THE SUNDAY POEM: Every week Ruth Padel discusses a contemporary poet through an example of their work

No 47 Ruth Fainlight

This is a poem in one sentence whose single statement, associations fray into messages, is coiled with images to make the form reflect the message. The first stanza is folding (braided, plaits, coils, packed, nestling), the second (unravel, follow, magnify, spray) is unpicking - introduced by fray in the last line of the first.

The central statement involves one noun becoming another, associations into messages: each stanza describes one of them. Grammatically, the first stanza hangs on an adjective (braided) which describes associations, then moves into comparison (like). The second introduces a series of nouns (codes, cords, poems, blueprint, waterfall) whose relation to messages is apposition: messages that are codes, poems, blueprint, waterfall.

The intellectual point is the mind's self-reflection and self-refraction, whose image is the prism. But the content of the associations is not cerebral but physical, emotional: childhood memories of parents, visions of what's under the city where the poet has made her home, of poems by which she lives the world, her blueprint for shelter against its glare. The first six lines are a bodily image of family life held together by mother's workbox: skin colours (beige, flesh and fawn), primary colours for kids' playclothes, the formal grey and black in which Daddy's business meets the world. We move into myth territory with Medusa-coils. The snake-haired head whose eyes turn you to stone reminds us that families are interiors of paralysing danger as well as mending and play; that communication (those phone-wires) is lethal as well as powerful. The internal workings of family or city, or the mind, are imprisoning, dangerous as well as exciting. The city itself is a body, internal organs exposed, guts nestling in gritty London clay. The second verse offers a way out of paralysis via another (implied) Greek myth, prefigured in the poem's first lines. Ariadne gave Theseus a cord, or thread, to guide him out of the labyrinth. Instead of labyrinth, we have prison: its image is that similar-sounding word, prism. Here the poem pivots on the prism's double action: it both packs in and unravels light. Like the mind, where associations operate, it receives but also refracts what comes in, magnifying and recolouring it. (The poem begins and ends with colour, multi-coloured threads and rainbow spray.) Now the coiling stops, the unravelling begins, leading out of the prism- prison of the mind with its family memories, through poems which magnify colour, towards a perfect place of contemplation and music where you simply hear and watch.

Soundwise, the poem is contained (like light in a prism) within the AY of braided and rainbow spray, re-inforced in the first stanza by grey, clay, fray. Each stanza is held together by vowel-harmonies (multi/primary, fawn/tones/telephone, black/packed, playclothes/exposed; cords/ignored, colour/shelter, glare/near/hear/choir). But at the gap between the stanzas which begins the lead-out movement, the first stanza prepares for the second by the word which is grammatically and theme-wise the subject - of the poem, and the single sentence that it is; associations. This poem is, very Freudianly, about associations. Its method is associative too. If you disentangled the grammar and put it in a telegram, it'd read: "ASSOCIATIONS BRAIDED LIKE MUM'S COLOURED THREADS OR LIKE SUBTERRANEAN PHONE-WIRES FRAY INTO DECODABLE MESSAGES THAT ARE ALSO THREADS AND THEREFORE TURN INTO POEMS WHICH BECOME A SHELTER FROM WHICH TO LOOK AT A WATERFALL. Each step forward (signalled in the telegram version by "like," "that are also," "turn into", "become" and "from which to look at") depends on a new association. Appropriately, the sound of associations ties the two stanzas together acoustically, like a sonic thread leading out of a labyrinth. From associations we move to prison, concession, deafen and finally the title word, the poem's key image, prism.

c Ruth Padel, 1999

`The Prism' is taken from Selected Poems (Sinclair Stevenson)

A poet of sibylline self-scrutiny, born New York, 1931, who has lived most of her adult life in Britain; a friend of Plath's (who dedicated a poem to her): one of Britain's few Jewish poets, and yet she still inhabits her American roots. Her poems interrogate their own processes, making ideas from different worlds resonate against each other (Indian and Greek mythology, women's domestic life) but always leading back to self-contemplation. Two Selecteds and many collections, most recently Sugar-Paper Blue, shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize.

The Prism

Braided like those plaits of multi-

coloured threads my mother kept

in her workbox (beige, flesh, and fawn

for mending stockings, primary tones

to match our playclothes, grey and black

for Daddy's business suits), or Medusa-

coils of telephone wires, vivid

as internal organs exposed in their packed

logic under the pavement, nestling

in the gritty London clay,

associations fray into messages:

codes to unravel, cords to follow

out of prison, poems which make

no concession, but magnify

the truth of every note and colour,

indifferent whether they blind or deafen

or ravish or are ignored; the blueprint

of a shelter against the glare

- and the waterfall to build it near -

the perfect place to sit and hear

that choir of hymning voices, and watch

the prism of the rainbow spray.