Emotional Support Horse is the multi-talented Claudine Toutoungi’s third collection published by Carcanet, and one which I am sure her firmly established readership will enjoy getting their teeth into.
As a self-professed casual poetry reader, I will admit that I expected this “tragicomic grief journal” to challenge me, and to perhaps be tricky to engage with. Whilst some of Toutoungi’s beautifully referential word play certainly went over my head (though I appreciated it nonetheless), I found the themes in this book were much easier to connect with than I had anticipated. Her varied narrative pace and techniques provide such lucid sentiment, with stream-of-consciousness style poems such as ‘Asparagus’ offering a chaotic relatability to the modern reader’s own busy brain, and the almost unpunctuated blocks of text in each ‘Medical Notes’ entry mimicking the indecipherability of medical advice and information. In this way, Toutoungi makes her work captivating – over the course of the pages, I was totally drawn in by the multitude of clever structures.
In this collection, the poet demonstrates mastery in what she terms “alternative realism”, which is manifest in her exploration of the almost-surreal as an invitation to the reader to step back and reconnect with the bigger picture. This might be seen most clearly in ‘Before There Were Words’. There is a consistent juxtaposition of the suffering of modern life against the joy of all things nature, such as in ‘We Interrupt This Darkness,’ which finds clarity in the calls of peacocks – “stately home dropouts? Heritage park rejects?” – cutting through the unfathomable, grief and confusion. The strong imagery of ‘The Death of Poetry’ is used to criticise capitalism and its inhuman agents; the bulldozers who steal away the fun of a bonfire upon which poetry itself already burns.
In Emotional Support Horse, personal and ecological stresses sit comfortably together in poetry as escapism from difficulty, and as reframing struggles in order to cope. In just as artistic detail as she explores capitalism as an enemy of the already frail arts, Toutoungi explores how disability and medical difficulty have fed into her sense of self – mostly through her ‘Medical Notes’ i, ii and iii. The chaos of ‘The Birds’ is just as aptly presented as self-reflection on times of personal hardship in ‘Violettomania’. Throughout all of these interwoven stories and musings, however, we still find a marked hope and romance appointed to the natural world. ‘Salvage’ and ‘To Be a Dog’ are just two examples of the poet’s yearning for connection to the Earth, especially as a way to process personal struggles. This only serves to intensify the pervading theme of eco-stress and pastoral grief.
In all, those who have enjoyed Toutoungi’s work as it has appeared in widespread publications are sure to find even greater depths of enjoyment and intellectual connection with Emotional Support Horse. This collection is one I would recommend to even the more laid-back poetry enjoyers such as myself – particularly any with a penchant for the eco-critical.
Words by Martha Luke
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