Review by Debasish Lahiri of "The Face in the Well" by Rebecca Watts

Rebecca Watts is a collector of ephemera: natural ephemera. But ephemera that holds eternity in its vial, just as enormous skies can come to inhabit wells, though all one can see is the face that "was always there." 

The Face in the Well, Watts’s new poetry collection, is an unusual work. Its rootedness in the countryside, the delicate-filmed, layered transit of daylight as though through fine-spun silk or cobwebs, casting shadows like the keyboard on a piano, is recorded in precise, urbane lines. All that constitutes the days of night and the light of nights is poured with great care into the rut between the E and F on that great imaginary piano of her verse. And like a piano, Watts’s poetry has its notes and keys. A chromatic polyphony often pervades her poetry: "But one day I tired of the house’s shadow, / the grey rectangle of the afternoon."

There is an audible drop in semitone as Watts reaches back to recreate a childhood memory. As her words touch a flat, memory rises to a sharp:

          Esme draws a picture
          but it’s only a whisper – 
          the pencil barely touches the paper

As in the titular poem, the dally of water, its creation of depth, its tenacious measuring of time passed becomes that bread-crumb directing our navigation through her poems. There are four "Soundings" in the collection, surfacings and deep dives into time and experience. Shrieks become sibilant before they become sibylline:

           Can anybody actually hear me?
           I’m shouting through the car’s back window

           while the others stand around in the layby laughing
           at my act, which isn’t an act at all.

The nineteenth-century English landscape painter John Constable (who was like Watts from the South-East) is said to have told his engraver David Lucas that "when water reaches the roots of plants or trees the action of the extremities of their roots is such that they no longer vegetate, but die." He was talking about a pond at Stratford Mill. Watts imbues her poems with this instinct for seepage and quiet infusion, like water, like the well, sometimes inspiring life, but sometimes also touching absence and death.

           ...  Now 
           only a part of one wall

           and a couple of gear wheels
           hang on at the edge of the pool.
           Go down and you’ll find it

           where the water’s ferrous
           with rust, or blood,
           depending how you’re minded.

Like the twitter of swallows gathering in the sky at the end of John Keats’s "Ode to Autumn," the starlings gather around Annie at the end of the garden. Childhood memories, the shaping influences of poets and teachers, the vulnerabilities of becoming a woman in a patriarchal world blow through our ken like rolling of the fishing nets and hazelling of the fields. The Face in the Well is a force that drives a fuse through blood and water, nature and the affairs of humanity.

About the reviewer

Debasish Lahiri has six collections of poetry to his credit. His latest book is Legion of Lost Letters (2023).