This second collection of poems from multi-award-winning writer Natalie Holborow is often shocking in its honesty, sometimes playful, sometimes lyrical, but carrying a freight of suffering which makes the reader wonder at her energy and positivity.Holborow has suffered from type 1 diabetes since childhood and a few of the poems describe this experience – her memory of receiving the diagnosis and what hyperglycaemia is like – but this is not the main subject. Small is the invisible demon she lives with – the eating disorder anorexia – which she personifies as an imp ‘with the mannerisms of a tantruming, needy child’ and which clings on to her, ‘difficult ... but still mine.’ The majority of the poems concern living with Small, unsuccessfully trying to lose ‘her’ through therapy, and also losing her marriage (and perhaps a child) because of Small’s hold on her life. Holborow has said that ‘Small is only quiet when I’m running’, and two poems refer to this, but the impression is of her running past other lives – she observes them in vivid detail, but in ‘20’ the running is desperate (‘eighteen miles / is an act of casual hell.’) The Small poems can often be horrific, as in ‘Small loses Sleep’: there is a strange playfulness in the imp – ‘she giggles. She flounces. / The stupid act splits me to ounces.’ – but it reduces her victim in more than physical ways. The poem ‘Girl’ is not a Small poem but reveals a widespread cultural attitude which disposes girls to the danger: the worship of childhood ‘innocence’, ‘Smallness’, ‘the flat, clean island of her body’, and ends in ‘worshipping ignorance’ – a path that should not be followed.Some of the most painful poems concern her break-up with her husband. In ‘Small Sends him Packing’ he cries out, ‘how can I reach you ... when she’s circled you in glass?’ Not only is Small fighting him for Natalie but Small has made her too fragile for love. He drives away ‘from this horrible thing cleaved to my waist.’ Some of these poems are defiant, like ‘Confession’, but ‘Physical’ suggests the depth of her loss and ‘Attics’ the slowness of healing.Amongst the Small poems are groups on a variety of subjects. Holborow’s visit to India gives poems that are rich in colour, sensation and the feeling of foreignness. The group around the Nativity has charm and wit. There are tributes to friends and other poets, particularly ‘Cwtch’, written for two friends who have become as close as sisters. One of the last poems is ‘Fountains’, in which she sees herself as a fountain with a ‘heart / like a pool boiling dry, having given too much / for too long.’ But it asserts that ‘water can carry invented / selves back to the heart.’ Holborow is known not only for her poetry but for her blogs and her mentoring of other writers. She might well feel, young as she is, that she is boiling dry, but even with her indestructible incubus, she hangs on to ‘the affirmation … that life goes on’.
