STANDING IN THE PRESENCE OF MY FATHER
Standing in the presence of my father,
I feel as uneasy as a child
standing in a field full of fridges
with all the doors torn off
and I can see
bodies,
all exactly the same,
lying on their sides,
with perfect ponytails.
The Rialto
Selima Hill’s Fridge is a compendium of jewel-like poems in which a dynamic accretion of objects – chinking tea-sets, mothers, rabbits, mealie-worms, gold Birkenstocks, grunting babies, morphine, cigarettes and, of course, the fridge in its various guises – is marshalled, with Hill’s trademark humour and with great tenderness, into the service of the book’s central themes: presence and absence, the suicides of friends, the dead and the problem of how we grieve for them.
