A Slim Volume

The Fat Lady Sings

by Michèle Leembruggen

Michèle Leembruggen has been writing verse all her life, but this is her first book of poetry. Best known as a successful actress in Sri Lankan English theatre and the radio ‘voice’ heard on a number of well-loved advertising jingles of the Seventies and Eighties, she was also, unbeknownst to her fans outside the advertising industry, the lyricist behind most of the jingles she sang and, more generally, a fine copywriter. She and I were, very briefly, colleagues in the early Nineties, but the time and circumstances were unpropitious and she did not stay long with the agency we were working for.

By then I already knew Michèle pretty well through her other great passions, music and the theatre. I had been involved (as crew, never cast) on several of the successful plays and musicals that were illuminated by her performance, worked with her on voicing some TV commercials I had written, and even played a guitar behind her on one or two occasions when she took the stage to sing. Somewhat younger than she, I was a mere amateur ’prentice at the time; she and her late husband Graham Hatch were big names and I was eager to learn what I could from them – from anyone, really – about music and performance. As time went on, we continued to interact, mostly in professional ways but also, from time to time, socially.

My interactions with the poet are relevant here because The Fat Lady Sings is full of some very personal verses, and no-one who knows Michèle and her circle will be able to resist the temptation to guess just who, in some cases, she is writing about. Some won’t need to guess; they’ll know, or think they know, already. I don’t mean to imply that there’s anything remotely kiss-and-tell about these poems; everything is presented with perfect discretion. Yet who could refrain from trying to guess (if they did not already know) which drop-kicking hero she had in mind when she wrote, ‘Out of a loose maul he came/the man of my dreams...’

Dark eyes intent below

the swatch of straight black hair

that obscured your forehead.

Your cheek, falling in that flat plane:

straight nose, full lips

and most notably, the stare…

very nearly a glare.

None of my business, obviously, nor yours; but if you’d lived in Colombo during a certain period, and went to rugger matches, wouldn’t you wonder whether she was talking about so-and-so, or maybe such-and-such? I certainly did.

And this is the main reason why I can’t really review The Fat Lady Sings. I have just enough personal acquaintance with the author to make it impossible for me to read these poems without wondering who she is talking about, who made her feel like that. This colours my experience of the verses, so that they act on me not simply as poetry – as literature – but also with something of the effect of a personal diary or, heaven forfend, a gossip column. I can’t think of them simply as the writer’s work.

There is another reason too. Michèle’s poetry is concerned essentially with matters of the heart. The heart in question is always hers; she makes no real effort to convey anyone else’s point of view in her poetry – it is only her impressions of other people, and how they make her feel, that are vouchsafed us. In other words, more than half the poems are intimate reflections on the ups and downs of a woman’s love life, and how other people, mostly close relatives and acquaintances, make her feel.

This, of course, is a staple of contemporary poetry, and has been since the days of Sylvia Plath. But it is a kind of poetry that, in my experience, rarely appeals to men. It certainly doesn’t appeal to me (but then, I also loathe the prose of Virginia Woolf). At any rate, I don’t fancy tramping through the garden of my old friend’s sensibilities in the Size Twelve men’s gumboots I usually wear when attempting literary criticism. One of the poems here, ‘Once More, With Feeling’, begins with the words ‘poetry is the language of unhappiness.’ Well yes, of course it is, but only some of the time. Poetry – as an actress of the calibre and experience of Michèle Leembruggen surely knows – is also the blank verse of Shakespeare, in which every emotion and passion of which human beings are capable is expressed in the most sublime terms. My own tastes in English poetry are unabashedly masculine – Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Coleridge, Kipling, Wilfred Owen, Philip Larkin, Clive James. I don’t enjoy the girly stuff one bit, so it would be unfair to interrogate The Fat Lady Sings from the standpoint of my own very different likes and dislikes.

Having said which, allow me to add that it is wonderful to read a Lankan poet who (1) can write properly and (2) knows the conventions of English verse – including blank and free verse – and how to deploy them. The stultifying influence of the Bard of Hulftsdorp (So may I end this tribute feeble/To the lamented Thomas Keble) still hangs over Lankan poetry in English, making people believe that any loose rhyme will do in a tight place. Michèle isn’t having that: her metre is strict (though ill-served by the typesetter), her rhymes, when she uses rhymes, click shut with a snap, her vocabulary is limber and precise. The only poem of which I have cause to make a technical complaint is ‘On Music’, for which she has chosen, doubtless with intent, an ugly, crippled metre that she forces to dance the jig through the use of a knout. The poem is all about how music fails to soothe her but rather makes her jittery, and the metre complements this theme; but trying to read it is like chewing on a piece of gristle that’s still alive and moving between your teeth. I was reminded of that poem of Clive James’s (I forget the title) which adopts the sesquipedalian, trotting metre of country songs like Gentle On My Mind to poke affectionate fun at the genre; but to be honest, that was one those poems of James’s that didn’t really work for me.

The Fat Lady Sings is a slim volume even by the standards of poetry collections; if I extend my review just a little further, it will be as long as the book. Just one final thing, though, before I close: I loved the last poem, which differs greatly from the rest of the collection and which, quite by accident, identified for me a huge, odd-shaped rock that rises out of the Vanni jungle along the east coast, south of Tiriyai. I saw it eight years ago from a very low-flying helicopter, but none of the people aboard knew its name or its history. I know it now, thanks to Michèle: Pinnalé Rock, on the northwest bank of Periya Karachchi lagoon. The poem is called ‘The Last Place’, and it expresses the poet’s wish to be buried at Pinnalé, ‘for there it was/I first felt sure/of who I was.’ I wonder how she knows of it, and what formative experience befell her there, but I suppose that’s a story for another day, if ever. Sing on, fat lady; Pinnalé can wait.