‘All of my best lines are accidents’, Chris Price writes in this book, and proceeds to prove that she has the knack of putting herself in harm’s way and the skill to build from there. Beside Herself plays with character, and with language, and with the way the one works on the other. Pronouns and personae shift and dance in this book in the same way that meanings do – ‘After the expected, the unexpected. / After the unexpected, the formal handrail / and the overflow.’ Price has always been attentive to the unlooked-for delights of language – she is a master of the riddling word-play poem – and uses this play in the service of something larger, an exploration of character and persona and perspective: ‘I am every character – every, every character’. These characters appear from a variety of times, places and fictions – Richard III, Hamlet, three readers (one a writer), Richard Nunns and Miss Bethell – from contemporary Wellington to medieval England. The longer sequence ‘The Book of Churl’ is the narrative of medieval everyman; another long poem, ‘Beside Yourself’, is both a battle against the relentless first-person pronoun and a celebration of it, in ramshackle poem-diary form. A selection of beautifully crafted, riddling poems of persons and personae, truths and falsehoods, frank identities and masked selves, Beside Herself is a playful, shape-shifting performance.
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