Embedded Files
Review: Imogen Cassels, Silk Work (Prototype, 2025)
And, after?
Reading Silk Work, delicate though it is, you get donkey-kicked in the chest by the third poem. ‘Spring poem’ is in the style of a hazelnut liqueur encased in glass curving Cistercian. The bottle imitates a monk’s habit. You drink from it and the rest of the debut collection becomes a Renaissance atelier making each poem a piece after the grand masters. It could be overwhelming; it could be tranquilising; it could be utterly delicious. After all, the original drink to which Cassels makes reference to in ‘Spring poem’, Frangelico, calls for saccharate-silent meditation letting “senses delight in the beauty of Italy, the sweetness of the taste and smoothness of the texture.”[1] Jeff Koons’s print work, after a 1980s Frangelico advert, tells us to “find a quiet table” but we are already seated at Imogen Cassels’s version.[2] By the third poem, we are quite settled and ready to sip at our drinks deep into the night.
Because ‘Spring poem’ is nostalgic for that tumbler of week-long “wee happiness” — on the rocks — the words are an insidious liquor twisting round ice-cubes. They, therefore, inspire grief, “a vein / I want to un-throb or de-ice”. But, sampled in moderation, ‘Spring poem’ warms the cockles as a
Frangelico sunlight shot through
with occasional bright sour, an Italian
cutting
“Untenable”, these “semiotics”, miniature lexical homages, secrete remorse in flowers and drink and play. There is a sad weakness hiding in the “week” which is the melting vein. There is a re-possessive ‘his’ hidden in the recurrent “this” before a proposal of love and after hugging a little brother. And there is a painter hiding behind his liqueur; Fra Angelico behind Frangelico.
Before ‘Spring poem’, the first poem, ‘Faun’, readies us for interdiscipline in a ballet of italics while the second is the sonnet laying groundwork for Cassels’s mournful romanticism. But the third sows an attention to both Renaissance homages and Renaissance-esque ‘after’s to last the rest of the collection. You know, in the typically ekphrastic way that is as gainful for the reader who gets the reference as it is for the poet behind the pen. It is the kind of referent that is bred on a necessary but unprescribed apperception, something which is so rewarded by Silk Work’s nostalgic fuzziness. In 1932, Edmund Husserl penned the theory of “ad-memorizing apperception” so that multiple subjective awarenesses could be supplanted onto an objective singularity — a bottle of Frangelico liqueur which means one thing for a monk and another for an artist.[3]
Using apperception, then, ‘Spring poem’ could be after Fra Angelico whose golden tinges beautify his frescoes as much as it is in homage to the golden alcohol. Think of ‘Noli me tangere’ (c.1439) where golden halos equate genuflecting Mary Magdalene with waltzing Christ. The fresco is bordered into peaceful simplicity by cuttings of cypresses and palms “planted over the border that / will wake you for the rest of your life” as Cassels would say. So, apperceptive, ‘Spring poem’ is sgraffito over something like Fra Angelico or Thomas Wyatt or Petrach. Apperceptively, we think of Cassels’s elegiac essay for Still Point, ‘You met me at a very strange time in my life’ (2020) which forms an allodynian “association [with] an excruciating hope and a baleful disappointment that developed into a neurasthenic noli me tangere” and Philip O’Connor. It is an association which can be, as Cassels explicates, “a defence mechanism predicated against hope”.[4] I think that ‘Spring poem’ must be after ‘Fra: after Robert Browning’s Fra Lippo Lippi’ (2013) from Cassels time as a Foyle Young Poet.[5] Of clothing and touch and brothers, ‘Fra’ reveals Cassels’s own Renaissance apperception brought from her early imagined pub-dweller — The Wheatsheaf, Fitzrovia? — to her now intricately and delightfully encrypted (save for the notes at the end) mimeses.
Silk Work is predisposed to apperception. And a doorway into understanding where that falls can be found in the medieval atelier’s ‘after’s that are various pushpins in the collection’s map. After incites explicit mimesis. The user of an ‘after’ is kinder to their reader, alleviating them of the labour always required by the search for codified references. Cassels, with consequent and gladly-received lightness, writes after Roger Caillois, Holly Pester, W.S. Graham, Dom Hale, Victor Hugo, and, I guess, Petrarch. These ‘after’s are a combination of titular — ‘After Petrarch’ — and subtitular — ‘Technicolour in silk: after W.S. Graham’ — so that when ‘after’ is a poem’s body, Cassels invites us to pause. ‘After’ is the opening quatrain’s refrain in ‘Jude’ (first published in Still Point, 2022), when
after correction, after love’s longer
than the way, after wind moving
the arboretum, we spoke beautifully
about our joint condition
‘After’s are permissive here, allowing a way into riddling and solving. But, we are readers after “clouds without rain, blown along by the wind; autumn trees, without fruit and uprooted—twice dead” (Jude 8:13) so there is no reprieve from the puzzling. Just when common ground is found in the toil that “there have been saints made for less”, Cassels riddles us syntactic blasphemy; a saint could be canonised frivolously as much as a saint could be ‘made’ for nothing. What would Fra Angelico say? Then quips are salvific: “So on.” and “As if.” It’s all just teasing! Cassels says ‘get it together’ because “Spring’s deep drift this”, written after ‘Spring poem’, recalls the refrain which ends the collection’s taunted third poem:
[...] O this,
this is this wee happiness, this wrong
blossom which – I am proposing – love to you
So in an ‘after’, Cassels can be excused because, don’t worry, she’s always like this.
Too, a hagiographic after runs through ‘Our Lady of the Soil: after Roger Caillois’. She is in the allotment with a language which her recent-PhD milieu could conceivably imitate. Dry wit is rooted in having “been offered a modest fellowship / as a minor patron saint.” The poem, Cassels’s notes tell us, has a “longer-form, noise-inflected structure [which] owes much to Kate Kilalea” and elements of Caillois come from interest in “games, psychoanalysis, insect mimicry and sympathetic resonances”. This poem is the very crux, the “serac, over the upper edge of chance” (c.f., the preceding ‘In the heart of the apple country’), of Silk Work’s apperception. “Cut-up”, Cassels exposes her homage tendencies bearing them in the process vocalised in the final poem, ‘New Song’, whose self-surgery
clipped down and found
another level of bone,
only more worn, and stencilled
Only in ‘Our Lady of the Soil’, we see afters in form and Herbert-like topology. We see it in italicised stanzas which are after after: mock quotations are imitations of homage but not the real thing. Or are they?, the poem asks, because hagiography was never that true to life anyway. There is a ‘Frangelico’ kind of nod to a “Portrait of the madonna as an early modern gentleman” and X (entomological Christ?) who “tells me, My mother was a mantis, and / I can see her, a Tuscan psychadell.” So much so that Cassels is deft with Italianate idiom after God who “is an Italian”. The story goes that X “said confess: He is like with my nerves / like a jazz kit. He is like with my heart / like blowing glass.” There goes those repetitions again — take the “this” of ‘Spring poem’ — as homage this time to the dispossession of an original language translated, showing up idiomatic tendencies.
The collection more broadly is after itself and earlier iterations of the poems that make it. Together, Cassels and Jess Chandler from Prototype press have chosen poems which gather particulate upon departure from the dust-proof archives. ‘French Work’ was in the LRB (Vol. 40 No. 9, 2018) first and ‘Ambiguous lasting flowers’ in Blackbox Manifold (No. 30, 2023). Surely ‘some notes & sources’ are clues unto themselves that Cassels operates ‘after’ an abundance of things. These notes suggest that the collection wants to appear as definitely after a whole lot of stuff. Through this, Cassels is a master of media enquiry leapfrogging and disempowering the critical take on ‘who or what this poet is like’. She bypasses the ‘you’d like this if you like…’ or the ‘this reminds me of…so it cannot be that original’ or even the ‘this reminds me of…so she must be the new…’. Naturally, the poetry which is predisposed to an apperceptive reading must, however hard it tries not to, walk with a cane because the collection must be elasticated to stretch with its reviewers’ biases. There seems to be a tendency for the Silk Work critic to transmute Cassels’s medium into something other than words.
The physically attractive marbled Prototype book is littered with comparisons, albeit doting, of Cassel’s wordsmithing to something other than poetry. The collection is “chorality” to Oli Hazzard; “art and craft of witnessing” to Eley Williams; silk weaving to Holly Pester. But finding frustration in such a draw to metaphoric analysis is pointless because it seems that Cassels had a hand in this from the get go. As discourse around Silk Work has been so deservingly celebratory, Rishi Dastidar, for The Guardian, affectionately attaches the collection to the work of Holly Pester. Yet, Cassels had already made that deliberate connection in 2018 where ‘French Work’ webs old and new together in a heady tapestry of lexical and stylistic echoes. “My lulla my lulla my etcetera” drifts easily into “lullaby” at the poem’s very beginning. Holly Pester delivered the essay, “Songs of Rest: An Intervention in the Complex Genre of the Lullaby” in 2016. Once more, Cassels has a no-frills approach to getting down to the poem’s business; like “after” is the refrain which prefaces ‘Jude’ and like after epigraphs always come before the poem, neonatal Cassels’s traits began at the beginning.
So, what Dastidar takes as “opacity and diffidence”, a potential for something committed early on trailing off with time, Cassels positions as the plan all along.[6] She shows her hand in ‘Chesapeake’, the six part poem which gives its name to Cassels’s 2021 pamphlet. Here, she reveals her philosophy of thought which is otherwise kept guarded by tricky syntax and unknown lexis — Jeremy Noel-Tod liked it when Cassels “taught me the precise word serac: “a tower of ice on a glacier, formed by the intersection of crevasses”.”[7] All of a sudden, we are clear that
I don’t think anyone
writes the way they want to,
or the way they think
they do. and nobody
listens
[…]
the philosophy
of language is embarrassment,
at what we have and what
we do with it. more than enough.
“Salt rims” are played out first in ‘Our Lady of the Soil’ and the return to a peachy “fuzz” remembers the seventh of eight sonnets, ‘To iron’, which is cast in familiarly uneasy Spring weather. Afterwards, the notes for ‘Chesapeake’ are necessarily illuminating because the poem has “two invisible epigraphs”, one from Jacques Lacan and the other, Shakespeare’s 94th sonnet. Invisibly, ‘Chesapeake’ in collection form (rather than pamphlet form) is after its epigraphs and after its 2021 iteration. While the pamphlet is all too often dedicated to the flimsiness of a fledgling back catalogue, Silk Work as collection works precisely against “opacity and diffidence”. It depends upon the earlier rendition of the work to deliver a sturdier homage. Perhaps an equivalent is the normalisation of wearing the same clothes three or four days in a row. Silk Work isn’t opaque or diffident; it just isn’t in a rush.
The rest is Silk Work: after ‘Chesapeake’. It resolves ‘Spring poem’s shot-through Frangelico into “whatever stain / the future passes through is sun”. Misleading weather is no longer disconcerting but expected as “winter’s false blossom”. ‘Fold’, then, is happily petite as sparing quatrains. And the terminal ‘New song’ can live with a bullet hole:
If I am a prisoner
in my own mind anyway,
it is a good mind. And said,
I had a life; which was
a wound; which would not shut.
Cassels gets heroic in this ‘chanson des jests’ which is energy regained from ‘Chesapeake’ “trailing the streets / like a walking wound.” The final few poems of Silk Work reach a transcendence which depends upon being after the poems which precede — in every sense. Echoes of the collection’s beginning really do give Cassels’s poetry the impression of a Style. As though what comes after Silk Work will forever be in homage to it. That this is the veritable beginning of Cassel’s oeuvre is the promise of more afters. We’re allowed to believe this; gratefully, we’re allowed to apperceive because Cassels has cast her Silk Work in some elastic, limited-run fabric; after this, we may go on from here.[8]
Notes
[2] Luxury and Degradation (1986), https://www.jeffkoons.com/artwork/luxury-and-degradation
[3] ‘General theory of apperception,’ Husserliana XXXIX, 1932
[4] https://www.stillpointldn.com/articles/imogen-cassels-you-met-me-at-a-very-strange-time-in-my-life/
[5] https://poems.poetrysociety.org.uk/poems/fra/
[6] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/may/02/the-best-recent-poetry-review-roundup
[7] https://someflowerssoon.substack.com/p/pinks-31-crystals-free-of-their-matrix
[8] Cited for ‘Chesapeake’. End of Eric Griffiths’s PhD thesis.
Olivia Boyle has just finished a BA in English literature during which she paid particular attention to Anthropocene poetry.
Copyright © 2025 by Olivia Boyle, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.
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