One of the most remarkable things about Jessica Traynor's New Arcana is how successfully it manages to evoke the expansive honesty at the heart of John Berryman’s 1969 masterwork The Dream Songs. Many of the poems are either addressed to or written in the voice of Lydia Deetz (named for the heroine in Tim Burton's film Beetlejuice) who, according to the book’s blurb, is 'a dear friend who died by suicide’.
Given the heaviness of the subject matter, readers might expect the writing to collapse into either misery or hyperbole. Suicide has already been dealt with so extensively by the Confessional school of the 1950s and 1960s that anything more contemporary is naturally threatened by pastiche. But Traynor is such an expert at navigating this fraught territory that like the Henry of Berryman’s Dream Songs, Lydia’s persona is allowed the full breadth and complexity of a real human being.
She is, by turns, funny, intelligent, occasionally cruel and grief-stricken, and is written in such a way that she could be taken for any number of things: the speaker’s lost friend; her conscience; her enemy. She could even be a stand-in for the speaker’s own shadow-self; a version of the ego who carries all her desires and revulsions and magnifies them to the level of operatic high drama.
Watch: Poet Jessica Traynor reads from New Arcana
In ‘The Hive XXIII’, which begins the collection, Traynor writes: "what the mirror told me – / a whole gash of bees / flying in to breed / and make honey / in the hole you left."
One can’t help but be reminded of Paul Muldoon’s ‘Bechbretha’, in which the poet brings to bear the absurdity of the Irish cultural tradition; specifically in that case, the inheritance of Brehon Law, in which beekeeping was seen as a noble profession and the possession of honey a luxury that was only afforded to the very rich and powerful.
Many of the poems in New Arcana continue in this vein, taking the form of contemporary, secular prayer; or more accurately neo-Pagan devotions, as at home on the page as they are on the TikTok pages of witch influencers and New Age healers. It should perhaps come as no surprise that the spiritual void left behind by the collapse of the Catholic Church in Ireland is now being filled with just this sort of esoterica, acting as a necessary counterbalance to the rampant abuse and inbuilt misogyny so characteristic of received faith.
In ‘Roger Moore’s Swimming Pool’, we are offered a glimpse into the complexities of girlhood friendship and burgeoning class distinctions, such that the listlessness of new money and the double-edged sword of privilege can’t help but call to mind the penetrating popular fiction of authors like Emma Cline and Otessa Moshfegh.
In ‘i’m lydia deetz and all my friends are dead’, Traynor writes: "he saw me like no one else ever / saw me. even if that means that he saw himself / in every mirror i looked into." Indeed, bad relationships and even worse men are presented as part of the fabric of any girl’s journey toward maturity. Some bear these conditions with the stoicism of a frontierswoman. Others, like Lydia, are destroyed by the world’s unfairness.
But what impresses most about the narrative threading New Arcana is the feeling of something revived or even resurrected by Traynor’s strange koans. The voice speaking back at us through the spirit board at the book’s centre feels so true to life that we can almost feel the planchette quivering beneath our fingertips.
Ultimately what New Arcana is astute enough to recognise is that the subject of any resurrection necessarily emerges back into the world changed, a little off-centre, forever marked by their dying and the pain of being brought back. What else is memory, after all, if not a zombified stand-in for the actuality of the past?
New Arcana is published by Bloodaxe
