Kate Fox, 'The Oscillations' (Nine Arches Press 2021)

the oscillations cover: an artwork depicting blue and gold sea waves, with a glowing white moon above

The Oscillations, a 2021 poetry collection by Kate Fox, takes the Covid-19 pandemic as its starting point, exploring neurodivergence, trauma, memory, childhood, and love, with the Covid-19 pandemic acting as the basis around which the collection is structured. Fox splits the collection into two parts, the first named ‘After’ (which examines life during Covid) and the second named ‘Before’, with the non-linearity of this ordering (the ‘After’ coming before the ‘Before’) suggestive of the highly personal approach to time that Fox has throughout this collection. Over the course of these forty-four poems, Fox succeeds in using poetic form to explore the complexities of her neurodivergent identity, and the highly individual experience of neurodiversity in the face of the wider world.

 

Fox triumphs with her focus on the neurodiverse experience of the Covid-19 pandemic, with a section devoted to the pandemic opening the collection. The opening poem, ‘Pharmacopoeia’, for example, reads as an exploration of a special interest opening in media res with “And suddenly the plagues | are the most interesting parts | of a city’s history”, with the phrase “most interesting” stated unequivocally. Throughout her poetry, Fox also uses language to contrast two alternatives, situating herself at an inexpressible middle ground. Towards the end of ‘Pharmacopoeia’, for example, the narrator describes how they:

 

brim with dark blue connective ribbons

obscuring, or highlighting,

the place where the path

meets the horizon.

 

with “obscuring” and “highlighting” placed in contrast to each other on the same line, with the narrator unable to put into words the effect of their brain brimming with information. Fox uses this technique across her poems; in ‘The Distance i.’ we find the narrator struggling with social distancing, unable to tell “how close was too close, | how far too far”. ‘Skimming’ does something similar, emphasising the completely opposite thoughts of two different people:

 

How much movement there is

and sound, I said

how quiet it is and still,

you replied.

 

Particularly in the above quotation, it is the juxtaposition of two completely different perspectives that, I find, emphasise Fox’s overarching metaphor of neurodivergence as a lens through which the world can be viewed. This is something more explicitly explored in ‘The Distance i.’ as the narrator contrasts the way that neurotypical people are “wired to notice | what is dangerous | and therefore important” whilst the narrator struggles to implement social distancing as they “don’t have a new instant overlay | for the world” and they are unable to view the world through a “new lens” because they are already seeing it through the lens of neurodivergence.

 

One of the standout poems of this collection, ‘What could be called communication’, explores the neurodivergent community as a whole through the idea of trees communicating via networks of roots, and the whole poem beautifully describes different ways of existing as a neurodivergent person, the way that they “might be wincing at sirens, | saying Pardon a lot in crowds […] wondering at the calm faces of everybody else”.

 

Other highlights include ‘The Funerals’, ‘The Choir’ (which manages to capture the particular brand of crazy that was Zoom get-togethers), ‘German Girl’, and ‘Emergency.’

Reviewed by Maebh Howell

Maebh Howell (she/her) is a Medieval Literature MPhil student at St Hugh’s College, Oxford.  Her research focusses on medieval lyrics and their materiality, and she can be found on twitter at @maebhhowell

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