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On ‘My Darling from the Lions’, The Title Of Rachel Long’s Poetry Collection

A photograph of Rachel Long's My Darling from the Lions laying on a lawn

I wanted to take a brief moment to appreciate the title of Rachel Long’s collection – her first – that has been on at least five award shortlists1.

When I first saw it, when I got the book, I thought it was… different. Unusual. I had no context in which to critique or consider it. I realise now, having started the book properly and reading it slowly, that I had accidentally ‘seen’, as such, a comma: ‘My Darling, from the Lions’. For whatever reason at the time of acquisition, probably due to the length and uniqueness of the title – a new thing for me where poetry is concerned – and also that fact it was my first encounter with the book in any form, I had read it more like the opening of a letter.

As a letter it makes strange, fantastical sense. It may also work in context, nay, it essentially does give the same basic idea as the ‘true’ one, but it’s less easy to decifer.

In its true form then, without the addition of my rogue comma, we have five words in a single sentence clause. The ‘Darling’ is a part of the group of Lions. The stylisation, though it may fit with normal English language styling anyway, helps us focus on the subjects My, Darling, Lions. And even without the ‘from the’, the title still suggests a similar idea, just that it’s more in the form of a group, ‘My Darling Lions’.

(On a related note, the ‘design’ of the title, in terms of where and how it’s printed on the cover, itself suggests this. It’s only the title page that puts it all on one line.)

To roll back from my pedantry and look at the text itself, the first few poems, which I’ll focus on because the first poems in a collection tend to subtly explain the title and are the ones that tend to stay with me – is that something everyone feels, a sort of ever-so-slight fatigue for close reading once you get past the first few poems in a collection? – the poems of the first section, which is called ‘Open’, suggests different interpretations. (Obviously?)

The section is ‘Open’, then the first poem, a single verse, is called ‘Open’. This is followed by ‘Hotel Art, Barcelona’, and ‘Night Vigil’.

‘Open’ suggests lions by its ‘I sleep with my mouth open’2. Not easy to miss, though the implication, if we see a narrator and see them as Long herself, is that Long is the Lion.

The other two poems say otherwise. ‘Hotel Art, Barcelona’ suggests that the lion is the romantic partner in the situation3, and ‘Night Vigil’ points to the Lion being a priest who shouldn’t be around children – two very different circumstances, but regardless accounting for the plural of Lions. (I’ll note that the idea of ‘MY darling’ works in the context of other poems, too, a darling straight from Long herself.)

I’m sure there is much that could be said about ‘from’, the possibility of possession or travel, the past, changes, but I’ll leave my pedantry to the subject words. I’m really rather into poetry now, having not really ‘got’ it for most of my life – modern poetry has helped a lot – and it continues to thrill me. But Rachel Long’s collection is the first time that thrill has been immediate and before I’ve even opened the book.

Please do share any literary pedantry or close reading you’ve done recently!

Notes

1 The Rathbones Folio Prize, the Costa Poetry Award, the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Jhalak Prize, and the Young Writer of the Year Award.
2 Interestingly, understandably, after three uses of the word ‘open’ so far, that one instance is enough for the verse. It’s repeated twice more for the next two instances of an ‘Open’ verse, after which we see changes for the last two.
3 This is an incredibly surface-level comment on the poem, which in fact has a ton of layers and has bowled me over.

 
 

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