Review: Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit by Emma Neale

Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit is a skilful exploration of the white lie; the schoolyard rumour; the gap in the narrative. The collection opens by addressing the untruths that coloured Neale’s childhood. 'Porky' narrates her earliest fibs, while 'Like girls were hot soft scones' lightly mocks the teachings of religion. One highlight, 'In the nodding grass beneath the cat’s-cradle clothesline, my hand an open perch' centres not a lie but an unfulfilled wish. Neale figures herself an agent of 'slow-burn disaster'; a child masking, perhaps, her feelings of power as feelings of tenderness. Lovely language abounds in this book. Sweets appear several times, a shorthand for something illicit — the 'aniseed sweet' in 'Mask', the 'sucked sweet' in 'Player', the 'mint or barley sugar' lollies in 'Androphobia'. This last poem is an eloquent indictment of abusers and systems that shield them: 'It begins when the child finds deceit / turns to truth if certain adults use it.' Liar is not all play, and satisfyingly so. Neale takes aim at injustice, at how people ignore inequality ('Spare Change') or 'use[...] words / like disguises to distract and dissemble' ('Scapegoat'). Ultimately, though, these engaging, empathetic poems remind us of our shared humanity, including our shared imperfections. Mask If every fiction tells a secret without revealing it, if it both dispels and creates a little more mystery than exists before it unravels like red flame that frets through white wax paper that conceals an aniseed sweet, let me here confess the worst deception I ever committed I entered into unwillingly in that, from the moment an infant first discovers the power in a mock cry, it is given a false identity as witness protection from which the only release will be as on a stage set when a cloak swirls to reveal a dropped mask rocking gently to and fro on the floorboards like an empty rowboat ghosting with a diver’s spring, now moored and lit by silence.