Tissues and uncertainty
It is not until the final stanza of this poem that we get a proper sense of what it is about. With the lines:
I’ll let it go.
My mother too, eventually,
who died not leaving handkerchiefs
but tissues and uncertainty:
We realise that the mother, who was named as the “hanky queen” at the start of the poem is, in fact, the chief concern of the poem. The poem, then, is part expression of grief, part therapeutic attempt to mourn the mother of the speaker.
As the above quotation confirms, the speaker is still grieving, in the strange in-between space of the psychological disruption caused by the death of a parent. The completion of mourning is characterised as letting go. This familiar phrase indicates that bereavement is the process of releasing hold of a loved one, but also, perhaps of release in general.
The poem takes old-fashioned, material handkerchiefs as its central symbol. Hankies take on the meaning of a mother’s love for her children and, as we shall see, an entire bygone era. Embarrassing and absurd – even at the time – handkerchiefs mark the difference between mother and daughter.
Bound to the figure of the speaker’s mother is an entire era. Assuming that this corresponds to the childhood of the poet, the poem evokes late 60s, early 70s Britain as a time before supermarkets and malls, when shopping took place in high streets and department stores. The speaker presents the era as one of small, local communities characterised by personal relations between members of the community. This was a time when you knew the names of shopkeepers and hence had fixed and durable relations with them, as opposed to the meaningless and disposable interactions which we have with shop assistants in malls. This is a time that the poem’s speaker yearns for but one which she must ultimately let go.
In a fairly unusual move for contemporary poetry, Barber composes “Material” in iambic tetrameter. Added to this rigid structure are stanzas of eight lines which end in a rhyme. The regularity of this framework seems apt for a poetic voice seeking certainty.
Yet it is the disruptions to this system which provide the most exciting parts of the poem:
And somehow, with the hanky’s loss,
greengrocer George with his dodgy foot
delivering veg from a Comma van
is history, and the friendly butcher
who’d slip an extra sausage in,
the fishmonger whose marble slab
of haddock smoked the colour of yolks
and parcelled rows of local crab
lay opposite the dancing school
where Mrs White, with painted talons,
taught us When You’re Smiling from
a stumbling, out of tune piano:
step-together, step-together, step-together,
point!
This single sentence marks an outpouring of nostalgia for a lost era. With the word “greengrocer” (itself a bygone term) the regularity of the rhythm is interrupted in a manner which does not recover until fully two stanzas later. As memories of local individuals spill out, the lines pile into one another with a mass of enjambment which spans even between the two stanzas quoted. Just before the stanza break, we get the triple assonance of “smoked,” “yolks” and “rows” which attests to vivid exuberance of the memory. Finally, another voice bursts through into the poem as we hear the dance instructions of Mrs White. “Step-together, step-together, step-together, / point!” But of course, this togetherness is precisely what has been lost, the togetherness of local community and the togetherness of mother and daughter.
The speaker punctures this outpouring of misty-eyed contemplation with the re-establishment of the rhythmic regime: “Nostalgia only makes me old.” This end-stopped line puts an end to the narrator’s rose-tinted descriptions of the past as we jump forward a generation. The narrator is now a mother herself but she cannot inhabit the role as her mother did.
Immediately, we return to the symbol of the handkerchief where, in the poem’s best line, the speaker admits to having “raised neglected-looking kids, / the kind whose noses strangers clean.” The speaker literally does not have the material means for keeping her kids’ noses clean, and on a deeper level does not care for her children in the way that her mother did. This painful confession is softened with the use of humour – suggesting that the speaker’s shortcomings are still raw.
Yet the reader understands that the mother really shouldn’t feel so personally guilty for her perceived shortcomings. After all, the department stores have closed down; hankies are no longer on sale. The era has changed and with it, the lives of women. So while the speaker admits to having turned on the numbing TV and to failing to “commit” to being home, the reasons for this are clear in the line “to buy some time to write this poem.” This line is more than smart postmodern wink of self-reference (although it is also a smart postmodern wink of self-reference), it acknowledges that times have changed, mothers can no longer afford to stay at home, looking after their children – they must do what the narrator’s mother presumably did not do; work.
These economic realities (what Marxists would call the material conditions) of the narrator’s life are presented through the assonance of the above line. The repeated vowel sounds of “buy” and “time” reinforce the modern maxim that time is money. The third piece of assonance, in the line: “write,” completes the speaker’s predicament. Writing poetry and bringing up kids is seemingly a zero sum game for the speaker.
As we noted at the start, the speaker is in the process of grieving her dead mother. This in-between space is marked, once again, by the handkerchiefs. On the one hand, she cannot use material handkerchiefs (she finds them embarrassing and their time has passed), but on the other, nor can she bring herself to buy disposable tissues (an act which is forbidden by what she calls awkwardness – she knows that her mother would disapprove).
The poem ends with a ghost. The voice of her mother claims the final lines of the poem, admonishing the speaker should she complain about “scratchy and disposable” tissues: “this is your material / to do with, daughter, what you will.” And so the final meaning of the poem’s title is unfolded; material is also the stuff of life that poets use as inspiration. The poem ends, then, with another postmodern gesture where the poetic conceit folds in on itself as the poem explicitly refers to its own material.
But there is, of course, more to it. The speaker’s relationship with her mother and children is more than just the raw material for a poem and the evidence is the poem itself. The speaker has used these recollections, not simply as a means of writing a poem, but has written a poem as a way of processing the complex set of emotions arising from the death of her mother. In this way, the poem is a kind of therapy, a talking cure which will help the speaker to “let it go.” The reader is thrust into the role of therapist, listening silently to the regrets and confessions of the speaker.
In the end, the ghostly mother is both there and not there. Her words are actually rather unmotherly. She calls her daughter “daughter,” a word which is parenthetically offset by comma. It feels cold and harsh and fits with the sentiment that now the speaker is on her own. The ghost offers no comfort or love – she has no interest even. The speaker must proceed alone.
