COCOONING by Christi Nogle

Published in PROMISE, a collection by Christi Nogle, published in 2023 by Flame Tree Press: HERE

Reviewed as part of my ‘Dessemination’ project HERE

My previous reviews of this author HERE

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This is a sort of lockdown or curfew; in fact I recently learnt that the UK Government considered ‘cocooning’ in 2020 as their term for such restrictions, but changed their mind to lockdown. This is a transformational grammar or theme-and-variations on such a cocoon with, inter alia, a blanket cartoon on a window and removal of mirrors akin to old block TVs being ousted by flat screens, whereby we follow —  haunted by it all, and our own memories and mind contortions three years ago — a married couple whose cocooning involves a carnal subsuming with pet dogs that is vividly conveyed towards what now in hindsight was a sort of natural culmination and I wonder if the particular word that is crystallised at the end here by the preceding matters was the same Welsh word that my Welsh father (trapped in England in the 1940s by the war) taught me as a word that seemed to be connected with the 1918 cocooning in Wales when he lost all four of his grandparents to a similar infectious subsuming. Trapped on the hither side of the hearth as something other than himself?