Fool

By Greta Stoddart

When knowledge is ours at the tap of a key, what is it we’re accumulating, and is it at the expense of another, more intuitive, kind of knowing? The word ‘fool’ derives from the Latin follis, one of whose meanings is ‘empty-headed person’. We can’t imagine such mindlessness but might it be possible that by ‘unknowing’ a thing we can start to see it properly? There’s a lot the fool doesn’t know – otherwise they wouldn’t be a fool. But can anyone be trusted to know anything? What can we be trusted to know? A certain apprehension runs through these poems; a low-level hum of discordance between inner and outer worlds, between the sceptical and the wondering mind. Ideas of belief and objective truth play out in various ways, often through lone figures, thinking aloud in a wilful kind of performance of being. Fool is Greta Stoddart’s fourth collection. Her third collection Alive Alive O was published by Bloodaxe in 2015.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: Sep 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781780376288

Greta Stoddart

Greta Stoddart was born in 1966 in Oxfordshire. She grew up in Belgium and Oxford before going on to study drama at Manchester University, then at the École Jacques Lecoq in Paris. She co-founded the theatre company Brouhaha in London, touring the UK and Europe. She has lived in Axminster, Devon since 2007. Her first collection, At Home in the Dark (Anvil Press, 2001), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2001 and won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. Her second, Salvation Jane (Anvil, 2008), was shortlisted for the 2008 Costa Poetry Award. In 2007 she was nominated by Mslexia as one of the best ten contemporary women poets in the UK. Her third collection, Alive Alive O (Bloodaxe Books, 2015), was shortlisted for the Roehampton Poetry Prize. Her half-hour radio drama Who's There?, first broadcast on Radio 4's The Echo Chamber in 2017, was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award. Her fourth collection, Fool, was published by Bloodaxe in 2022.

Book preview

The Act

Trouver son clown, c’est en quelque sorte se trouver soi-même

JACQUES LECOQ

I know it’s been years

but I want to speak out now

for that girl who used to sit on the bench

in a shapeless frock

with an orange and brown diamond pattern

no one would seriously wear –

her hair greased and parted down the middle

her face a powdered white.

She had this look

of one who had no idea

how they might appear to others

and so without shame.

If she had a smell I know exactly what it would be –

vinegar, the last dirty bone of soap.

This is how it was:

the girl had not a single word floating inside her

or even a thought that might want to try itself out in words.

For the girl on the bench

there was some resistance to anything happening.

I mean anything at all.

She just sat there in a kind of cosmic indifference.

But soon it became clear

it was impossible to carry on like this –

it was too much for any one person to bear.

So someone laughed

then someone else did

then someone else and someone else

till the sound became enormous

and then nothing

but a big bleary drowning out

of what could not be known.

If ever you don’t partake in the laughter

and so as a matter of course the tears

you’ll find yourself very much alone.

So there I was

sitting on a bench

with all the humans before me

happening in the hilarious.

And if I thought anything it was this:

that I could never go to a party again

or hold someone’s face in my hands

and slowly bring it in

that I might never be able to lie again

and it wouldn’t be so bad to die then

being as I was so without fear

so without anything

being as I’d found who I was

in the act of being

that girl on the bench

fool that she was

for all that she didn’t know.

Where to look

So let’s begin

with a sweeping gesture

that it may take in

the goal-post and gate, the bird-table.

Let’s call it a kind of seeking

as it goes back and