A Cut Above by Sarah Collister
A Cut Above
You just can’t buy a good haircut online.
I sit with mock patience at quarter to nine,
waiting for a stylist much older than me,
who will seize my hair band with smiling glee,
and tickle my ear with her expertise.
“My dear, you’re balding! But, in a niche
sort of way that we can easily fix
with a fresh side part and some pretty clips.”
When all the barbershops are shuttered,
I find I’m appointed my husband’s hair-cutter.
“I’m sure it looks fine,” he softly coos.
I snap, “Yeah – but I have to look at you!”
I lean in close with the fresh sharpened shears
Just one wrong move and I could clip an ear…
This time, my love, I won’t. Keep your chin up!
You’re only two weeks from a good haircut.
SARAH COLLISTER
…………………………………………………
The COVID lockdowns were a grim time for people, but comedy co-exists with tragedy in human life. Sarah Collister’s description of a humorous COVID-induced experience will resonate with many. We all through that time had small windows to re-experience (almost) normal life before those windows closed again and we were thrown back on our own limited resources. Other people’s skills that we might have taken for granted suddenly revealed their true complexity. The ability to cut and style another person’s hair – or, in extremis, one’s own hair – is such a skill.
Beneath the comedy and topicality of the subject matter here, this is a poem about relations between the sexes, specifically those of a married couple. A good marriage’s tender intimacy is apparent, as is the sharp candour (‘I snap, “Yeah – but I have to look at you!”’) characteristic of long-term relationships: get that wrong, and any marriage will founder.
The relationship doesn’t become the focus of the poem until the husband appears in the second verse. In the first verse, the speaker’s companion is a hair stylist whose candour is funny and startling:
“My dear, you’re balding! But, in a niche
sort of way that we can easily fix…”
It’s a poem of two halves, as if the poet were saying to her other half, I’ll attend to myself first: my needs when it comes to hair are much more complex than yours!
The poem’s light-hearted tone is maintained by its jaunty rhythm, conversational voice, and seemingly free-and-easy use of (mainly) slant rhyme – culminating in the clash-chime of ‘chin up’ and ‘haircut’. Tenderly comic, the poem is rather untypical of Sarah Collister’s work, which tends to be lyrical and serious. A teacher and writer now living in Oxford, Collister has had poems published in such publications as Ekstasis, Grand Little Things, The North American Anglican, and the anthology, An Outcast Age (2022), but not yet in a collection of her own. She cites the New Formalism movement in the States as an influence, especially the poets Dana Gioia, Gertrude Schnackenberg, and the Oxford Professor of Poetry (and subject of an upcoming Into Poetry article), AE Stallings.
There is something of a phoney war between formalists and free versers. The career of the American poet James Wright, whose first two books consist of metrical verse and the rest of free verse, is instructive in this respect. He was a true poet in both styles. Collister’s own position, which she states simply, constitutes – when you ponder it – quite an original approach: ‘The form provides rigidity that the poet must soften with his or her subject matter and language.’