The Room Between Us

The Room Between Us, says author Denise Saul, ‘can be viewed as an interrogation of chaos and order’, what happens when ‘the boundaries between “life and death”, “remembering and forgetting”, and “gain and loss” become blurry or porous’

T. S. Eliot Prize: One of the first poems in the book is ‘Stroke’, which is formatted as a dictionary entry and gives multiple definitions of the word: care, sudden even violent change, writing/language, repetition, water/landscape and time. This announces your key themes, doesn’t it?

Denise Saul: Yes. From the outset, the multiple definitions of ‘stroke’ define the various traumatic spaces in which writing/language and caregiving reside. As a carer, I started to question meanings of the term ‘stroke’ and how this medical condition links to other experiences of transformation and change.

TSEP: Your book is a deeply empathetic and moving exploration of how we communicate. Would you say something about communication in the context of aphasia, perhaps with reference to the work of the linguist Roman Jakobson, who you mention in our filmed interview.

DS: Jakobson’s essay, ‘Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances’, suggests aphasia is a ‘language disturbance’. For one type of aphasic disturbance, he uses the term ‘similarity disorder’, which refers to a major language deficiency that lies in word selection and substitution. My mother often produced elements of similarity disorder in her speech. Instead of saying the name of an object, sometimes she would substitute another word or rename that object. Some of the poems like ‘Clopidogrel’ reflect my mother’s experience of miscommunication. For example, the word ’cabbage’ might have started off as a phonologically related substitute but was replaced by a different word.

My mother also experienced ‘expressive aphasia’. Her speech and language therapist advised me to avoid asking open questions that invited more than a yes or no response. During conversations, I had to write down key words or draw diagrams and pictures. I often watched my mother’s thoughts unfold through gesture and speech.

TSEP: Some of your poems are prose poems and many are short, terse even – but they are much more than the sum of their concision. Can you say something about the different modes of language and your use of form?

DS: In TRBU I experimented with varied forms of the prose poem – like aphoristic, monologue and object-centred – to produce elements of aphasic embodiment or the carer’s narrative. This form destabilises the idea of freedom of space for the carer. Some poems sit within a condensed poetic form to mirror the breakdown of language and limited spaces experienced by the speaker. For other poems, the lyric form shapes the carer’s internal and external view of personal and public spaces. The forms used are mimetic of the emotional trauma experienced through miscommunication and the experience of caregiving.

TSEP: You talked about the domestic world of the cared-for and carer in our filmed interview. Would you like to say more about that, about the domestic space being both enclosed and permeable, even a site of revelation?

DS: Some poems locate my caregiving experience within the confinement or spaces of our house. Repetition of words like ‘window’, ‘room’ and ‘door’ situate the bodily experiences of caregiving and brain trauma in domestic spaces of confinement. The interplay between lines and the room-like form of some poems create new openings, unanswered questions and moments of doubt. The opening up of spaces within and around poems signals the rejection of closure.

TSEP: There seem to be parallel or dream worlds in poems such as ‘One’, ‘House of Blue’ or the very beautiful ‘Someone Walked Into A Garden’, which suggest a paracosm, a detailed imaginary world. Wikipedia says ‘paracosms function as a way of processing and understanding […] early loss’. But in your poems, these alternative or historical or mythical worlds seem a natural response of both the cared-for stroke survivor and the carer – an invented place in which they are able to meet and engage. Is that how you see it?

DS: Yes, I can connect to the idea of a paracosm. I wanted to give space to the caregiving experience. Writing this collection was never a linear process. This manifestation of ‘the parallel’ signifies the outer and inner worlds, that is, what is spoken and what is not. We expect a type of closure to occur at the end of reading The Room Between Us but that does not happen.

TSEP: Your repeated meditations on colour – how colours suggestively stand in for sense in non-conventional communication – is very powerful. Would you like to say something about that?

DS: TRBU meditates on the presence and absence of colour. My mother was a keen gardener so there is a natural affinity towards the representation of colour and light in nature as portrayed in the collection. The process of bereavement can heighten the bodily experiences like sound and sight. In moments of grief and trauma, our sense of seeing and hearing become intense or more vivid. In this collection, the colour spectrum allows various forms of grief to be fully experienced and expressed.

TSEP: In her blurb for your book, Nancy Campbell talks about ‘a fundamental enigma of human experience – how words bring order to the chaos of the cosmos’. That’s your theme, isn’t it?

DS: The book can be viewed as an interrogation of chaos and order. In moments of grief, there is also the moment when the act of remembering is questioned, and our sense of polarity comes under scrutiny. The boundaries between ‘life and death’, ‘remembering and forgetting’, and ‘gain and loss’ become blurry or porous.

Denise Saul’s The Room Between Us is published by Pavilion / Liverpool University Press. Watch the T. S. Eliot Prize filmed readings and interview, and read the reviews and Readers’ Notes online to find out more.