‘Restorations’ seems by the end too positive a title, if not intended ironically. It needs a question mark, at least. ‘Restorations?’ would be more appropriate for poems that spend much more time with uncertainty, vulnerability and instability than with anything so affirming as ‘restoration’ seems to promise. 

This collection is obsessed (materially) with layers, borders and surfaces, and as a consequence (experientially) with ambivalence, porosity, guises. The emphasis is on flux; processes eclipse states, and material stuffs are often introduced seemingly just to watch them fade, crumble and peel. From a neutral perspective decay, after all, is just another form of becoming.

These combined characteristics — I mean the stress on instability and seeming, and their dispassionate treatment — are hallmarks of that baggy beast postmodernism, and if you’re weary of it you might initially bridle at the coolly distanced voice of some of the poems, in case the denial of essence and its replacement by a striptease of appearances should be fetishized as an end in itself.

Often, though, the position Hudis adopts is more ambivalent and interesting. In ‘The Artist Mixes Colour in the Renaissance’, the painter-persona delights in telling us that the ‘primal blue you worship’ is partly made up of animal parts which ‘I knife, mine, grind, churn, pound […]’. Transcendence duly has its face rubbed in the dirt, but the end of the poem suggests that all the blood and muck that goes into this painting (of a ‘hair-coiled girl’), rather than desacralising it, actually constitutes a rival and more authentic source of power:

Some of the text has been omitted here[…] She took on the earth
to coagulate: egg-yolk, red clay, mineral, old linen
marble dust. Do you think, if she looked up
she wouldn’t roar with the energy of her roots?

The relationship between substance and ‘vision’ recurs time and again. It’s ultimately one of co-dependence rather than antagonism, as neatly summarised in ‘Consolidant’, where art restorers, paid to revive a discarded artist’s mannequin, labour to ‘re-bond her to the dream / she hatched from’.

Hudis is a fine observer (‘a toffee-smooth infant Christ’; ‘the cross eyed stare of angels’), and she also seems to know her art history. Her interest in de-romanticising art leads her to accentuate the ironic and accidental, and turns up some surprises: the prized sound of Stradivari’s violins is all down to the application of insecticide that saved them from woodworm, while a painter’s ‘famous desert colour was by-product / waste, layered toxins.’ 

This theme, though, and a persistent trace of archness in its treatment, features in too many poems, and when the topcoat of rhetoric wore thin I found myself wishing for more substance. In ‘Last Sighting’, an account of the dissolution of Vasari’s Last Supper in the Florentine flood of 1966, Hudis’ description of how the apostles felt the ‘Yellows, blue, carmine’ of their garments being ‘rewilded’ in water is lovely. Still, the nagging question remains, ‘So what?’ The final stanza’s focus on the face of Judas feels like a half-conscious recognition of the need for deeper meaning.

Still, at their best, the poems on art go beyond description, beyond even a mischievous undermining of painting’s pretensions, to ask pertinent, difficult questions about the whole value system of modern, Western aesthetics, and this is a point of intersection with the second of Hudis’ main themes: colonial history, or rather, the colonial mindset that enables it. While they, too, are animated by irony, the tone of the ‘colonial’ poems is subtly different; what comes across is not only the folly and ignorance of this mindset but also its inherent melancholy. Colonial pioneers cannot ever do more than scratch the surface and lacquer artificial meanings onto places and ways of life that they have neither the wish nor the capacity to truly understand. Yes, it is horrendous, but it is also pitiable, in the way that the colonisers in Jean Rhys’ stories also are. The aura of pessimism, even sadness, implicit in these poems, adds welcome depth.

The painter’s mixing of ingredients, which so intrigues Hudis, is also relevant to her own, verbal, artistry. It’s a high wire act. The least imbalance can cause a poem to appear flat (‘routine as a hormone’), or too reliant on the reader’s complicity with its implied values. At times the real, unacknowledged subject of Restorations seems to be Hudis’ attempt to reconcile two completely different poetic voices – the one streetwise, glancing and tart, the other slower, more personal and reflective. The former mode works best when given free rein: ‘Annunciation’ is a wickedly amusing play on an unexpected delivery from Hermes: a ‘godlet’ whose asceticism leads the reluctant foster-mother to google ‘male eating disorder’ and who ‘was into vinyl, upset her by joining a marginal cult.’

About halfway through Restorations, the main theme switches from the restorer’s art to the illnesses of Hudis’ ageing parents. Now the relevant surfaces are not paint and grime but skin and the invisible meniscus that separates awareness from indifference, consciousness from coma. Unsurprisingly, these poems are more moving than those about art history, as the clever surface wordplay is sobered and stabilised by concealed reservoirs of emotion. ‘Under’ describes a visit to the hospital:

We’ve circled you like saints, on plastic chairs,
not homage but to stir you with names dropped
into the white well of your face.

Saints crop up all the time in the poems on art history, too, so this is an obvious point of comparison, but in this new context the reference expands. If the hospital visitors are like saints, what is the position of the patient? Is this some uncomfortable, terminal Adoration? But the syntax here is slightly ambiguous: isn’t it rather the departing parents who are figured as saints? And if so, does their seeming saintliness have less to do with virtue than with their final remoteness? We visit the dying somewhat as we visit an exhibition, and the very title of one poem, ‘The Person on Display Has Been Replaced by a Replica’ may strike us as horribly accurate.

There is very little comfort in these hospital poems, and perhaps the most that can be said is that though restoration (of people as of paintings) is ultimately futile, the effort is human. This tension between botoxed preservation and vital decay lies at the heart of Restorations.

Hudis is a gifted and versatile poet, generally adroit in her prosody despite occasional arbitrary-seeming line endings. I became impatient with what seemed to be the self-conscious gesturing of the weaker poems, and a surface busyness of words at the expense of inner coherence:

A porn of cute, these jerkined rabbits
wired to their teacups, ape
the hour’s pleasantry

But when the writing is more relaxed and snug to sense it can achieve a fluid beauty that contrasts appealingly with the gunge of the subject matter, as in this passage from ‘Inherent Vice’: 

The foam was breaking
down, grease softening, smudging, a cataract
over his ‘clarity of purpose’. It caught dust, the last
black powders of a blue-bottle, minute silage
of dead people or traffic going anywhere
but a gallery. Hairs.

Despite its flaws, Restorations is an unsettling and ambitious collection by a powerful, restless poetic voice.

Rosalind Hudis’s knowledge of art restoration – its materials and processes – has supplied her with an arresting lexicon and an abundance of metaphor. This allows her to reframe familiar subjects as she explores childhood memories, family life, parents aging. Her poems also encourage us to look with fresh eyes at works of art.

The opening poem, ‘Shellac,’ serves as a kind of prologue to her project. In a poem that explores time, childhood memory and geo-political change the reader is drawn to consider The Philips London Library globe, its layers of significance. First, the childhood memories of being told it’s ‘not a toy’, then on to the facts of its materiality in the present:

                                           A globe’s constructed like a face:
                                           epidermis pasted to a mould plastered,
                                           papered. Inside a wooden cross
                                           pinned to the equator. It carries losses,
                                           a thickened, darkened surface.
                                           Panelled in under a weight of
                                           old shellac …

Many poets use old photographs as a trigger. Here, in ‘Fixative,’ Hudis shifts the point of view, to the person developing the black and white image, to the chemical processes:

                                           us in the 1960s, playing on a bombsite
                                           the man who dipped us in sulphate, vanishing

                                           silver halide, silver that held us
                                           not darkened or fogging, so that always our stares

                                           unweather from a storm of greys …

Hudis plays further with point of view to refresh our eyes and assumptions around works of art in poems such as, ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Pear,’ ‘Millais Floats Ophelia’ and the entertaining monologue, ‘The Artist Mixes Colour in the Renaissance,’ in which she restores the artist:

                                          Don’t think of me as lime-robed and lost
                                          in undailiness; I come with sleeves rolled-up
                                          worker in a mire of substance. Yes, I stink!

The poem continues in this vein, subverting what John Berger referred to as ‘relic worship’ as Hudis, also restores the condition of its making:

                                          When you varnish me with meaning, remember
                                          the grit under my nails, the fumes. …

There is humour here too, in poems such as ‘Interior,’ a family portrait via the marks made on the walls of rented house which is ‘… wholly magnolia,’ until ‘… one sister/drew in jam the fate of another.’ Later on comes, ‘…the blur/of a lobbed plate, archaeology of chocolate …’ and ‘… mud Pollocks mushed by the soft/dissolution of moths …’

As the collection shifts towards more of family life – the illness and death of parents – Hudis sustains her forensic, art-informed explorations. She brings fresh eyes and awareness to the condition of dementia in ‘Book of Masters.’ Here is a father who, ‘believes in Art …’. Father and daughter view a much-treasured book of reproductions, ‘his holy book…’. They turn the pages on angels, ‘lemon groves and towers/fleshy murder in forests …’ until images merge with the viewers:

                                                                       I pause
                                           at The Conversation: a standing man

                                           in striped pyjamas, who won’t sit down,
                                           a seated woman in black who will not stand.
                                           And what they said they’ve said dad says

                                           or not yet spoken – neither can leave …

In ‘Hospital Art’ the poet staves off the pain of visiting the terminally ill by navigating her way down brightly colour coded corridors: ‘I play the curvature of blues…’

This is an intelligent, thoughtful and thought-provoking collection. Hudis works in a variety of forms, some experimental; often her challenging lineation keeps the reader intrigued. These richly-textured poems repay several readings in order to uncover the layers within. The reader, like the restorer, uncovers fresh layers with each return to the work.