and communitarian, which relies on conversing with one another and
versing alterity.
As she hits at the limits of language and communication,
Berkeley is as interested in silence as she is in conversation and in this
way, she can be understood in relation to discussion of Boland. The
female figure in ëReflexí (p.69) refuses to verse or converse. She is
not a writer but ëa crafter/ moulding her absence with bare hands,/
dovetailing silencesí. Oddly, the female artist joins together absences
with silences. She is taken to a ëshelter,/ a cardigan of words she
would seldom wear;/ the nouns she devouredí ëbut the verbsí ëshe had
no purpose for,/ and cast awayí. Berkeley uses words to evoke the
female artistís silences and to fill in the gaps or dovetail them together
thus creating a structure of sentences out of an implied absence. Her
speaker swallows names and throws away words associated with
action. With ëdarkness about the mouthí, her gap needing to be filled
is evocative of the female genitals, while refusing words is associated
with insanity. In the poem, the female artist is a castaway who turns
her back on the Symbolic which could fill the semiotic void.
Paradoxically, this is narrated by a poet holding onto ëthe ache of
sanityí as she fills the silences left behind by the female artist in the
poem.
The poem ëFallí from Facts About Water explores silence
further:
I finger the silence
That follows a poemís end
It is the sound
of having been there, the hard despair
that follows the pain getting words
and after the rain you can hear the drops
staying in the trees. (p.65)The silence after the words is the sound of having been somewhere yet
this after space is unchartable. Such a silence is heard in contrast to
what came before as the sound of no sound and words are explored in
terms of absence. The poem could be read by feminists in terms of
femininity, silence and lack, especially in view of the allusion to