If there’s one thing the poet has on her side in her attempts to navigate such aesthetic dilemmas it’s surely voice, that most pliable of poetry’s resources, that trick of all tricks. A certain irony is built into the very act of voicing a lyric: you know as well as I do that it’s not really me you’re hearing, that my presence in the poem is the sum of a set of calculated textual effects. It’s as if I’m really there but of course I reside elsewhere (stunt double). We have chosen temporarily to suspend that knowledge, to move by agreement to inhabit a different order of the real. In her debut collection Do You Have Anything Less Domestic? Collyer experimented with drawing attention to this contract, its strange internal laws: “If I’d known you were coming I’d have tidied up”, she told her reader in ‘Cocoon’, a portrait of her chaotic bedroom à la Tracey Emin’s My Bed (22). But the poet did know we were coming; it was she who invited us in. Our impression of finding her in the poem compromised – of finding her there at all – is an illusion she herself has orchestrated.

In As If I’m Really There these ironies are repeatedly put in service of a kind of playful self-protection, a sense that the poet is appearing to let us into her privacy at the same time as she is allowing us to catch her sleight of hand as the realer self is hidden away. In, for instance, ‘The Pitch’, one of several poems in the collection to deal with Collyer’s breast cancer diagnosis (the experience also features in Do You Have Anything Less Domestic? – one suspects it makes her particularly awake to how readily female pain is remade in the image of male pleasure), Collyer sends in her double for some especially heavy lifting, with the effect that the poem feels at once obscenely earnest and brilliantly tongue-in-cheek:

I was pitching to a roomful of people who were all smiling. The air in the room was thick. The week before I had had surgery to remove a tumour from my breast, but I hadn’t told anyone in the room in case it seemed unprofessional. […] As I started to talk about the idea, I began to leak. It manifested first in my eyes and then my nose. Salt and mucus. The stitches holding my new wound together split and breast tissue began to leak, porous, through my white shirt and, as if in sympathy, my sweat glands went into overdrive and soon the table was awash with my bodily fluids. Everyone was very polite. They kept smiling and nodding as if I was saying something very important that they hadn’t heard before.

(55)

O abject exposure! The ruptured stitches, the leaking breast. No matter: Collyer is insured against the hazards of such unstinting confession by the comic excess with which the scene is relayed, “the table […] awash with bodily fluids”, the audience smiling up at her from a sea of her own tissue and mucus (by the end of the poem they are merely “foreheads bobbing in the ocean of [her] fluids” – “I don’t know”, she admits, “if any of them survived”). The skit grows funnier when we learn that “all characters in the play [she] pitched” – Collyer is, unsurprisingly, a playwright by trade – “are played by breasts”: “full, soft, pendulous, hanging, limp, sack-like, nothing-more-than-a-fingerful breasts”, “[p]ost-menopausal breasts, which are the most likely kind of breasts to get a particular kind of breast cancer” (“not the type I had”, our speaker clarifies, “as I like to be different”) (55). There are many reasons to like this poem, but chief among them is perhaps the obvious joy it takes in its own theatrical ridiculousness, its capacity to invent and reinvent at no cost to the body behind the words – a joy that many poems in the collection share.

In ‘A Night At the Theatre’, Collyer’s speaker attends a play where her assigned seat is atop an enormous pair of horns, “embedded in the theatre floor and ris[ing] up to a height that is awkward to mount” (64). “I am not impaled,” she explains, “but I am, over the course of the play, slowly skewered”; she remains there “some weeks after the play has ended,” wondering “at what point the horns will push all the way through my legs and emerge on the other side” (64–66). Absurd? Well, yes. We are in the realm of the invented, and the poet does not want to give up her real pain so easily, or does not want to give up her real pain at all – what, after all, would be the point of reenacting it? For whom could it be worth the trouble? And what do they care? (One thinks here of a line from Diane Seuss, another dramatic-lyric poet who revels in this recalcitrant routine: “trauma, a word I’ve grown to hate. It’s like a cute puppy / who got old and whose only new trick is shitting in the house”). In ‘Watching Cricket with Gertrude Stein’, Collyer both takes the chance to acknowledge the queen mother of these dissident feminist tactics – “Gertrude,” in the words of Eileen Myles, “Gertrude Stein, of course” – and affirms the absolute right of the poet to lie shamelessly for her own pleasure, for no other reason, perhaps, than because she can:

We discuss history she laughs easily. Women invented the overarm ball because their hoop skirts interfered with other under arms. It was her she says who invented it. She is lying it was not her she had never heard of cricket until today but who cares if Gertrude Stein is lying? Her poetic license is platinum.

(25)

Of course, the point of all Collyer’s pretending is not only, or not really, to hide from us. There are things we know reading As If I’m Really There, like the fact that if Collyer is not really her speaker, she also almost certainly is. How does this work exactly? It works like any other speech act: there is someone there behind the words, she is not in them and yet she is, she is directing them from the wings and it is the listener’s task to find her in them, whether or not being found is the thing she wants. Collyer, for her part, wants this badly; why else go to such lengths to pretend she doesn’t? (DW Winnicott, in a quote used by Deborah Levy as an epigraph to her recent book about Stein: “It is a joy to be hidden, and a disaster not to be found”). Sometimes we find her confused by her own theories: “Can feminist happen to / a body? Can body happen to poetics? Can rage / make body feminist?’ (‘Body In Question’, 26–27). Sometimes we find her dumb with longing – ‘A Horse / strolls over. … I want to touch him but his head / is so big’ (‘If I Hold Out My Hand’, 86) – and sometimes sick:

…sunbake until skin is peeling until blisters form because to move would betray the want and because the boys are impressed by the burn. By the way I can make and take pain. It makes me cool. The red-hot skin.

(‘Red-Hot’, 15)

Mostly, though, we find her like Woodman, crouched shyly beside the shadow of her stunt double, as if she could not help sneaking back into her own scene. She has put on such a show for us, you see. And she is a woman. She wants to know what we think.