simonfeatherstone
meditation upon it. Scovell’s solution is to assert the domestic and the local as central
tothat engagement, and to render these not as comforting escapes from catastrophe,
but as necessary parts of the wider experience of that catastrophe—the afternoon, as
sooftenwiththispoet,is‘darkening’.LikeGertrudeStein’spassionatearticulation of
an alternative world to Verdun (‘Kiss my lips. She did.|Kiss my lips again she did’^40 )
and Mina Loy’s wartime meditation on ‘incognitoes|In seismic orgasm’,^41 Scovell’s
poetry fashions a way of thinking through war’s experience and rhetoric by dealing
with women’s, not men’s, bodies and experiences. ‘Sorrow uses what it can’, and that
sense of a pragmatic attention to the exigency of experience beyond both combat
and social change offers new possibilities, not just for the expansion of the canon to
include women’s war poetry, but also for its re-definition in the light of that poetry.
(^40) Stein, ‘Lifting Belly’, 80. (^41) Loy, ‘Songs to Joannes’, 66.