Liminal
by Laura Fusco
(Smokestack Books, £7.99)

 
THERE are writers who focus on finding their voice, honing it within a chosen syntax, with vocabulary that captures their own emotional flow.
 
For poets, especially, this helps identify their work. The lyricism of Byron or Shelley is unmistakable, as is the language of nature favoured by Robert Macfarlane, the melancholy rage of a Dylan Thomas villanelle or the comic Scouse sweetness of Roger McGough: “i... miss mass and wonder if mass misses me.”
 
Then there are those who don’t give a damn about the authorial voice because they’re too intent on capturing what others have to say. Part-reporter, part-eavesdropper, theatre director Laura Fusco seems fuelled as much by duty as any desire to be recognised.
 
Liminal is a collection of more than 30 poems, written in Italian and translated into English by fellow poet Caroline Maldonado, who recently wrote Poems for Grenfell Tower.
 
It owes more to the genre of verbatim theatre, that powerful vehicle which has produced dramas based on real testimony from both the Bloody Sunday and Stephen Lawrence inquiries.
 
Fusco’s work, drawing on the time she spent with refugees, particularly women, in camps in France and Italy, uses not only their words but scraps from placards and graffiti.
 
The White Piano is filmic in its imagery of the instrument being lowered from a truck so that a young Syrian girl can play it “for Ai Weiwei’s project. Pity she’s doing it for a project they’re filming and they’ll take it away again in an hour’s time.”
 
The transience of the situation and the unreliable altruism of the privileged European world are themes here. In the poem Macedonia, “The girl who looks like Medusa and in her country used to play music ruins her hands fetching wood and things to burn.” A boy tries to shield himself from tear gas, and both are filmed by a TV crew.
 
There is an unforgivingly accurate description of the countries into which refugees yearn to pass. In Backs Against the Wall! Fusco writes: “‘Invaded’ Europe raises its walls and welcomes, resists and offers food, afraid of losing itself but its dreams aren’t as strong as those of someone who arrives having lost everything and together with others dreams just one dream.”
 
With much of their lives already lived via cyberspace, younger refugees seem more hopeful, they find joy in listening to music together on YouTube.
 
For the women on an exodus, there is an epic dimension here. Sensing their past slipping away, they are fearful for the future. In limbo, they can only “throw wishes against the sky.”
 
 Copies available  in book stores and from Smokestack Books, smokestack-books.co.uk.