Matthew Richardson

Modern life in verse

Julia Copus’s new collection The World’s Two Smallest Humans exists in four parts, each in their own way circling the theme of loss. Two parts – ‘The Particella of Franz Xaver Süssmayr’ and ‘Hero’ – take on historic themes, the first inhabiting that of a man in 1791 ‘translating direct from the silence’ of Mozart’s shorthand for The Magic Flute while also caring for Mozart’s wife, Constanze. The second channels history too, in this case an Ovidian past made new, rejigged for a few pages in contemporary idiom.

Both brief sections work well. But the collection really gets going in the two other larger sections – ‘Durable Features’ and ‘Ghost’ – where Copus’s lucid lines come into gripping focus. In ‘Stars Moving Westwards in a Winter Garden’, the notion that ‘grief…will pass – ripen and wither’ is aired, and we see it again in ‘Impossible As It Seems’, as the speaker realizes that the ‘world is teeming / with similar gaps, backdrops / for lovers parting’. In ‘A Soft-edged Reed of Light’, the tension between known disappointments and old hopes is skilfully balanced, the idea that ‘All things are possible’ wanting to be believed in the teeth of experience.

In the final section, ‘Ghost’, these themes achieve an even greater poignancy. The section charts a course of IVF treatment, rendering the experience with raw and uncomfortable candour. Copus skilfully evokes the clinical ‘floodlit floor’ of the treatment room (‘Inventory for a Treatment Room’) and even manages some wry comedy at the ‘Polish embryologist…looking for all the world like one of the girls / serving on the bakery at Sainsbury’s’ (‘Egg’).  Near the end, however, comes the heart-breaking title piece, ‘Ghost’, as the treatment fails. As with the idea that everything is possible, ‘the silvery ghost of a second line’ is ‘willed into being’ on the pregnancy test even though it fails to appear.

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