked out by this sequence: 

 

‘You’ll eat my world alive’ (‘April’) 

‘He’ll eat my world alive’ (‘August’) 

‘I’ll eat his world alive’ (‘January’) 

 

The Birds, The Rabbits, The Trees is a beautiful, searing and haunting collection of poems that has left an indelible impression on my soul and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

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Giuseppina Brandi lives in Naples, Italy. She has a Master's Degree in Comparative Literatures, with a dissertation on European Poetry of WWI. With a great passion for poetry, she believes in the power of art and poetry of healing and connect. An autodidact, she has always loved drawing and painting and takes inspiration from natural world and human emotions. Her artwork has been published in  Black Bough Poetry edition Sound and Vision, Acropolis Journal and Fevers Of the Mind journal and anthology.

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The Birds, The Rabbits, The Trees by Briony Collins (Broken Sleep Books, 2023), review by Rhona Greene.

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‘Sometimes my mouth burns 

With an unspoken truth 

and the words splinter in my jaw’  (‘Charming’) 

 

I am a huge admirer of Briony Collins’ writing and it’s a privilege to read her deeply personal collection The Birds, The Rabbits, The Trees (Broken Sleep, 2023), a follow-up to Blame it On Me.  Here is poetry that commands attention and respect for the poet’s courage in exposing her vulnerabilities and lifting the veil on intensely troubling and sensitive subjects, including violent relational abuse, control and coercion, misogyny, toxic masculinity, death, grief and mental distress.  

 

There is nothing faint-hearted about Collins’s work here; it’s as hard hitting as it is poignant and, in fact, she doesn’t ‘give a fuck if it’s the worst thing I’ve ever written’ as she declares in the final poem ‘You know who you are’, a direct address to an abusive ex-partner. In this triumph of a collection, which gives voice to her ‘unspoken truth[s]’, we are lead on a poetic tightrope that spans a chasm between the fragility and brutality of her life-experience.   

 

Arguably, the title The Birds, The Rabbits, The Trees belies the gravitas of the content within; however, the highly stylised and foreboding forest on the cover, designed by editor Aaron Kent, hints towards something rather more dark, haunting, bordering on the dark fairytale or gothic, than the bucolic setting the title might suggest.  

 

‘I m tired of her being dead’   

(‘What a difference a mother could make’) 

 

In the first four poems, ‘February’, What a difference a mother could make’, ‘Absent’ and ‘Charming’, we are introduced to key figures in the poet’s life:  a deceased mother; a distant, traumatised father and later, an abusive partner who is the very antithesis of ‘Charming’ and is described throughout the collection in predatory terms: ‘his eyes are malice black ’, ‘the stare of a creature hunting’ (‘August’), and ‘a hairy, half-naked stench of a creature/Growling viciously’ (‘Nightmare’) . This importantly reminds us that, often, it is not the mythological monster that is a true threat, but the humans close around us, and the absence of those that might offer protection and guidance in how to cope with such people and navigate such adversity intensifies the fear and danger.  

 

‘You are not here/My dreams grieve you’ (‘February’) 

 

A sense of longing for the mother-figure hovers constantly at the edge of her awareness, where ‘rabbits forage in my black peripheries’ (‘February’).  It struck me while reading, that this collection bears many of the hallmarks of gothic writing which deals with similar themes: death, the supernatural, sorrow, fear, loss, isolation and more, often set in eerie landscapes, including the labyrinth woodland. The rupture created by the loss of a mother in particular deprives ‘the young heroine/damsel in distress’ of significant safety and female protection, leaving her vulnerable in a male-dominated environment and an easy target for predators. This is a theme through this collection. The language of the gothic is effectively used to dramatise the tragic spiralling of the poetic figure into despair and entrapment: ‘If I shut the window I will die…If I go outside I will die’ (‘Do I’).   

 

The opening letter/poem of the collection ‘February’, where the mother-figure has been ‘seventeen years in black peripheries’, locates us immediately in the forest - Collins’ surreal, unsettling psychological landscape, where she seeks not only to connect with her mother to cope with her overwhelming grief, ’under the bed, the forest opens/A flicker of light/You?’ but also to retreat further into herself as a means to escape the increasing dangers of her relationship.  

 

‘In the forest opening, there’s a hole 

I climb inside to hide/He’ll eat my world alive’ (‘August’) 

 

As the collection unfolds, Collins’ interior and exterior worlds unravel on the pages before us.  With blazing finesse she takes us through a tumultuous year in her young life using the device of heart-breaking monthly letters to her dead mother, detailing her toxic circumstances as she suffers not only at the hands of her partner, but also his friends:  ‘My boyfriend is shaking me’ (‘March’), she tells her, ‘He says I hit my head on the wardrobe (‘April’) ‘My boyfriend looks the other way/His friend swirls sweaty, cig-stained fingers up my thigh…In a room full of men, nobody speaks’ (‘October’).  

 

.As a reading experience, it is soul-destroying to bear witness to her struggles, her desolation, her fragmentation: ‘I am not there/ I speak to bury myself’ (‘April’) and ‘The open grave of my mind/Where I meet you every night’ (‘December’). These poignant letters are interspersed with further poems, more harrowing, vivid and visceral accounts of the lived reality of her brutal relationship: ‘bile from the pit of my stomach retched into every corner’ (‘Petrichor’); ‘The wall is hard against my skull/sunlight bleached space-blue carpets/Bright Prawn Nebula’ (‘Extra-terrestrial’). ‘I crawl up our walls/Beetle into corners/Scuttle in the dark’ (‘It makes you so sick’).  A reprehensible ex-partner thinks it all ‘proper funny‘, tells her she is ‘schizo’ as she suffers a serious breakdown and deliriously repeats the words ‘the birds, the rabbits, the trees’, which seems linked to the request to the mother-figure to ‘Take my hand/Before/I shut my eyes and there is nothing’(‘Notes from the other side’).  

 

The sense of abandonment in these poems is acute and even God is presented as neglectful - ‘God closes his eyes’ to her suffering (‘March’). The immediacy and intensity of her circumstances is heightened by the predominant use of the present tense in her poetry as well as her tendency to use punctuation sparingly, adding to a sense of instability, uncertainty, of someone in danger, in free fall.  

 

There’s a sense of redemption, a shift in the narrative to a sense of empowerment. In ‘Marginal Glosses’ we encounter a poetic voice who has found a new-found inner strength to break through her confines ‘the way mosses bulge in cement’ and to move bravely towards empowerment: ‘I pack his things for him/Proper funny’  (‘January); and finally to the ‘skeletal truth’ until she emerges fully possessed of her own voice and empowered. 

 

I was moved at the very end of the book in the ‘Acknowledgements’ where the writer dedicates the book to herself, for her bravery, for standing up, for putting herself first. Collins unmasks some horrific aspects of human nature and by so doing she opens up a space for consideration and discussion on these traumatic topics. This is a powerfully important work.  I urge you to read it and make sure everyone you know reads it too.  

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Rhona Greene, a Pushcart Prize-nominated writer from Dublin is published in several Black Bough Poetry editions and The Storms Journal and she was shortlisted for the Dai Fry Award. Her poem in Black Bough's Afterfeather gave the edition its name. She also featured in Sarah Connor’s ‘Advent Poems’ and she has work in the Tutankhamun edition.

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The Birds, The Rabbits, The Trees by Briony Collins (Broken Sleep Books, 2023), review by Matthew M. C. Smith.

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In the much-anticipated poetry collection The Birds, The Rabbits, The Trees, a follow-up to Blame it on Me (a former ‘book of the month’ with Black Bough Poetry), award-winning writer Briony Collins explores the ‘black peripheries’ of memories and dreams, from the experience of personal loss to poems exposing the types of violence and control exacted on women. 

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The collection begins with evoking her mother who, after death, is imagined to have passed on into mystical realms – the fairytale, mythical, symbolic woodland.    Collins’s poem addresses the mother-figure directly - ‘my dreams grieve you’, adding a pithy, yet devastating poignance to a poem, showing how loss can be bound up with fantasy.  

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Poems act as counterpoints to one another, charting the different, ever-altering states of mind experienced by someone grieving, someone who has lost their mother so young. In another poem, there is a defeated tone where the poetic speaker expresses the tiredness of being consumed by loss and feeling ever-incomplete, culminating in the flatness, yet aptness of phrasing –  ‘the season rains her absence’.  

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The trauma of her mother’s death is reflected in a poem about other family relationships where there is a kind of disassociated distance because of a collective inability to function, a subject explored in the previous collection, also published by Broken Sleep Books. The collection does not shy away from really disturbing poems about emotional and physical abuse, an honest attempt by the writer to expose the violence and control inflicted on women and how these experiences have the potential to be overcome through writing, an act of empowerment. 

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Briony Collins’s poetry has the ability to affect the reader emotionally in poems, such as ‘Absent’, ‘March’ and ‘Coming out of it’.  

 

There were tears once  

Some way of telling  

How I used to  

Remember this flesh 

 

There’s something of the freedom of her idol, Jim Morrison, in the unpunctuated, free verse of the poems, reminding me distantly of the Lizard King’s The Lords and the New Creatures and ‘Celebration of the Lizard’, beatnik, cult writing at its best. 

 

Insects nestle in the smooth alcoves of my eye sockets  

Roots tangle themselves around fragments of my skull  

Finger skin is coming undone in wet, white ribbons (from ‘September’) 

 

There are many cool moments in the book, including the resurrection of Morrison’s hitchhiker figure  

[The hitchhiker thumbs in the dark] / He’s all yellow eyes and deadlife / Headlights firing into highway nights / He knows: I’m worth nothing / The barren core of a tunnel / [The hitchhiker enters]

 

I loved this cameo and feel that this should be further explored because there's something super-charged about Collins entering Morrison territory; Collins’s imagery is often sparse, visual and elemental. The woods and the rabbits recur through the poems – a dreaminess that acts as a form of enchantment, making this a collection of many contrasts and talking points. This is an outstanding book that deserves a wide readership.    

 

Matthew M. C. Smith is a Welsh author who has recently published The Keeper of Aeons with The Broken Spine Arts and has also published shorter works, 'Paviland: Ice and Fire' and 'Origin: 21 Poems'.

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