Janet Frame

Photograph of Me Holding the Cat – Janet Frame – Comments

richinaword Poetry analysis Tags: , , , 2 Comments 
A Photograph of Me Holding the Cat
I see I have fallen into the trap. 
I hold it against my breast 
but not on the side of my heart.  If you observe closely 
you will see my fingers pressed into the fur 
of my liable cat my escape-cat who would much rather be 
                             stalking 
in the great elsewhere at ground or sky level, seldom in 
                             between where people’s heads are. 
There is a tenderness in the way I balance its back paws 
                             on my palm.  
It’s all quite by chance. 
I am frowning hard.  I too would much rather be 
at my own level where I seldom meet a soul 
except perhaps a travelling word or two, hordes of memories, 
and because there is a tomorrow, a few meditative dreams 
that will accompany me in my pleasurable inward world 
my secret mirror of your great here and my great elsewhere.
Janet Frame (1924 – 2004)

The actual photograph is not available for the reader to sight, at least to my knowledge. But we can imagine based on JF’s words. What is more important is the detail and underlying interpretation. It is both a liable and an escape cat – implying a cat that likes the outdoors. And JF, a cat person, is very gentle in her holding.

But then in the last six lines she uses the cat’s likeness for its own level to define her own level.

JF states that she is content with being away from people but still connects using letters (travelling words) and she also connects by recalling the hordes of memories. This indicating the poem was written late in life.

But the key to her soul is her pleasurable inward world – and her secret mirror.

And if you read her autobiography (written in 1984); especially the last of the three-volume trilogy (An Envoy from Mirror City) you will glean clear meaning to that association. The Mirror City is her understanding of life experience created by imagination – her mirror city. It is her very special personal world as she looks into that hazy glass called reality. And she becomes a messenger in the form of an envoy. An envoy from another world … the world of imagination … where she devoted her life to literature and writing.

I do like that last line – your great here (life) and my great elsewhere (interpretation).

She was very gifted and led quite an amazing life. Her literary talent was discovered in her writing of short stories and the winning of a prestigious award while incarcerated in a mental institution in New Zealand. She was awarded a grant and travelled to London in 1956 at the age of 32. This was the opening to many adventures and eventually literary success and recognition in London after spending time in Ibiza and Andorra.

A film was made by Jane Campion based on her life called – An Angel at My Table. The title of the second book of her three book autobiography.

Janet Frame – Wikipedia

A link to her poem The Icicles.

The Icicles – Janet Frame – Comments

richinaword Poetry analysis Tags: , , 3 Comments 
The Icicles

Every morning I congratulate
the icicles on their severity.
I think they have courage, backbone
their hard hearts will never give way.
Then around ten or half past,
hearing the steady falling of drops of water
I look up at the eaves. I see
the enactment of the same old winter story
– the icicles weeping away their inborn tears,
and if they only knew it, their identity.

Janet Frame (1924 - 2004)
'The Icicles' from The Goose Bath (Vintage, 2006), and in Storms Will Tell:
Selected Poems (Bloodaxe, 2008)

This is all about the personification of an icicle. And of course like most of nature the movement from one state to another is without thought and if you like a total acceptance; humans are a little different!

There are perhaps some deep underlying thoughts promted by the text. The question to consider is whether we weep our way through life traveling through the winters of experience. And what do we become as we change state in our final dissolution? And do we transform into a new identity?

I will leave it for readers to ponder such questions, if they so desire!

The following are some details on the New Zealand writer Janet Frame; mainly from Poetry Archive webpage –

She is known primarily as a prose-writer, but Janet Frame’s passion since the age of nine was for poetry. Desperately unhappy because of family tragedies, later judged as ‘abnormal’ and spending years in mental hospitals, she never stopped writing poems, expressing the recurrent themes of nature, animals, people, death and writing itself, and aiming for a “truthful vocabulary of what is and is not”. Yet she only published one volume of poetry, The Pocket Mirror, during her lifetime. A posthumous selection of the overwhelming number of poems she left behind was published in The Goose Bath, the title referring to the container in which Frame kept the poems.

Janet Frame on Wikipedia