Emily Zobel Marshall. Bath of Herbs. Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, 2023. 86 pages. ISBN:978-1-84523-557-4.
Emily Zobel Marshall is a lecturer at Leeds Beckett University and specialises in the study of Caribbean literature. She is an expert on carnival cultures and on the figure of Anansi, the West African trickster-hero who was imported into the West Indies during the days of the slave trade. In 2012, the University of the West Indies Press published her book Anansi’s Journey: A Story of Jamaican Cultural Reistance, and in 2019 Rowman and Littlefield published her American Trickster: Trauma, Tradition, and Brer Rabbit. On top of her work as an academic, Emily Zobel Marshall also writes poems and her debut collection, Bath of Herbs, was published by Peepal Tree Press in 2023.
Emily Zobel Marshall is of mixed-race ancestry and grew up in Wales with her Black Caribbean mother and her white English father. As a consequence, identity, journeying and the difficulty of navigating various cultural channels are constant themes in this engaging collection. The cover painting used for this collection, “Transformation and Renewal”, by the Dominican artist Carol Sorhaindo, connects with the main concerns addressed in this collection and adds a nice pan-Caribbean touch.
The books falls into four main sections (“Mother Sun”, “Moon-pulled”, “Water Rites”, and “Fell”) which chart the poet’s journey through life as a mixed-race person living in the UK.
The poems in the first section (“Mother Sun”) address the themes of ancestors and focus mainly on the poet’s mother and grandmother, two women who still guide her steps today. One of the poems in this section is dedicated to “Maman Tine”, the poet’s great great grandmother who refused to let her grandson, Joseph Zobel, work in cane fields. Passages from Zobel’s Black Shack Alley are cleverly inserted into the poem to comment on Maman Tine’s hard life. The poems about the poet’s mother are more elegiac in tone as they are about the untimely demise of her mother and the void it left in her life.
The second section (“Moon-pulled”) continues the theme of motherhood, but this time from a different angle as the poet/persona becomes a mother and brings into the world a mixed-race child. The West African trickster hero Anansi is present in some of the poems (” Anansi Mothers” and “Anansi’s Silence”), as is the African-American blues guitarist Robert Johnson who, according to the legend, once stood at a crossroads and sold his soul to the Devil to become a great guitarist:
“No, let me stay old blues she-devil,
selling her soul for love & music,
my wizened & trembling hands
making my guitar sing & spellbind,
while the yearning cuts deep
through tainted veins, keeping me
fixed to the crossroads” (41)
Johnson and Anansi are powerful symbolic figures here who involve transformation, change and all kinds of negotiations.
The poet/persona’s father appears in the third section in poems like “Dad’s Solstice” and “Boat on Pebbles” and these poems insist on the poet’s Welsh ancestry through the long walks and sometimes painful journeys in the Welsh montains.
The last section of the collection has a symbolic and double-edged title (“Fell”) and contains poems about journeying, being lost and finding one’s way. Poems about growing up as a mixed-race person in Wales (“The Reason I Slapped Barry”) can be found alongside poems set in the beautiful Welsh mountains which become a labyrinth through which the persona searches for her own identity (“Running Lost”). In the poem entitled “And So, We Fall”, the persona and her mother revel in the beauty of Welsh nature before being brought back to reality when they pass a Welsh farmer:
“Then the farmer passes,
head-down, heavy-booted,
sheepdog snarling,
does not return our smiles,
steeping us in our
not-from-round-here-ness” 57)
But the mountains and nature more generally can also be a source of comfort and regeneration where one can lose oneself and then find one’s way again, as in the poem entitled “River Rites” in which a “Yorkshire river” is the setting for a new kind of baptism which results in the persona’s “resurrection” (58).
All in all, this engaging and moving debut collection augurs well for Emily Zobel Marshall’s career as a published poet and is evidence that this gifted academic has more than on string to her bow.