Review by Stephanie Ellis
5 stars
Whitechapel Rhapsody is a collection of dark poems by one of my favourite dark poets, Alessandro Manzetti. This particular collection sets itself in the crimes of Jack the Ripper and the atmospheric ‘personality’ of London’s East End.
As I read these poems, I thought about my own ancestors, from great-grandparents and back, who lived in this area. Whitechapel, Bethnal Green, Spitalfields, they lived in the most poverty-stricken streets of this time and would have experienced much described in these poems. The atmosphere of the East End leaching from Manzetti’s verse is a perfect marriage with the known history.
The East End was grim, a morass of the forgotten, of migrant communities, of people who lived in the “rhapsody of shadows, rats, and refugee”. Manzetti turns Whitechapel into a predator personified in ‘I’m the Lair’. It is the trap into which all fall, “the prophet of misery”, the “nest of dust, shillings, and sweat”. Reptilian, it is everything that beats at the dark heart of the East End.
Through his repeated refrain of “Deep Red, Deep East End,” (‘Bloody Rhapsody’, ‘Sick Rhapsody’, ‘Entangled Rhapsody’, ‘Madhouse Rhapsody’ and ‘Whitechapel Rhapsody’), he colours the shades of misery in the language of blood – the “Deep Red, Deep East End/the ghost with the razor, Death”.
‘Sick Rhapsody’ is the song for the syphilitic, the sufferers of tuberculosis and fever and their medicine “the liquour of melancholy”. In ‘Entangled Rhapsody’, with its mass of intertwined lives on intertwined streets, Manzetti gives Whitechapel a body, a place no one can escape. He delves into its dark mind in ‘Madhouse Rhapsody’ with “stories of asylums, green ghosts, and white brains attached”. He wraps it all up in the embrace of Whitechapel Rhapsody, the song of the people, “‘who meet by chance, to live or die”.
These rhapsodies fix you in time and place as Manzetti leads you into the story of Jack the Ripper and his victims. Weaving in historical fact, he sings the songs of Annie Chapman, Mary Ann Nichols, Mary Jane Kelly, Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes. He also reminds us of Alice Mackenzie, murdered by a possible copycat. Their stories are broken by other tales of the street such as The Butcher’s Shop and the infamous Ten Bells, of the world going on around these deaths. A nice touch are the almost Dickensian names given to everyday people such as Dr. Openshow, Mr. Neardead, Mrs. Askmore, Mrs. Lovelone, and Mr. Hackfate, which adds even more to the sense of time.
Manzetti finishes with ‘The Dark King’, the bringer of all that is horror, “the mud that takes a thousand forms and which can become, at will” so much: chainsaw, gasoline, obscenity and requiem.
With its truly lyrical quality, this felt like a dark love song to the East End of London. I think it’s my favourite collection yet from Alessandro Manzetti. I loved it.
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