Reviews of the Ephemeral

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‘The Glutton’s Daughter’ by Sinéad Wilson

In Pamphlets on February 22, 2012 at 10:30 am

-Reviewed by Afric McGlinchey-

Wit and clarity are two words I’d associate with Sinéad Wilson’s chapbook, The Glutton’s Daughter. Her opening poem, a sonnet, reflects the formality of religious rituals through the ‘litany of quiet names: altar, vestment/chancel, nave’, in a poem where the adolescent speaker hopes ‘for something bordering on proof from the young vicar/or the older kids, nibbling custard creams in the break’. But the closest she comes to faith is when she observes, over a period of weeks, ‘Tom’s un-squeezed whiteheads….inching down the gospel of his cheeks.’ For all the crisp word selection and tight lines, she maintains a lightness of tone that is refreshing and credible, while the objects of this poem give it a reassuring solidity. It is a well-chosen first poem, as the theme of communication, bodily references, and the ‘ink-streaked photostats’ link to the poems that follow.

‘Memories of Berwick Street and Dyfrig’ vividly describes recollections of a neighbourhood where children communicate using ‘yoghurt-pot-and-string telephones’ while ‘ladies in balconettes and underwireds/lean out on sills to smoke and try to catch your eye.’ Again, humour is evident, as Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice is invoked: ‘I speculate the value you’d put to my pounds of flesh’. When the ‘you’ of the poem names one of the women Portia, she asks, ‘Portia as in Shakespeare?’ ‘No,’ comes the answer: ‘Portia, as in the car.’

The poems are beautifully arranged, moving from the balconette bras to a wonderfully wry ‘found’ prose poem about a bedroom view. Wilson has an eye for the quirky detail, and also for connections:

‘Once they saw Bardot marry Jourdan/twice in one afternoon,’ she says of two small boys who hold hands outside a church in Fonataine. This image of the hand-holding boys is echoed in the final line: ‘Fontaine left in the hands of two small boys’.

‘The Anatomy of the Poem’ describes how the speaker tries to penetrate her lover’s dream, after he utters a phrase in his sleep. She imagines he’s ‘lolling in an Oxford punt,/the lunch of drumsticks, tartlets, the chilled/white burgundy, the emptied hamper/a cushion for your lazy head…’ Her attention to detail is beautiful: ‘there’s a boater tipped to a squint/at the bridge of your nose, so you don’t see/the friend in cricket whites drive down his pole/to the river bed, then with a suck, kick off/and climb it, hand under hand, up out again.’ Only someone certain of her craft could get away with so many prepositions – down, off, under, up, out – in three lines.

Poems continue to talk to each other, even with the merest of connections. The next poem contains a couple, and wine, and further recollection: ‘down the descending scale of years,/you can now disclose how her voice/tightened your pubescent grip/and pulled you, groin-first, closer/to your partner’s stiff propriety.’

In  another imaginative leap, Wilson adopts the voice of a cynical American forties crime detective in ‘Le Film Noir,’ ‘with just a wisecrack, a license, a loaded .38’ who sits in his office, nursing ‘a pint of bourbon on my desk/until someone spills their guts’. All the clichés of the film noir come together to recreate the black and white world of ‘the mad, the drunk, the grifters’ guns’.

In ‘Cape Farewell, Greenland,’ the speaker, feeling a pang for ‘whatever home means’ asks, ‘Why did we come?’

The symbolic value of objects continues to connect the poems thematically, as fabrics are named in ‘Mourning Dress’, and linens appear in ‘Removing the Ring’, where starched Egyptian cotton is folded, like origami, into a sailing boat ‘in the small of this last night’ so ‘he’s left without a doubt.’ This poem, like the origami folds described, is tightly restrained with rhymed line endings.

‘The Glutton’s Daughter’, a dramatic monologue, beautifully evokes the bitterness of a woman past her youth and beauty, who once modelled for Toulouse Lautrec and Degas, and who claims, ‘I could still turn to anything – landscapes, still-lives, sea views,’ but clearly hasn’t. In a strangely similar poem, the magical and quirky ‘Twenty to One’, an eccentric and we assume retired, dog takes himself back to the track, alone, where he joins the race,  winning one more rosette. Maybe the woman in ‘The Glutton’s Daughter’ will surprise us yet, and do something similar.

Taken together, the poems are wonderfully wry observations of the human condition: the quirky and often pointless things we do over the course of our lives. TS Eliot’s ‘J. Alfred Prufrock’ comes to mind, although these poems are much lighter and more hopeful.

Sinéad Wilson is a strong new contemporary voice and I look forward to more of her work.

 

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‘The Brothers’ by Asko Sahlberg (translated by Fleur and Emily Jeremiah)

In Novella on February 22, 2012 at 10:05 am

-Reviewed by Richard T. Watson-

Asko Sahlberg has written a tight and compact little saga in The Brothers (entitled He in the original Finnish – which I gather translates as ‘They’ in English). This English translation, courtesy of mother-and-daughter team Fleur and Emily Jeremiah, is the first in Peirene Press‘ new series, The Small Epic.

You might remember Peirene Press translations from our review of Alois Hotschnig’s Maybe This Time, part of 2011′s The Man series. For 2012, Peirene’s focus is on The Small Epic, and there are two more to come in this series. As its name implies, The Small Epic is all about big stories told in a short form (I polished off The Brothers in a matter of hours). This particular Small Epic takes place in what is now Finland, just after the Finnish War (1808-9) between King Gustav IV Adolf of Sweden and Czar Alexander I of Russia. In February 1808, the Russian Czar began a war against Sweden intending to draw that country into Napoleon’s Continental System; his prize for doing so was the newly-created Duchy of Finland.

The Brothers, by Asko Sahlberg, translated by Fleur and Emily Jeremiah - Peirene Press
The Brothers begins as it means to go on: with a sense not only of the Finnish cold but of the immediacy of everything. That’s not just because of the present tense narrative, but also because the Jeremiahs’ translation makes a virtue of this and it all feels punchy and immediate – there’s no messing around or unnecessary waffling here. There is a tension in the first few lines that never quite goes away and that always threatens to erupt into violence.

‘I have barely caught the crunch of snow and I know who is coming. Henrik treads heavily and unhurriedly, as is his wont, grinding his feet into the earth. The brothers are so different. Erik walks fast, with light steps; he is always in a hurry, here then gone.’

Elder brother Henrik treads heavily and has a lot of baggage to carry around. He’s returning to the family farm, in the isolated, snowy Finnish countryside – he has been to the war and it shows in his face. But Henrik fought for the Russians and will never be quite at home anywhere again. His betrayal hangs about the pages of the book, mingling with the bitter clouds of betrayals by his mother and brother. These are high emotions and deep feelings (high and deep not only in the sense of being intense, but of carrying a human nobility and universality); they are experiences of the human condition as much as they are the experiences of specific human beings: regret, bitterness, lust, despair.

But then Sahlberg’s characters are very much frail human beings, whose failings make them who they are, for better or worse. The Brothers is shot through with a bleak truth and honesty, and that’s most visible in the characterisation. It’s as true of the Farmhand, the Old Mistress and the brothers as it is of their cousin Mauri and the local bailiff. That each of these characters gets to voice their thoughts and perspective through a first-person narrative is another strength of Sahlberg’s writing, making each event and character multi-faceted as we see them from inside as well as outside. It makes for a genuinely three-dimensional realisation of the Finnish farmstead in the prose, even before that makes its way to the imagination.

The background to Sahlberg’s story is certainly the stuff of epic. Empires and kingdoms clashing, Napoleon, families torn apart by war, betrayal and secrets, and whole life stories piling into the briefest chunks of time. But what Sahlberg has done is make a pivotal moment in Scandinavian history accessible and empathetic. The Brothers makes the sweep of history personal and shows its impact on individuals, on people with whom we can identify much more easily than we can with kingdoms, empires or their rulers. That’s what The Small Epic is all about, and that’s its great strength.

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Beaconsfield Reading Series – Poetry and Wine 23/11/2011

In Performance Poetry on February 15, 2012 at 3:27 pm

-reviewed by James Webster-

@ Royal Standard of England

There’s something wonderfully quaint about Claire Trévien’s Beaconsfield based poetry night. Maybe it’s the gorgeous surroundings of the Royal Standard of England (oldest alehouse in England apparently) with its warren of low-ceilinged rooms. Maybe it’s the charmingly mixed audience, comprising all different ages and a mix of locals and visitors. Maybe it’s Claire’s glittering hosting. It’s a very relaxed, supportive and fun environment in which to enjoy some poetry.

Host – Claire Trévien

  • Claire began proceedings herself with her ‘Novella’. Apparently it usually goes down well (woof), and, with its nostalgic and joyful look at pretentious and bohemian youth and incredible turns of phrase, I could see why.
  • Next was a piece written using the ‘hipster poetry generator’ method: start with a place, a list of things, vague references to a person and cut the first and last stanzas. It was suitably pretentious and incomprehensible.
  • Finally she read a sort of sestina called ‘Love From’ that started with expressive poeticism and then seems to wear itself down to flat, but exposed, disappointment.

Features

  • Dan Holloway (curator of 8 Cuts, winner of Literary Death Match and whose books are available on Kindle) was a strong performer and very aware of his audience (and wearing particularly dashing braces).
  • ‘Adam’, the first of two poems on Old Compton Street, flowed with slightly destructive hedonism; Dan talks of ‘this absinthe in my blood’ and ‘haunt[ing] the shelves of Foyles’. It was moving and softly seductive.
  • The second ‘How to Make a Soho Quilt’ was at once both rich and actively stripping itself bare. It spat up pictures and images that formed a ‘patchwork skin’ made up of strange places with an urban-bohemian-grime feel to them.
  • ‘Holly’ was on an artist attempting to recover a lost week by spending 40 days locked away trying to get that mad again. It was filled with verdant language that used slick rhyme to race from one image to the next (almost too fast to follow) that earned a chorus of appreciative ‘mmmmmm’ noises.
  • ‘Petals’ was a piece on the Kurasawa film Dreams. It melded the romantic, personal and political in a harrowingly engaging portrayal.
  • Finally ‘Her Body’, on the way peoples’ lives are appropriated after they die, blended fond remembrance with the jolting and grievous loss of a person ‘made of pieces of pain that no longer hurt’. It was triggering and hauntingly beautiful.
  • Laila Sumpton, of the Keats House Poetry Group, was next. Her poetry was steeped in a family history spanning larger than life personalities and a fair amount of strife that went through Bosnia via Pakistan and Hull.
  • ‘Patterning’ was on the characters in a family’s history that almost blend into mythology. It was resonant, using imaginative, interlocking language, but there’s almost too much to take in.
  • ‘Pakistani Postal Collapse’ was a surreal take on a sugar shortage, amusingly describing ‘black market cafes in upmarket homes’.
  • ‘The Only Photo’ (if I can read my own handwriting) was a moving poem about the two objects that survived the war inBosnia. A rescued coffee grinder becomes a ‘device that would defeat everyone’ and you can feel a real sense of pride and resilience reflected in the image of a family gathered in front of the wreckage. It’s a piece that is planted in destruction and struggle, but becomes so joyous. Ace.
  • Jill Wallis, editor of Rhyme and Reason (a poetry collection-cum-diary), read a selection of poems from their last edition which all offered something different.
  • Her poems, while not always as rich or imaginative as other poets, are full of gut-wrenching emotional honesty that really resonated with the audience.
  • ‘Owl Pellets’ described the ‘horde of tiny bones wrapped in hide’ in eloquent and poignant language, almost digesting the idea of the lost loved one and her own feelings, just as the ‘Owl Pellets’ do.
  • Her poem about dying in hospital built a really strong connection with the audience, as she described clinging to your last night with a loved one.
  • ‘Dust to Dust’ expressed the inability to scatter the departed’s ashes. She used hurt, clipped sentences with the smooth assonance of breath, as at the end of the poem she says ‘deeply, deeply, I breathe you in’.
  • Her final ‘Walk by Moonlight’ was a clear expression of the difficulties of using ‘the grotesque props of immobility’. It invited the audience in, then surprised them with the otherworldly beauty of the moonlit walk.
  • Simon Barraclough has been published in the Financial Times and Guardian, and has three collections: Neptune Blue, Bonjour Tetris, and Los Alamos Mon Amour.
  •  ‘Los Alamos’ evocatively compared love to an atomic bomb test in an entertaining (if pretentious) extended metaphor of destruction and recreation.
  • ‘Saturn on Seventh’ started with some nicely expressed grumpiness, then takes a lovely turn into describing a ‘homeless astronomer’ who lets you ‘See Saturn for a dollar’ leading to a charming and fleeting transcendental moment.
  • Poems on hearts: ‘Starfish Heart’ was pleasantly whimsical; ‘Pizza Heart’ was expressive and alliterative; only ‘Celeriac Heart’ disappointed, as it seemed slightly pointless.
  • Poems on planets: ‘Earth’ was amusingly phrased, with nice interwoven imagery running through it as he described ‘God’s gobstopper’. While ‘Neptune’ was quietly and jocularly fond of the planet that’s ‘so blue/ you probably think that Jarman’s Blue/ is about you’. While ‘Sol’ made the danger of impending apocalypse seem so sweet.

The Open Mic

  • Anne‘s ‘Terminal Therapy’ cleverly summed up how airports seem to distil emotions, with some nice phrasing on the ‘second hand arrivals’.
  • ‘White Noise’, on the sound installations of Bill Fontana, highlighted the contrasts of the bustling city against sea noises, but the imagery was a little suffused and unfocused.
  • ‘Evolution in the City’ gave a well-realised portrait of their life, but both the rhyme scheme and the ‘I just want a man …’ message were a little simplistic.
  • Mary‘s ‘Release Me from This Hell’ about Milton returning to London was impressively resonant of Milton’s rich style, making me feel the heat and smoke of industrial London.
  • And her ‘Ultramarinus’ was a lovely delicate sounding poem, all crystals, gems and precious stones.
  • Ted Pike introduced himself with a confident preamble, his ‘Man of Other Peoples’ Words’ was a concisely clever picture of a committee clerk’s life.
  • While ‘West Whittering’ was a charming celebration of human insignificance compared to nature.
  • Phillip read a series of haiku that were in places beautiful, sweet and adventurous. He gave us some really engaging snapshots of a mixture of subjects; rainbows, capitalism, airports, tears and umbrellas.

Summary: a fun, welcoming and moving night, with plenty of different voices, in a warm and inviting venue. If you feel like venturing out to the sticks for some poetry, definitely check it out.


Saboteur Awards 2012

In Saboteur Awards on February 14, 2012 at 2:35 pm

This year we’re going to do things differently, and leave the choice of winner down to you, the reader. In this post we will feature all of the literary magazines we’ve reviewed on Sabotage since 1st May 2011. Voting will close on 30th April at midnight, with results revealed on 1st May 2012 to celebrate Sabotage‘s 2nd Birthday.

The Saboteur Awards exist to celebrate literary magazines be they online or in print. To read all about our 2011 winners go here. There are no prizes outside of a logo to put on your website and the kudos of course.

The poll will open at the end of this month to allow time for any last minute reviews of literary magazines to join the longlist. Voters will be encouraged to leave comments explaining their choice.

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Three Love Poems for the Romantically Disinclined

In Conversation, Uncategorized on February 14, 2012 at 10:30 am

By Betty Herbert

Valentine’s Day: roses, champagne, lace knickers and bad poetry. It’s tempting to ignore the whole rotten lot of it, with its grand, clichéd gestures and craven lack of common sense. After all, if love could be righted just once on an annual basis through an expensive gift, Relate wouldn’t have such a long waiting list.

It’s the empty verbosity of Valentine’s Day that irritates me the most, the requisitioning of undoubtedly great poets to say something shallow and trite – and, worse, the proliferation of doggerel in a million spangly cards.

The problem is, we’re only seeing one aspect of love portrayed here: the blind, besotted kind that we feel at the beginning of a relationship. Those of us who are together in the long-term can’t help but feel that it’s some kind of festival for those who know nothing about love, in all its deeper and darker permutations. Let the children play, we tend to think, but just don’t bother us with your nonsense.

But what if we want to make the best of things this year? What if we want to take the opportunity to say something sincere and pertinent, that reflects the bitter intensities of long-term love, without becoming nauseating? Here are three suggestions.

 

1.     Time

The first thing we might want to say to our lover is about time, and the sense of awe it inspires when we tot up the years we’ve spent together, the percentage of our lives that represents, and the traffic that has passed through our relationship in that period.

Czesław Miłosz’s 1936 poem ‘Encounter’ is a perfect distillation of the effects of time, the bewilderment and ‘wonder’ it inspires. In it, we find a sharp, simple image of life, a shadow of death, and sense that the passing years are a marvel rather than a horror.

Except that it is addressed to ‘my love’, it is nothing like a traditional love poem, but I think that it offers something more profound than that: the knitting together of love with life.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/179568

 

2. Sex

Let us turn, now, to a little naughtiness. ‘The Sun Rising’, John Donne’s heartfelt plea to the sun to give him just a little more time in bed with his lover is, on the face of it, akin to the whole ‘young love’ Valentine’s industry that I was lamenting just a few short paragraphs ago.

But what this poem offers for we lifers is a glimpse back at the delicious compulsion of sex, before we became complacent about it (or before it became more of a political act than a pleasurable encounter, depending on how things are going for you).

The Sun Rising is a lascivious cry of rebellion against the universe, whose order dares to overthrow the temporary kingdom that Donne has built with the woman in his bed. ‘Saucy pedantic wretch,’ he scolds, ‘go chide/ Late school-boys and sour prentices.’ There is a wry smile on his lips even as he says it, knowing as he does that he is really asking for an upending of natural order.

http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/donne/sunrising.htm

 

3. Pain

It is impossible to talk sincerely about love without also acknowledging its bitter underbelly. Those of us who have travelled its course over many years may have cause to reflect on the moments that we have been hurt, and caused hurt; but also on the miracle of resilience in the light of these horrors.

Sarah Maguire’s ‘Spilt Milk’ is poem for those who have an intimate knowledge of atonement, both given and received. This may be an image of the end of a relationship (‘It has rained and rained since you left, the streets black/and muscled with water.’), but there is a strength in knowing that our own relationships have endured such desolate moments.

What’s more, this poem is a defiant assertion of the messiness of adult desire, a repentant je ne regrette rien. Share it with your imperfect lover on this most unrealistic of festivals.

http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=12216

 

Betty blogs at bettyherbert.com. Her memoir, The 52 Seductions, is published by Headline.

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‘The Patron Saint of Schoolgirls’ by Liz Berry

In Pamphlets on February 8, 2012 at 9:30 am

-Reviewed by Claire Trévien-

Liz Berry

This review is late to the party, Liz Berry published the pamphlet  The Patron Saint of Schoolgirls  with Tall-Lighthouse two years ago after having won an Eric Gregory Award in 2009. She is now an Emerging Poet in Residence at Kingston University and a 2011 Arvon/Jerwood mentee with an impressive publishing record. Fortunately, these poems somehow feel timeless, and waiting this long to encounter them in their pamphlet form is not too dissimilar to waiting for a good wine to mature. It’s going to be a challenge to steer clear of food imagery when describing Berry’s poetry since her adept combination of craft, heart and musicality, creates poems that can only be described as moreish. They’re accessible on a first reading, and yet a part of them (which will always allude you) keeps you returning for more until it shades your life differently.

Take ‘The Year We Married Birds’, which is perhaps the most famous from the collection since it won second prize in the Torriano competition in 2010. It is quite possible to enjoy the poem on a surface level:

‘That year, with men turning thirty

still refusing to fly the nest,

we married birds instead.’

The language is clear and direct, and Berry’s persistence with this beautifully strange concept gives us humorous and light-hearted images of magpies smashing jewellers’ shop windows and restaurants serving worms. Yet, under this apparent cheer, there is the gleam of a kingfisher’s ‘metallic turquoise suit’ and the ‘fanning of his feathers / on my cheek’. Slowly, subtly, with each reading, the atmosphere turns chilly and one is left to wonder: what does this alliance really mean? Like a Daphné du Maurier short story, piercing the rationality behind the strangeness is secondary to enjoying the frisson of the unexplained.

This technique, to start with an idea and run wild with it is one that reoccurs throughout the pamphlet, in particular with ‘When I was a Boy’, and the title piece ‘The Patron Saint of Schoolgirls’. As with ‘The Year We Married Birds’, the reader is given a choice: to enjoy the lightly humorous first reading, or to persist as the smiles begin to freeze. There is a sense of play-acting throughout these narrative poems, of a child who has run loose with the dressing up box, but behind them is a knowing adult steel, and it is this powerful combination that makes the poems work.

On the opposite page to ‘The Year We Married Birds’, we have the extremely sensual ‘In the Steam Room’, where one can almost taste the sweat:

‘                 nuzzling the neck

of the fat man

on the bench, easing

beneath the breasts

of the beautiful girl

in the dripping blue swimsuit,

every pore an invitation’

There is no childishness here, but the sheer delight in the way bodies are separate yet unified in this room by the opening of pores is a natural progression to the more ‘childish’ poems. Berry’s enthusiasm for life, in all its ordinariness: ‘every mouth, ear / nostril, arse hole, rich anemone seabed of cunt / a place for joy’ is infectious.

‘Homing’ is another highlight of the collection: a love poem to a girl’s Black Country accent. The accent has been kept for years ‘in a box beneath the bed, / the lock rusted shut by hours of elocution’. It is a poignant poem that speaks of the accent’s intrinsic relationship to the earth from which it comes. Berry’s descriptions are feral, textured and contagiously passionate: ‘vowels ferrous as nails, consonants // you could lick coal from.’ The piece climaxes with the poet’s call for the accent to be sent ‘fluttering for home’ like pigeons, which somehow manages to be elevating. The title, coupled with this last line, cements the idea of the accent as a homing pigeon who will attempt to return home at every opportunity.

On the other hand, the sestina ‘Notes on Being a Mother’ falls frustratingly short of its companions. The repetition of ‘beautiful’, ‘mother’, and ‘heels’ leaves a nasty taste in my mouth of endless subservience to patriarchy (which hovers, unnamed, over the piece). Its insistence in the beauty of motherhood and childbirth and periods is overdone:

‘Be thirty seven. Pregnant. The beautiful

swelling of life blooming from belly to breast.’

This ambitious attempt to span an entire life cycle makes Berry abandon the non-sentimental precise imagery that succeeded so well in other poems, and instead recedes into clichés.

This is just one blip in an otherwise stunning collection of poems whose themes of childhood, Black Country settings and play-acting are deceptively simple. The poem ‘Coconuts’, on the unusual presence of the fruit on the Birmingham canals, is a fitting summary for Berry’s craft. Her poetry at its best is indeed a combination of delight in the odd, a locality of words, with the whole tinged by a sweet melancholy:

‘They bob, shrunken heads,

thatch-haired

or polished bald by lock and weir;

sometimes face down, eying

a stickleback, a message

in a sunken cider bottle.’

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ILK #1

In Blogzines, online magazine, Website on February 6, 2012 at 10:00 am

-Reviewed by John McGhee -

The Canadian experimental poet Christian Bök, in his ‘fantasy about the badass-ness of poetry’ The Extremophile, likens poetry to an indestructible bacterium: ‘It feeds on asbestos… It grows in lagoons of boiling asphalt…  It can withstand temperatures of 323 degrees Kelvin, hot enough to melt rubidium… It is invincible.  It is unkillable.’

I’m with Bök.  Let’s have poetry that is indestructible, brilliant, and bold.

The excellent launch issue of ILK, an online journal edited by Caroline Crew and Chris Emslie, has just the right kind of boldness.  In its best moments, there is inventive imagery and language and structural playfulness.  The tone is one of convivial brashness.  In the main, the poems are punchy, and the poets’ concerns are urgent, personal and contemporary.

Much of what is lively and mysterious in ILK is generated using relaxed, unadorned language.  Amy Herschleb provides the disgustingly memorable ‘birds hidden in the grass like meat Easter Eggs’ (‘The Title of This Poem is Secret’).  In ‘Ukulele’, Rob Macdonald turns a minor mental leap into a mellow reflection on childish innocence.  Read this and you’ll want to believe again that ‘the world is sugarcane and good and goes on forever in every direction.’

There is variety in approach and structure.  One poem is a recipe: Deirdre Knowles’ ‘Rabbit’, where the reader is commanded to ‘unsheath your finest knife / and cut your best hand in two’ and ‘re-entrail a pheasant’.  Knowles also has a story told algebraically, ‘Total’: ‘I am a B not an A nor a C. / You are a D and wish you were an S.’  Canadian Amanda Earl pours us two flavours of ghazal (‘Anti-Ghazal’ and ‘Bastard Ghazal’).  Both are furtive and inebriating.  David Raymond’s ‘Poetry Assemblies and Theories Var*’ is a story as a numbered list, elaborated using footnotes containing offbeat definitions.  The longest piece is from Mathias Svalina and Julia Cohen, the unsettling extended prose poem, ‘Two Sisters’.  In fact, prose fragments are favoured and variations involving rhyme are not represented at all.  Maybe I missed it but I couldn’t find a single rhyme, unless I count Dearman McKay rhyming ‘tongue’ with ‘tongue’ in the eerie ‘Lingua/Zunge‘.

The choice of subject matter and how it is described also shows a boldness but one that does not descend into gratuitous nastiness or shock for its own sake.  Michael Koh’s intriguing ‘I Take Pictures’ paints a grisly war scene in short fragments, a staccato massacre.  The cheerless narrator of Molly Prentiss’s ‘I Can Be Found Right Here’ appears ‘squatting over a toilet seat and peeing on my leg’ and opines ‘fuck everyone… fuck super hero shows.  fuck cutting and pasting my life into 140 characters.’  On a lighter note—but one just as splendidly vulgar—Deirdre Knowles clears up the vexed question of whether a penis or a vagina makes a better musical instrument.  It’s the penis, apparently.

At ILK, the day is today and the time is now.  It is poetry being devised on laptops and read aloud from smartphones.  Celebrities, computer games and websites are name-checked.  A plea: just once, wouldn’t it be great to read a poetic reference to a website other than Wikipedia, Twitter, Craigslist or Google? What about a poem about B3ta or Pathetic Motorways, just for a change?

With Netflix launching this month in the UK, surely it is timely for me to recommend Madison Langston’s ‘Asking Someone What To Watch On Netflix Is A Form Of Flirting‘, which concludes with the glitzy ‘I have never masturbated / to the Wikipedia entry for Carmen Electra / but I have masturbated / to the idea of it.’  Favourite title of the issue goes to either M.G. Martin and his nervy tale ‘The Band is Playing CTRL + ALT + DELETE, Again’ or Wendy Xu’s account of morning ennui, ‘The Future Doesn’t Care About Your Breakfast‘.

ILK’s website design is snappy and functional (although for Luddites like me, a PDF option or other print- ready version would be great).  I see US and Canadian poets are well-represented in the debut ILK and, casting forward to future issues, I am interested to see how the geographic mix of contributors develops.  I’m sure there are plenty of UK poets who will be able to match the boldness of those appearing this time.  Why can’t poetry be badass?  Subtlety is overrated.  As Bök’s Extremophile suggests, poetry ‘breathes iron… needs no oxygen to live… It awaits your experiments.’

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‘Rogue’s Gallery’ by Robert Barnard

In Short Stories on February 5, 2012 at 12:54 pm

-Reviewed by Elinor Walpole-

Robert Barnard’s Rogue’s Gallery is a collection of dark short stories and unnerving mysteries. Although renowned for his crime writing Barnard’s tales in this offering do not feature many crime capers or detectives (except our Nordic dog-detective in ‘Where Mongrels Fear to Tread’) so rather than the thrill of the chase the focus is instead on forbidden urges and desires. The unifying theme of the collection seems to be unusual families with tales of absent parents, incest, and parricide.

Robert Barnard's Rogue's Gallery

Barnard’s storytelling style is to really bring out a character’s point of view in an ambivalent and precarious situation, tracking the decision making process carefully. The purposeful third person prose takes precedence over description, setting and details, working to lead you by the hand down the twisted path. However it also has the effect of blending the stories together into one homogenous mass; although the voices are different there is not much variety in the storytelling style. This has its own charm with each story having a predictable trajectory, and repeated momentum, but it also serves to make the stories feel paradoxically ‘safe’ despite the disturbing subject matter.

Those that I personally liked the most were those that dealt with discomfiting family dynamics; the other areas that were explored in the collection impressed me less. The supernatural powers of a cursed painting was fun but wound up where expected and a re-imagining of the Hamlet story and Mozart’s experiences in pre-Victorian England I found a little glib and in the case of the Hamlet pastiche, tedious. While some may find the reinvention of Hamlet as ‘Hammy’ who ‘spent most of his time in amateur dramatics…which is how he acquired the diminutive of his name’ hilarious, I found it off-putting.

There are also self-reflexive parts of the narrative that reference the writer’s dedication to his chosen form such as ‘Was it some kind of crime novel, where the reader is offered information but in a way calculated to mislead?’ And in another tale ‘This was going to be one of those in which the wrong suspect is fitted up for a murder he, or in fact she, didn’t do’.

Overall Rogue’s Gallery is an entertaining package of short stories that makes good light reading but isn’t challenging enough for my taste. My criticism would be that the stories feel burdened by twists that are just a little bit too predictable. Although in some of the stories this predictability throws over the tale a sense of wry humour, in others it feels like it weighs the story down. The collection reads like a series of playful experiments in form where some are more successful than others, but there are genuinely moving moments and passages of great pathos among them. Literary Review says ‘Barnard always makes it look so easy’ and this ease does come across in the writing, but also imbues a lack of depth.

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Fantastique Unfettered #4: Ralewing

In Magazine on February 1, 2012 at 10:00 am

-Reviewed by Annabella Massey-

Fantastique Unfettered, Issue 4

Fantastique Unfettered describes itself in its mission statement as a ‘Periodical of Liberated Literature [which exists] to provide well-written, compellingly readable, original stories of fantasist fiction to readers.’ This is a relatively new print magazine – just a year old – and ‘Ralewing’ is their landmark anniversary issue. Undeniably, the quality of the pieces in Fantastique Unfettered varies hugely, but this is often forgivable in such a young magazine, and the editors certainly seem to have the enthusiasm and commitment required to take this publication further. They already have large-scale plans drawn up for 2012: an issue titled ‘Shakespeare Unfettered’ is on the agenda, as is the launch of an Aether Age e-zine (www.aether-age.com).

The introductions inform us that death is the theme of ‘Ralewing’, although the significance of this doesn’t shine through in any distinctive way. The featured writers don’t fundamentally lack imagination, but many of the pieces would benefit from some strict rewriting. Some of the poems, in particular, feel like first drafts and they risk coming across as unnecessarily grandiose or even juvenile. For example, Dan Campbell’s ‘‘cubus’ begins in an understated enough manner (‘the eyes are all I have’), but the monologue grows more unsubtle and more unsurprising the longer the speaker waxes on:

‘I want.

and I will have.

they say, while I watch

them writhe, that I am tender,

that I yield when I ought

be firm, withhold

when I should pay.’

Like Campbell, many of these writers have a penchant for fairy-tale creatures, mythological beings and folklore-ish elements (see ‘Three Tales of the Devil’s Wife’ by Carmen Lau), but these figures and themes often feel underdeveloped and their implementation rather derivative. The genre hasn’t always been inverted, transcended or made new. Instead, it often seems to be a limitation in itself, and a number of these authors fall back on irregular archaisms or haphazardly inflated language: ‘“I can sell anything,” he said, the words a statement of fact, not remotely braggadocio or hubris.’ (Alma Alexander, ‘The Butterfly Collection of Miss Letitia Willoughby Forbes’). That said, the terse dystopia laid out in ‘The Bachorum Principal’ by Brenda Stokes Barron is economic and compelling:

‘Tenant #1: Numerica shall be a land of remembering and forgetting. […] I catalogue their sour kisses in my mind like our ancestors recorded dates of birth in moleskin journals and hand-me-down Bibles.’

Georgina Bruce’s short story, ‘Mr. White Umbrella’, also stands out—it’s direct, sharp and well edited, with an understated self-awareness that some of the other pieces can lack (though on a minor note, I’m not keen on the ‘Some time… One time… Another time… Lots of times…’ tags which begin each new section of the story):

‘The problem with Kiko is she thinks she’s some kind of a hero, with her big spiky black pigtails, enormous desert boots and stripey Alice tights.’

In this issue of Fantastique Unfettered, it’s the interviews and discussions that are conducted with particular flair. Alexandra Seidel speaks to three writers (Hal Duncan, Brent Weeks and Mike Allen) in depth, displaying a very real and comprehensive knowledge of their works and always asking focused and pertinent questions. The editors made an excellent decision in retaining the length of the responses instead of condensing them down into clichéd sound-bites: the authors give personable, entertaining and perceptive replies, and this section of the magazine is certainly worth a close read. Duncan’s standpoints may not be to everyone’s liking, but he is undeniably incisive and wonderfully eloquent:

‘[A] poet is anyone who writes poems, and a poem is any linguistic construct presented as a poem, exploiting potential import effects besides those covered under the rubric of semantics. That should allow for even the most experimental and conceptual approaches; and if it doesn’t I’m more than happy to broaden it.’

In Duncan’s own short story, ‘Sons of the Law’, the opening narrator pieces together a fragmented saloon tale out of scraps he finds in his grandfather’s old manuscripts and journalistic notes: ‘The Wild West was born where fact ends and fantasy begins’. Different voices then take up the telling: the showgirl, the slave, the drifter, the killer, and so on. For Duncan, ‘The Wild West is the pre-eminent mythscape of the modern era […] Every wandering gunslinger is an angel in Sodom’, and his wry treatment of the genre and the way he dissects the construction of a legend is offbeat and a lot of gritty fun.

Ultimately, Fantastique Unfettered is a friendly and encouraging platform for authors who flirt with (or fully embrace) genre writing. Some of the contributors rely much more on the conventions of these genres than others, but the magazine will hopefully develop and improve the longer it stays in production. What’s more, it’s uniquely informative: the interviews are insightful, and one could come away with an extensive reading list after flicking through this publication. William Browning Spencer, Hope Mirrlees, Thomas Ligotti, Søren Kierkegaard and G.K.Chesterton, among others, are all alluded to at various points; Fantastique Unfettered knows its audience well and tailors its recommendations accordingly. If the overall quality of the creative content were to be brought up to scratch, this publication could easily become a valuable resource for both writers and fans of the fantastical.

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Tongue Fu @ Rich Mix 12/01/2012

In Performance Poetry on January 28, 2012 at 5:12 pm

-reviewed by Paul Askew-

Tongue Fu‘s concept: Invite writers to perform with a live band improvising along.

I’ll admit I was somewhat dubious, as my only previous encounter of such a thing was on a late night BBC2 live jazz series in the mid 1990′s, when the presenter performed some “jazz poetry” while improvising with his piano trio. It was cringeworthy, and this is when I was a teenager, writing and enjoying cringeworthy poetry myself (come on, you all did that too, don’t pretend you didn’t), so for me to not like it then, it must’ve been REALLY bad.

And that was the image I had in my head when I tried to imagine what this gig was going to be like.

The noticeable and crucial thing though, the music worked.

(Here’s how they do it. Before each piece the performer has a brief chat with the band to tell them the themes, or what kind of thing they’d like the band to play. The musicians, clearly very competent improvisers, almost always end up playing something that fits what’s being performed.)

Tongue Fu is hosted by Chris Redmond, who started the night off with a “Prayer” poem that started in outer space and ended in the room we were in, hoping for the best from the night’s performers.

The First Half:

  •   Tim Clare. His first poem was about being drunk and trying to make people like you. It was a witty account of the kind of things we’ve all done when that boozed up little voice in your head says things like “Hey, you know what would be a great idea? Get your knob out and dip it in that guy’s pint. Yeah, that’ll impress them!” It was “Aren’t we all ridiculous,” rather than “Oh, woe is me,” which kept it funny.
  • He followed it with a poem about how we should all be kinder to ourselves that started off sounding like the Baz Luhrmann song “Everybody’s Free To Wear Sunscreen,” but became more unhinged as it went on. This was cleverly mirrored by the music becoming looser and less structured, which shows how good Tongue Fu’s concept is when it gets it right.
  • Tongue Fu’s poet in residence, Shane Solanki was next. He did a fairly long retelling of the nativity that reminded me of John Lennon’s poetry, he took a familiar tale and replaced words for comic or political effect (the three wise men became women, Thursday became “Parklife by Blur-day,” etc.). It switched between being an amusing, modernised version of the familiar story, and an anti-war political commentary.
  • I have to say, if it hadn’t been for the accompanying music, I would’ve probably found it a tad annoying and a bit too long, but as Solanki wrote it specifically for this night, with the intention of it being set to music, it worked well. Another point scored for the Tongue Fu concept.
  • Malika Booker finished off the first half: her first, described as a “Homage to Brixton”, was a straightforward depiction of everyday city life with dub backing from the band. It sounded like a Linton Kwesi Johnson track, in a good way.
  • The next poems were tributes to her family. The first, a dream in which she performs with some dead relatives in the audience before they all have dinner together, was a tad clichéd for my liking (a flower is used as a metaphor for love, a knife as a metaphor for pain). The second, about trying to restore the faith an aunt has lost while in hospital, was far more original and interesting.

The Second Half:

  • Began with Chris Redmond doing a poem about the time he got his own poo in his eye. No, really. It was like a formal poetry version of a Judd Apatow film. It went down a storm.
  • Malika Booker returned with a poem about the strength of women through the generations of her family, and was the first rare instance of the music not working.
  • This was followed by a poem constructed of quotes from her mother. It did an old trick well: starting humorous before a well judged switch in tone, which led to a poignant ending.
  • Tim Clare came back with a poem/rant against teenagers, both now and when he was a teen.
  • Then the highlight of the night: a series of hip-hop verses as various famous women from history. It was very cleverly done and hilarious.
  • Last act of the night was Martin Shaw. A storyteller, rather than a poet, he finished the night off with an extended myth-like tale, which starts as a deal-with-the-devil story before following the daughter of said deal maker in some sort of I’ve-gone-mad-because-my-Dad-cut-my-hands-off-and-I’ve-lived-in-a-forrest-for-years-and-oh-look-a-king’s-going-to-fall-in-love-with-me. Then the king goes off to war, she has a baby, Devil comes back to shake things up, they separately end going to the same pub (years apart form each other, of course). Then they get married. Then her hands grow back.
  • (Then I bit my own hands off out of sheer boredom. Seriously. I’m typing this review with bleeding stumps, but it’s okay. I’ll just find a pub full of people from all the stories ever told in the world and then somehow they’ll just grow back. No biggie.)
  • This story should be rewritten as a novel. Or even a novella. Then there would be enough space to properly deal with everything that comes up. As it is, Martin tries to fit too much into too short a time and it comes across as scrappy and half baked. This wasn’t helped by him stopping the band every minute or so, which just served to highlight the lack of narrative flow.
  • It split opinion in the audience though. Some seemed to really enjoy it, some left while he’d been performing.

Overview

  • As Chris Redmond said at the beginning, the night itself is an experiment. And sadly, that means it won’t always work. On the whole, the night really won me over: the central idea of spoken word with live improv backing gave it a unique feel, and the charisma of the other performers had made it really fun. I would definitely say that this is a night worth going to.
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