Millner has written, as her debut novel, a story told entirely in rhyming couplets, of a woman exploring her sexuality, of the comfort of an old relationship in conflict with the excitement of a new relationship.
This takes two forms, broadly alternating. Normally there are a few chapters of rhyming couplets as we would know them from our poetry lessons in Year 8 English, told in the first person. These more move the narrative along, suffuse with references to Rachel Cusk’s autofiction and the music of Pinegrove, the kind of ambiguous specificity that works even if you are not aware of their work, or indeed as it was for those references that I either didn’t get or even didn’t notice.
But dotted throughout the book are chapters which are, for all intents and purposes, prose - told in the second person for a stylistic switch up - long paragraphs more of motivation and psyche; but these too are, eventually, cuttingly, capped off by the singular second line of the couplet.
There is, after all this, a final coda of the first person couplets proper, which can easily serve as a standalone piece. Not long after reading Couplets, I attended my boyfriend’s friend’s Burns Night party, which alongside the haggis and neeps included communal poetry reading. I decided, in the absence of any other inspiration, to read the coda, which went down very well (although I’m not much of a reader, I’m better sans text).
I considered, for a moment, trying to write this entry in couplets, but my god is it painful when a gimmick is done by hands not worthy of it. How lucky we are then that Millner does the job wonderfully.