Reviews of the Ephemeral

Archive for the ‘anthology’ Category

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Overheard: Stories To Read Aloud (ed. Jonathan Taylor)

In anthology, Saboteur Awards, Short Stories on May 21, 2013 at 3:00 pm

-Reviewed by Richard T. Watson-

The earliest stories were told through word-of-mouth, and passed on with slight variations by being told over and again to new generations. Imagine narrating to groups of rapt listeners, probably huddled round a fire in their cave, hoping the power of the spoken word can hold back the terrors of the night. These were tales to make sense of the world around early mankind, told simply and in a way that connects with something basic and primitive inside us. Salt’s anthology Overheard: Stories to Read Aloud aims to reconnect with that spoken heritage, and asks a scattering of modern writers to contribute their stories in the good old style.

Overheard Jonthan Taylor

That’s not to say that Overheard‘s stories are fairy tales or myths for the campfire. Nor are there Homeric epics or tales spread out over a thousand and one nights. But like our fireside storyteller, there’s an awareness of the ‘physical power of words’ (in the anthology that opens with a quote from Edgar Allen Poe’s The Power of Words) The focus is on clear, linear narratives, strong focal characters with a clear voice and stories short enough to read aloud to an audience without them getting restless.

Overheard offers a punchy read, with a lot of short, sharp stories from some writers who’re on top of their game. Some are snappy, bitesize, only a page or so, while others take some more chewing. But all of them draw the reader into a contained world, leave their mark, and then move on. And in case you missed the place of the anthology in the oral tradition, editor Jonathan Taylor has arranged the stories in sections with names like Crying Stories, Singing Stories and Whispering Stories.

There are sincere stories of family heartache and support (Sara-Mae Tuson‘s ‘Ill Angels Haunt Me’, Gemma Seltzer‘s ‘My Sister Like This’ or Kate Pullinger’s ‘Estranged and Unanticipated’), alongside the Kafka-esque transformation of PJ Carnehan’s ‘A Changed Man’ – a transformed man who wishes he’d only turned into a beetle – and the fantastical in Catherine Rogers’ folklore-inspired ‘The Derby Poet’ or the downright odd narrator of ‘Frank’ by Claire Baldwin.

Despite Overheard‘s Western bias, there are some stories from elsewhere. In ‘Good Advice is Better than Rubies’, Salman Rushdie contributes a lovingly-constructed depiction of the Tuesday Women at India’s British Consulate, and evokes the dusty India where the rules are there but not always obeyed and the people get by in the gaps between them. Hanif Kureshi‘s ‘Weddings and Beheadings’ offers a different take on the viral beheading videos which so often finish off hostage-takings in the Middle East, and is both uncomfortable and fascinating.

There’s Adam Roberts‘ sci-fi hymn in rhyming couplets, ‘McAuley’s Hymn’, which blends an element of mystical devotion with a touching story of personal loss and sacrifice in a universe at once familiar and yet unique. In just a few pages, Roberts creates his world and, in the space of a single human soul, dramatises the age-old battle between religious morality and science. Religious devotion is taken to a more disturbing extreme by the narrator in Jane Holland‘s ‘The Cell’, which beautifully evokes the isolation of a nun’s cell and her gradual descent into either madness or anther spiritual plane. Rather beautifully, Holland lets the reader see this as both a loss of health and also an outcome to be desired and welcomed.

As with the best short stories, some of the strongest moments in Overheard come when writers drop hints but leave their reader (or listener, of course) to fill in the blanks. For example, Taylor’s own short and sweet ‘Synesthetic Schmidt’ does an excellent job of expressing its character’s long-held guilt, beautifully capturing the physical sensation and effects, giving just enough clues without spoiling it with explicit explanation.

With such a strong line-up of writers assembled, a mix of well-known and less well-known names, Taylor presents a quality anthology. As well as those already mentioned, there are entries from Ian McEwan, Blake Morrison, Louis De Bernières, Tania Hershman (author of Saboteur 2013-nominated My Mother Was An Upright Piano) and Joel Lane (whose own collection we’ve reviewed here).

The oral tradition pre-dates the development of writing, so it seems surprising that there aren’t more books like Overheard. We’re used to the idea of poetry being performed out loud and brought to life off the page; less so with prose stories. But with the increasing number of spoken word events across the country, performances of prose are becoming more popular and Overheard is unlikely to be the last such publication.

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‘Rhyming Thunder’ ed. by James Bunting and Jack Dean

In anthology, Saboteur Awards on May 6, 2013 at 2:53 pm

-Reviewed by Billy Mills-

 rhymingthunder

It has long been my opinion that editor introductions to anthologies should consist of a single sentence, something along the lines of ‘here are some poems I like’. However, it seems that this is not an acceptable option; publishers need to sell books and editors to justify their inclusions and exclusions, so claims have to be made and cases put forward. When the anthology presents a new generation of young poets, these claims and cases tend to revolve about the sins of their elders and the new thing the poets bring to the art of verse. It’s a tendency as old as poetry itself, I suppose.

In James Bunting’s introduction to Rhyming Thunder, the elders are identified as ‘Oxbridge professors with elbow patches’ and editors of anthologies of young poets where young means ‘born since 1970’ (the poets in this anthology appear to have been born after 1985, and many post 1990). It’s not difficult to sympathise with these complaints; far too may anthologies you pick up nowadays read like the products of university staffrooms, down to biographies of the poets that amount to lists of the prizes they have been shortlisted for, the MFA programmes they graduated from and the colleges they have taught at. It’s almost as if the editors and poets lack the confidence required to allow the writing to stand by itself without this kind of supportive scaffolding. In Rhyming Thunder, on the other hand, the bios list Slams won, festivals read at and TV and radio broadcasts featuring the poet in question. There are even some references to distinctly non-radical readings in Downing Street and Buckingham Palace. Why, it’s almost as if…

These biographical notes also point towards the ‘new thing’ that is being claimed for this generation; they are all oral or performance poets. They represent, again according to Bunting’s introduction, ‘a surge in poets getting up onto stages and reciting poems like monologues’.  Jack Dean then goes on to claim that ‘by saying them out loud’ these poets ‘tried to make words exciting for their own sakes again’. As the blurb says, Bunting and Dean ‘made them write down the poems they were making with their mouths’. This is an anthology of oral poetry which, we are asked to believe, has been translated to the almost alien medium of print.

Now, call me out of touch if you like, but I seem to have missed the day when words stopped being exciting for their own sakes; nobody takes up poetry because they find language dull. More seriously, the claim that performance is a new poetic device that the Slam generation invented is about as reasonable as the notion that teenagers invented sex. There is no question that live events have helped poetry reach a new audience in recent years. However, few Slams have matched the scale of the 1965 International Poetry Incarnation in the Royal Albert Hall. I can’t but wonder how many of today’s oral poets will ever reach the kind of audiences the Mersey Sound gang touched through their books, performances and musical annexes The Scaffold and Grimms. I’m also inclined to wonder how many Oxbridge professors were in the Royal Albert Hall audience or cut their poetic teeth on organiser Michael Horovitz’s Children of Albion anthology. To be fair, Horovitz does get a name-check in one of the bios in Rhyming Thunder and festival ‘star’ Allen Ginsberg is mentioned a couple of times, so the poets at least seem aware of this heritage.

It seems a pity to spend so much of this review discussing the presentation of the work rather than the work itself, but the paradox of the poetry anthology as a genre is that it both points to and distracts from a body of poetry. And with Rhyming Thunder it’s a shame that the distractions are so blatant because there is some very interesting poetry hidden away between the somewhat overstated claims of introductions and blurb.

For those readers who are not familiar with the rules and conventions of Slam poetry there are certain surface textures that have to be assimilated before the words on the page can be enjoyed for themselves. There can be a certain verbosity to some of the writing that probably reflects the different requirements of the ear and the eye when confronted with information-rich text. Also, the facility to rhyme, that most dangerous of gifts for the young poet to be cursed with, is positively encouraged by the need to grab the ears of an easily-distracted audience. Ultimately, however, these are neither more artificial nor more natural than the conventions of the sonnet or the haiku.

There isn’t space in a review to give full attention to all the twenty one poets included, so what follows is a very subjective list of highlights. Rob Auton writes shortish poems with the wit and charm of a young Roger McGough.

Bacon

Francis Bacon and Kevin Bacon are rashers from a very talented pig
The pig could paint
The pig could act
The pig was a genius as a matter of fact

Deanna Rodger’s 22NOW captures the romance of the Routemaster bus and the breathless excitement of teenage nights on the town with acuity.

We move in a cloud of impulse
Wearing inside out blazers
Because we are fresh princesses free from an all lady posh school

Jodi Ann Bickley’s prose poems represent an interesting contrast to the rap-inspired rhythms and occasionally over-easy rhyming of some of the other work here.

We sat in silence. Not because we had nothing to say – we both had so much to say but we knew anything we said – nothing could change.

Zaru Jonson’s PAINTBRUSH is Beat fun.

“my PAINTbrush AINT
crushed nobody’s soul”
he said;
banglehand
banginonna
dustbin lid

The three poems by Raymond Antrobus seem to me to be the most fully achieved body of work in the book, as exemplified by these lines from his INTERROGATING DEPRESSION.

Before you hit the garden party
consider your mood –
is it a water can
or a bad cloud?
You’re doing your best
to feel like the right weather.

In fact, I found things to enjoy and admire in all of the poets in Rhyming Thunder, to one degree or another, and at the end I was left with a definite sense of a common or shared approach to writing that unifies the very individual voices of these twenty one poets. Once you start reading the work carefully it becomes evident that the primary motivations are narrative and subjective. The majority of the poems in the book are autobiographical, with unproblematic first-person narrators presenting personal anecdotes about relationships and the facts of the quotidian lives of sensitive young urban Britons. In this, at least, they are not too far removed from much of the poetry you might find in an Oxbridge professor’s anthology, once you allow for the different worlds the two groups inhabit. However, the Rhyming Thunder poets write with far greater energy and commitment than most of their better-reared academic cousins, and their poetry, while perhaps not signalling the kind of revolution that the editors might wish for, certainly represents a clear alternative to the dreary conformity that characterises far too much contemporary verse.

It’s nice for a change to read poetry by young writers who aren’t trying to be old before their time. And despite this old man’s cynicism it is, of course, important that young writers continue to get excited about poetry’s possibilities as an art form. It is clear that these poets are and their excitement is infectious. It is a pity that the book isn’t accompanied by a CD of their performances so that readers like the present reviewer, who are not in a position to attend events in the UK on a regular basis, might get some idea of the full range of their gifts. As it is, Rhyming Thunder is a well-produced introduction to a world of poetry that cannot be ignored and deserves to be taken seriously and Burning Eye are to be commended for publishing it. Will it make poetry more popular than Eastenders? I doubt it. But that doesn’t matter.

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‘Catching the Barramundi’ by Rebecca Burns

In anthology on May 4, 2013 at 1:15 pm

 -Reviewed by Adrian Slatcher-

The stories in Rebecca Burns’ debut collection Catching the Barramundi are primarily focused on the moments of realisation in her characters’ lives, where memories from their past or unacknowledged secrets break out and confront them. The stories are set in a variety of locations, though with a clutch of stories set in a rural Australian outback, and others with a Scottish setting and often focus on loners, waifs and strays. This isolation is often deliberate, or a result of where their life has taken them. So in the title story the protagonist, Connie, is isolated after her husband has died, and not immune to the arrival of a new man into her environment. In ‘The Intruder’, a woman has gone into self-exile (and become mute) in avoidance of the horrors of her past, that are now about to come back and haunt her. Elsewhere, characters are stuck in grim towns, returning there because of illness or divorce, or simply to see what has decayed since they last visited. Whether in Scotland or Australia she is interested in those communities that have been left behind by progress.

Though not consciously themed, there is a clear pattern to much of her writing, where landscape is used to evoke our own emotional landscape, and where her protagonists are almost without exception damaged by difficult lives. Yet though there is misery here, they are not ‘misery memoirs’; the stories are often focused on moments of acceptance, realization or even transcendence. That the problems they have aren’t necessarily resolved at that point, but have reached some moment of recognition or crisis, seems central to her writing. The writing at its best has a certain luminous clarity, at one with the desolate landscapes, though at times the lack of specific detail flattens our engagement with these landscapes.

Catching the Barramundi Rebecca Burns

Reading these stories I was struck at first by their somewhat traditional nature, in that tales of isolation and fracture are a mainstay of a certain type of (usually American) realism. In other words, that familiar tradition – perhaps seen most recently in the writing of someone like E. Annie Proulx – means that the writer has to be at the top of their game. In half a dozen of these stories, Burns achieves that; where sparse detail enables the lives of the characters to be made real with just a few words. None of the stories are long, perhaps indicating the contemporary (often online) market for stories like this, but Burns manages to provide enough meaning for the key images of the stories to stay with the reader beyond the page.

Less successful, I felt, were those stories that seemed closer to reminisces; looking back on college years or in one case, showing a love affair from its beginning to its tragic end, through a not entirely convincing male narrator. Burns seems a careful judge of human emotion, but a little less specific when it comes to the physical world around her – more interested in the interior landscape of the characters than the external one. Where this works best is where the landscape seems at one with the lonely characters – in the title story, for instance, in ‘The Intruder’ and in ‘Hades Landing’ where a sports scholarship student returns to the company mining town for one last time after the company has pulled out.

Like a Nick Cave album, every story here seems to have a tragedy at its heart, and this concentration on death and illness does become a little wearing after a while – with several stories focusing on (different) characters suffering from cancer or other illnesses. The lightness of ‘The Mirror Man’ story – where it is only youthful memory that has expired – is therefore more than welcome.

The contemporary short story is being produced in a somewhat crowded field, and a writer can either work within the tradition or try and step outside of it. Burns is very much within the tradition, and in her best stories her carefully structured vignettes on the loneliness of the human condition hold up. ‘The Intruder’, which was longlisted for the Pushcart Prize, in particular, is her work at its very best. Where the stories are a little more humdrum – the kids in the garden of ‘The Night of the Fox’ for instance – I was yearning for some of the precise uniqueness of Lorrie Moore or Helen Simpson, who can use the finest details to elevate a seemingly tiny piece of someone’s life to a higher pitch.

Throughout the stories, Burns is careful to show, not to tell, but almost always has a design on the reader that doesn’t leave a lot of room for interpretation. The excellent final story, ‘Painting the Hay Bales’, stands out in this company for leaving the story’s poignancy unspoken. It’s an interesting, coherent and well structured debut, published by an Australian press, and where all of the stories have been published online or in magazines. Its shortlisting for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize is a testimony to its qualities. I can imagine certain readers enjoying its control and precision immensely; if I had some doubts it’s because when she gets it right, the terse style and controlled narrative fit so well together that I noticed those stories that fell a little short.

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Front Lines Anthology

In anthology, Saboteur Awards on April 28, 2013 at 1:30 pm

-Reviewed by Nick Sweeney-

The stories are introduced as interpretations of ‘modern society’ conveying foreboding, dreams and apprehension. I think that one way of gauging decent writing is to see how well it reflects its socio-political environment (among other criteria, of course) and to my mind these stories do the job more than well. They are also well-written and entertaining.

Front Lines Valley Press reviewed by Nick Sweeney

Editor Dan Formby’s ‘Dead Stone’ opens the collection. The eloquent language, and the feel of the story, is reminiscent of Dostoevsky, which sets up certain expectations in the reader. His narrator sketches his initial journey:

I would not say that the exploration I undertook was much of an adventure. It did not require the traversing of treacherous chasms or unknown lands, but it was exactly what I wanted it to be; a removal of society from my life – or at least, the society that I was a part of and had come to deplore.

There is a sure hint of Raskolnikov in his seeking to escape from ‘a country at the height of vulgarity’. The narrator’s life among the homeless, and his meeting with a self-styled leader of homeless men, who speaks verging on the flourish of an orator, also takes the reader into the short stories of Franz Kafka, and Kafka’s often anonymous characters’ search for a self that cannot exist in the world around them.

It works very well on an allegorical level, although the story remains open-ended, leaving the reader wondering, and with the option to decide what might happen next.

The main character in Felice Howden’s accomplished ‘Stop Gap’ is in transit in small-town Britain after a visit to the US. His encounter with a kid in a run-down pub has a genuine sense of foreboding to it. There is a telling moment of chill when Roger realises that he ‘had nowhere else to be until the next day, and the kid’s eyes were suggesting something deadly that roused a sharp interest in Roger’s mind.’ The story imposes a kind of helplessness on the reader, as well as on Roger. It is full of sharply-drawn characters, instantly visible, unforgettable: a boy with ‘blonde hair and a jaw that could slice through stone… shudders like a mirage’, another vomits, looks up ‘with eyes like black holes in his head’, and a big guy is ‘laughing, scared’. Since Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, it’s difficult for any writer to come up with a new take on the stoner household, but Felice Howden achieves it with great verve.

One of the themes running through David Whelan’s ‘Viral Marketing’ is the western world’s voluntary entrapment by tools that we should be controlling, such as TV and computers. It also focuses on the sometimes strange relationships between people who meet in cyberspace, in this case while rivals in a bidding war. The losers decide to meet in real life:

The next to enter was a woman. She told him her name was Norton and that she wasn’t particularly good at conversation.
‘Conversation?’ Rupert asked.
‘Yeah – you know, talking. I prefer to write. It’s hard to say what you mean, but it’s easier to write it.’

Norton is a gem of a character, her meeting with Rupert one of the best scenes in the story, which cements the senses of fracture and dislocation – a disturbing scene, rendered with expertise and understatement. In other stories within the story, a man undergoes the paradoxical scene of a shared experience – watching a football match in a pub along with a roomful of football fans – in which nobody shares anything, as nobody is aware of anybody else. Whelan has nailed the condition of many people in our modern, western life in these scenes; most of his characters have become desensitised to whatever might have once seemed normal. Nobody has done it to them; they have used those tools that could be a boon to destroy themselves in this way and to lose what people may once have called their souls. This motif reminded me of Greek myths and, of course, the misuse of the free will given to people in Christian mythology.

That’s not all that is going on in this multi-layered story – there is the encroachment of America into the Middle East, China’s taking on of the western world, and the small matter of nuclear war. There is also an anxiety about the world’s scarcity of water, and, of course, the greed for it as for any scarce commodity. Whelan is addressing the fears of our times here, a big ambition for a short story. And he pulls it off; the black humour lifts it soaring beyond po-faced environmentalism or up-itself sci-fi.

You have to feel sorry for Malcolm in James Mcloughlin’s ‘This Hopeless War’, chained outside Liverpool Crown Court to hassle passers-by in protest at the incarceration of his brother, Justin, convicted of manslaughter after a trial by media. His protest, emotional and rather romantic, soon becomes that staple of British life, the ‘town centre nuisance’.

The words made sense to him, through the fog of injustice; he just couldn’t render them into any sort of coherence for others, so he had become a joke, scorched by the burning belief inside and the twisted image out.

It is this lack of coherence that is one of the pitfalls of translating emotion to protest; what can be a good idea in principle can go wrong when it is executed. But worse, there is the apathy which follows when novelty wears off, leaving Malcolm ‘at the mercy of his own estrangement from society’.

Ryan Whittaker’s ‘Climb’ is full of haunting images, framed in an expedition up Everest, which stands as a challenge to mountaineers, a religious focus for the Nepalese, and, ultimately, a graveyard, studded with decomposed bodies still wearing designer sunglasses and cold-weather jackets, with heart rate monitors blinking out a steady zero. It is also the search for a lost son, and a lost relationship.

On the same theme, Nathan Ouriach’s ‘Patrick’ traces a relationship to a phrase that sums up its seeming decline: ‘Looking back at the bed I see she has dribbled on my pillow. I used to think it was sweet but now it is just her saliva on my pillow.’ This tale is made up of such statements, putting the reader immediately into the story.

I’ve heard rumours of the short story’s demise ever since I started reading them, but on the evidence of this collection, it’s alive and well, and it’s good, and a relief, to see it in the hands of writers so young and talented.

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Sculpted: Poetry of the North West (ed. L. Holland and A. Topping)

In anthology, Saboteur Awards on April 17, 2013 at 8:12 am

-Reviewed by Laura Seymour-

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As David Morley writes in his introduction, this new anthology explores ‘the possibility of place and language, of reinvention after annihilation’. He may well have added that it explores the challenges of indestructibility, and the ways in which the past can reinvent the present rather than the other way around. Edited by Lindsey Holland and Angela Topping, almost every page of Sculpted has something wonderful on it.

A rich anthology, filled with so many accomplished poems presenting multifarious viewpoints on the North West, Sculpted is impossible to completely capture in a short review. One thing that struck me, though, is the various contributors’ preoccupation with what is at once the stony or the mineral and the bygone. From the nugget of coal in the hand to the teetering built environment dominated by rickety pleasure beaches and piers, the world presses urgently against the bodies of the people in Sculpted. In my favourite image of living flesh melting away to become the thinnest recording layer of the hard world, V.A. Sola Smith writes ‘kids press themselves like graffiti / or blood against the alley walls’.

The image of the fossil crops up with a striking frequency in Sculpted as a symbol of the power of the past to mould the contours of the present, and of the dead and gone to trammel the living body: ‘This fossil alters the shape of my palm / Flesh moulds to its mineral hardness’, writes Sarah James, encapsulating this theme of the anthology. Evolution, fossils, ancient trees and other relics, and ancestors as remote as grandparents and close as the Lindow man are constantly re-envisaged in this volume. They appear to demand a nostalgic response from the various poets, a response which is sometimes given whole heartedly and sometimes uneasily refused.

Given the stony focus of many of the poems in Sculpted, it is wonderful to find some concrete poetry in there too. In ‘Leander Swims the Mersey’, for example, Stephen Waling parts the verse in two to create a visual effect of two separate banks with crossings between. Moreover, far from being a mere object, the rock speaks back in one of Jan Dean’s poems towards the end of the volume: ‘and the hill said, the slab stones said / you made a hole in me…’.

Sculpted is often playful in its subject matter. David Seddon almost provides a microcosm of the volume as a whole when he clutches ‘a museum ticket, a kiss-me-quick hat / a cloth cap/ a silk purse/ coal’ together in his grasp. In one of the first poems in the anthology, Richard Barrett writes a love poem to a post box. The post box, he concludes, will last as a material trace of epistolary culture even in the days of digital hyperconnectivity: ‘But you/ You will live forever’, he assures it.

Sculpted itself is a fossil record, a preservation of an exciting moment in the history of writing in the North West. It is a book to treasure wherever you are from. An offspring of the West Country, I peered northwards in delight.

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Still Anthology

In anthology, Saboteur Awards on April 15, 2013 at 3:15 pm

 -Reviewed by Adrian Slatcher-

For my English O Level, one of the creative writing options was to write a story based on a picture that had been supplied. Though I didn’t know it at the time, I chose Vincent Van Gogh’s Bedroom in Arles. A picture doesn’t necessarily just say a thousand words, but can also inspire them.

That is the principle, at least, behind Still, the beautifully-produced debut publication from Negative Press. The photographer Roelof Baker had exhibited a series of photographs of the ‘vacated interior spaces at Hornsey Town Hall’ and the book sees the writer Andrew Blackman, who had blogged about the exhibition, inviting a wide range of short story writers to choose a photograph from the series and write a story about it. Unsurprisingly, writers of the calibre of Richard Beard, David Rose and Evie Wyld leapt at the chance.

Still Anthology reviewed by Adrian Slatcher

Contemporary photography has had an abiding fascination with abandoned spaces almost as a counterpoint to the developer-led regeneration of our inner cities. The abandoned building offers an adult artist the chance to delve down a rabbit hole of the imagination and see what he can find there. The civic building is particularly interesting to photographers, as denuded of their purpose, what is actually left? Roelof’s photographs are aware of the contradictions of the project and themselves suggest stories. We tend to think of the past in black and white, but Barker’s photographs are in a gloriously flat colour, the dark woods and bright paints of the interior hinting at a municipal pride even now the building itself is decaying. He places found objects in particular scenes – an old telephone on a council worker’s desk; a maintenance sign on a door handle – taking it away from the purely documentary.

The stories themselves are highly varied as you might expect, though a surprising number find poetry in the possible drab narratives of long forgotten municipal administrators. Mark Piggott’s opener ‘Midnight Hollow’ is a perfect start, as an ex-worker borrows the keys to his old work place as it’s due for demolition, and in an act of monkish devotion polishes the floors for one last time. In an era of casual labour and outsourcing this sense of civic pride is both sad and inspiring. The twenty-six stories in here are sometimes the shortest of snippets, sometimes longer, and are split between those which offer up literal interpretations of the photographs and the old building and those which use the picture as a jumping off point. Nina Kilham’s ‘My Wife, the Hyena’ follows the office worker home to his unusual domestic arrangements whilst Claire Massey’s ‘In the Dressing Room Mirror’ uses the image of the dressing room to tell a dark fairy story of a mirror that steals part of the person who looks in it. I particularly liked Dutch writer Jan Van Mersbergen’s first English language story ‘Pa-Dang’ which takes an image of a locked door as the inspiration for a story about an autistic man visiting his family.

Even those stories which stay in the mundane world of the municipal building have jumps of surrealism about them and I think it’s a testimony to Barker’s photographs which are not so much about documenting a forgotten building, as energising our memories of vacated spaces. James Miller’s future history ‘From the Archive’ looks back ironically on a picture of the council chamber and offer misinterpretations of our contemporary culture in the manner of Will Self’s The Book of Dave, complete with comprehensive footnotes.

Although I’ve mentioned just a few of the stories, I think it’s fair to say that Still works as whole, with the stories never overwhelming the images but offering a meta-narrative to the whole project. Some of the shorter pieces – such as those by Evie Wyld and S.L. Grey – take merely a couple of pages, and act almost as gnomic captions to the photographs; sketches for the reader to build their own interpretations on top of. The book itself is a beautiful paperback, clear white paper, great reproductions of the photographs, and a clean design that encourages repeated browsing.

Obviously the book will be of interest to anyone who likes some of the writers included. But fans of contemporary photography and those with an interest in our neglected modernist heritage will also find much to enjoy in this elegantly assembled collection.

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Estuary: a Confluence of Art & Poetry, ed. H. Lawler, A. Marton

In anthology, Saboteur Awards on April 13, 2013 at 11:57 am

 -Reviewed by Ananya S Guha-

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The basic tenet of Estuary is a synecdoche for the arts, a confluence, convergence or meeting point of art work and poetry. The editors point this out in the brief introduction, taking pains to explain literally what an estuary is, the meeting points of the river and the sea. This ‘explanation’ sets the trend for the metaphorical meaning of the texts and the art work. The fusion of art work and poetry is not uncommon these days, with literay zines using such aesthetic compulsions effectively and if one may say so, profitably. However, it is unusual to see it achieved as thoughtfully as is the case here, with art and poetry given the same amount of respect and, through their placement side by side on the page, forcing the viewer to find echoes of each other in the pieces.

The poems in this anthology are highly sensory, tainted by a deep coloration and sensuousness that brings out nuances between the real and the ideal, the make belief or the mythic, as contrasted with the real. There is a recurring imagistic use of shores, water, mirages, washing, etc in the poems which bind them into a thematic unity. The poems ‘Sand Dollar’, ‘From the Country, Sonnets from the Sea 18’etc  typify such recurrent symbols, once again holding on to the estuary theme even if it be in a loose manner.

In line with the theme, a number of poems re-employ the anthology’s title, beginning with the opening  poem, Kathleen Jones’ ‘The Estuary’, in which she explores the estuary as a preserver of memory, hoping her footprints will ‘last a few millennia / slowly fossilising / into bedrock’. However, Jones’ estuary is no peaceful or picturesque scene, its sludge is ‘deceitful’, ‘A boat has been drowned / in it’, while the sea is ‘too withdrawn / for conversation’.

In contrast, one of the end poems by Aad de Gids entitled: ‘Estuary Barcode Scanning’ takes a different approach, with a prose poem: ‘estuary // as if the fingers are forked within each other two flows of energy meeting a sea and a river meet’. It’s a dense poem, storing, not unlike a barcode itself, a wealth of information. Facing it is Hego Goevert’s artwork ‘Deus Ex Machina I’, which has a slight steampunk aesthetic with its gold pattern (mimicking wiring), and a fragility emphasized by the erasure of the design. Where de Gids’ work may be deemed alienating, Goevert’s complexity invites further observation, throwing the words in the shadows.

Elsewhere, the pairing of artist and poet seems like a more comfortable synthesis. Pippa Little’s ‘Zones of Convergence’ asks:

‘What washes up on different shores?
You walk with your camera, I walk with mine:
Orange globes, nets and lines, hasps, rusted pulleys,’

Little’s list of detritus has its shining moments, ‘the sea for all its muscle cannot swallow’ the trash it has been given. To which, Mark Erikson’s ‘Dusted Beans and Broken Beams’, shows the same interest in casting the lens of observation on the minutiae of the everyday. Little writes ‘our seas are strange to one another’, and yet here, artwork and writing collide in harmony.

Throughout the art work there are many such examples of finely tuned emotions in consonance with the jugglery of poetry. These pairings are the highlight of the book as they lead the poet to seek the hidden rationale for both poetry and painting.  It is exactly this dialectic which gives the book its finely tuned talent of merging poetry and illusory truths with the graphics of art whether it is photography and digital art, or painting in acrylic or for that matter ink and paper. The range of the work is astonishing to view, like a riot of colours. One stand-out, Katerina Dramitinou’s ‘You Have no Idea How Early they Wake Up’, which uses photography and digital art, is an astonishing play of inner sensibilities contrasting with empirical realities of nature.

Estuary is a narrative of poems; I call them narratives beause each individual poem tells a story of the self in relation to the outside world. There is a turning inwards in some of the poems, a kind of introspection after the speaker detaches himself/herself from the subject matter. In most cases, there is an emotional distancing from the subject matter that is the object and the narrator, speaker or ‘listener’. Directness is a hallmark here but, at the end of most of the poems, there is a feeling of fogginess, the poet leads the way and the reader is trapped in a cycle of doubts. However, inaccessibility in these poems work to their advantage because at the end of each poem is a beautiful swirling mist, something you would love to see but something also that you cannot penetrate further. Does poetry need such penetration or incision? Reading these poems makes me ask this question and also the eternal question, what are ‘meanings’ in poetry? These poems all have layered structures and the edifice as a whole is monumental. Likewise, the paintings are abstract if not abstruse, but their very texture is finely knit and aesthetically very compact.

Peeling these layers of both poetry and painting has been for me, an exciting and stimulating experience.

 

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Binders full of Women

In anthology, Saboteur Awards on April 7, 2013 at 12:43 am

-Reviewed by Joan Standwick-binders-of-women-image

Binders full of women was originally a limited-edition chapbook edited by Sophie Mayer and Sarah Crewe created in response to Mitt Romney’s ill-advised comment (which now has its own Wikipedia page!) These lovingly glitter-glued chapbooks have now sold-out, but the chapbook is available digitally for free, with the option to donate to two charities, Rape Crisis UK or the Michael Causer Foundation, the original recipients of the money raised by the physical chapbooks. Sophie Mayer and Sarah Crewe are no strangers to creating poetry projects in response to current events, earlier that year they also edited, along with Mark Burnhope, an anthology with PEN in support of Pussy Riot. Since then, Mark Burnhope and Sophie Mayer (along with Daniel Sluman) have launched Fit for Work: Poets against ATOS, a webzine with a focus on disability in all its forms, and a campaigning agenda.

There is no doubt that these are all worthwhile causes, but does it make for good poetry? Poetry that too overtly displays its agenda can be at risk of being preachy, or not slanted enough. Fortunately, Binders full of women is engaging on all levels. First one has to mention the fabulous punk-aesthetic to this chapbook, with its ripped-from-zine images plastered on the cover, and actual mini-rings binding it together. The editor’s foreword is delightfully quirky, a flow-chart of its creation, a  visual brainstorm of its purpose. This sets the tone for the poetry which is by turns funny, experimental, gut-wrenching. Take Sarah Crewe’s opening poem ‘Performance’ which simply, yet effectively, bolds different parts of the word ‘performance’ within its poem:

‘carmela, he bought you a pear. it matches your hips. chimes with your womb in parenthesis. a guns scrapes the wall and the bathtub enamel. your silence is perfect. your acquiesce perpetrates a wife’s anonymity in the script.’

It is a stealthy and deadly method of raging against silent acceptance, that avoids the easy comfortableness of a one-sided depiction.

The subjects vary from intimate moments to large political acts. There is rage at cumulative acts of patriarchal repression, such as the pressure to shave: ‘Tights were not an option, / in the same way that gravity exists’ (Rowena Knight, ‘Razor’). From this theme emerges also Steph Pike’s joyous ‘We Will not be Deodorised’:

‘take your fashion, your body fascism
your plucking and shaving

[…]

we rejoice in fat and muscle and hair
we stink of blood and sweat and piss
we will not be deodorised
we reek of the ocean deep hot hunger of our lovers’ cunts
we will not smell of the sanitised chemistry of your misoginy’

A poem that reminds me of Catechism and indeed it ends ‘we are pussies. we riot’. Chella Quint writes a love poem ‘To the Leaking Girl’, perhaps my favourite poem about periods (and in fact it appears to have been first published in a zine dedicated to menstruation poetry, something else I didn’t know), which sees a girl reclaim an accident and turn it into laughter.

There is darker material too, exploration of unhealthy domestic situations, as in Sarah Hesketh’s ‘The Adulturer Teaches his Wife to Swim’ who writes of her imagining ‘his hands in her hair — / getting the magic out’. Michelle McGrane’s ‘A Girl Like That’ is a brutal depiction of rape culture: ‘the cheeky / cunt had it coming’, as is Jacqueline Saphra’s ‘Spunk’, which rightfully condemns today’s still too prevalent attitude of victim-blaming when it comes to rape.

This is a comforting and discomforting chapbook, in all the right ways. Discomforting enough to make you want to stand up and fight for improvement. Comforting enough that I wish I had been in possession of it as a teenager. This is poetry for chanting and cradling, and long may it live.

 

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‘Long Drawn and Other Random Bits’ by Bradley E Robinson

In anthology on March 2, 2013 at 6:18 pm

-Reviewed by Martin Macaulay-

Long, Drawn and Other Random Bits is a visually arresting collection of self-published short writing by its author and illustrator Bradley E. Robinson. A series of observational pieces, short stories, photos and drawings, it is in the author’s own words a “folio…for the adventures, perceptions, and randomness of a generation…intended to be nothing more than a window of a generation”. Credit to Robinson, the title could lower expectation levels into something resembling, graphically at least, that of a ‘zine but Long Drawn… has higher ambitions. It is a professionally produced collection and I couldn’t help but think Robinson had more than one definition of folio on his mind when he made this available as a free download. Not only does he know his way around desktop publishing but his illustrations are striking, a series of tattoos that (l)ink his words together.

Long Drawn and other random bits

And in his words, despite the undeniability of the ‘random bits’, there are recurring themes or motifs that help pull this folio together: the ebb and flow of friendships, bus journeys, new beginnings, lost endings and bourgeois attempts to limit freedom of choice. Robinson appears to be more at ease with the observational or creative non-fiction elements, but I was suitably impressed with ‘Apre Moi’, a coming-of-age tale that ticks all the requisite check-boxes (drugs, love, study, parents, mates) as well as the not-so-common issue of mental illness, but it does so with a hefty dose of charm, humour and honesty, such as when Onowa’s father ‘confronts’ him about his nightly escapades:

“Are you going through the window, when you go out at night?” he asked me without breaking his
stare from the television…

“Umm…” I replied gauging his cool tranquillity with such an issue.

“Just use the god damn front door next time.”

His other short story ‘The Farmer’ didn’t grab me in quite the same way. I felt it over-reached itself somewhat in its attempt to recreate a futuristic society whilst trying to provide weighty social commentary. But I won’t dwell. It could just be me that didn’t take to it. There’s plenty worth noting elsewhere in Long Drawn… such as ‘The Canadian Memoirs’, a road trip incorporating a series of character sketches. The writing is sharp and here the observational stuff is much less intrusive:

In one carry-on put all your urgent needs for the two-day trip that is about to follow. Sleeping aids are advised.

Robinson’s style is functional. Dipping occasionally into witty, he’s never smart-ass with it. This suits the semi-reportage tone blending in with the photos and Polaroids, more in keeping with a magazine and reinforcing his skater-ethic (which becomes evident in certain stories). There are a few errors strewn throughout the collection but these are not enough to detract from the overall quality of the publication. I’m sure it’s the case that some of this is down to what Bradley E Robinson sets out in his ‘Forward!’, that ‘this haphazard venture…will be lost in translation’ but I did find myself wishing that a bit more care had been taken when choosing certain words. Undoubtedly there are examples where this is intentional, but equally I found occasions where it seemed slightly careless, or if intentional, detracted from the flow of the sentence. This aside it is difficult to criticise something that has been so lovingly crafted and made available for free. Not all the stories were for me, but those that were I enjoyed and it’s clear that Robinson has a natural flair in his ability to navigate his way across the page as he does across the continent.

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Saboteur Awards 2013

In All of the Above, anthology, Interactive Literature, Magazine, Novella, Object, online chapbook, online magazine, Pamphlets, Performance Poetry, Play of Voices, Saboteur Awards on March 1, 2013 at 9:35 am

Your Pick of this Year’s Best Indie Lit!

Nominations are now closed, you can view the shortlist and vote for the winners here. Buy your tickets here.

Once a year, to mark our birthday, we at Sabotage like to give out some awards to the publications we’ve most enjoyed during the year.

In the past this was restricted to magazines, and it was held solely online.

This year, however, we’ve decided to do things a little differently.

First we’ve BLOWN UP [geddit?] the categories to include spoken word shows, anthologies, pamphlets, innovative publishers, your favourite literary one-off, … And secondly, we want you to vote for the winners!

This is going to happen in two parts:

  1. First you’ve got to nominate your favourites, which is where the contact form below comes in handy. Nominations close on 31st March at midnight (UK time).
  2. The very next day, we’ll be posting a shortlist here made up of the top 5 nominees and we’ll open up a round of voting. Voting will close on 1st May at midnight (UK time).

Then, this is the fun part, we are going to have a PARTY on 29th May at the Book Club, London, where we’ll announce the winners. It’s going to be a big celebration of indie lit in all its glory and we’d love it if you could attend. There’ll also be performances, a mini-book fair, music from LiTTLe MACHINe and our very own critique booth. Ticket details will be here soon.

The small print: the works you vote for have to have been created between 30th April 2012 and now. If you’re voting for a publisher or a spoken word event then they have to have produced something during that time frame, ditto for the one-off literary project.

We’ll be showcasing the shortlisted works on Sabotage: if they haven’t been reviewed yet by us, we’ll make sure they are. Winners get to perform at our event, be interviewed for Sabotage (like these guys did), and feel warm and fuzzy inside.  If you’re looking for inspiration, why not plunge into our archives? Here are some reviews of anthologies, magazines, novellas, pamphlets, spoken word nights and poets, objects, … We strongly encourage you to vote for more than one category.

If anything’s unclear, read our FAQ and do ask!

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