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‘Nth Entities’ by Anna Le and Phil Manzanera – Poetry Album Launch

In Pamphlets, Performance Poetry on May 22, 2012 at 11:12 pm

@ The Charterhouse Bar

25/04/2012

- reviewed by James Webster -

On the Collaboration

Mixing poetry with music can be a tricky business. For every resounding success where the music sets off the rhythms and themes of the poetry and vice-versa (such as Kate Tempest’s Sound of Rum or Dizraeli’s Small Gods), there’s a smattering of poems set to music that do little to compliment either medium and seem to exist solely to fulfil the poet’s long-standing desire to be in a band.

Anna Le and Phil Manzanera’s Nth Entities happily slots into the first bracket, with Anna’s poetry roaming and diving through Phil’s rich and diverse music, each highlighting the strengths of the other.

It’s a collaboration born of mutual interests and, perhaps more importantly, mutual friends. Gavin Martin, who introduced the pairing at his ‘Talking Musical Revolutions’ event, gave a warm description of how he had met the two individuals and the part he played in bringing them together. It was a great intro that highlighted the role the various interlinked strings of their lives had started to intertwine (from Anna’s beginnings on the spoken word scene to Phil’s background with Roxy Music), making the collaboration seem the easiest and most natural thing, whilst also gently reminding us of all the little turns their careers had taken to bring about this album.

The Evening

The Charterhouse was packed, full of friends, long-standing admirers/fans and family, making for a welcoming and friendly atmosphere (though the sheer number of people standing in the room did make things a little sweltering).

The event was gracefully hosted by Richard Marsh who needed only the gentlest of touches to set the night in motion and guide it along. He gave a charming welcome, doing what was needed then humbly letting their work speak for itself.

The Music highlighting the Poetry

From the moment Anna and Phil started their first piece ‘All the While’ it was clear that Manzenera’s guitar (alternately cheerfully jangly and mournfully ambient) was an excellent companion to Le’s powerful verse, the constant rhythm of his music grounding the poem, just as his occasional wail of strings washed over it. Anna’s repetitions of ‘continuously’ were very effective in settling the poem into the music’s beat, while her words pulsed with Phil’s lower bass notes in a poem that described the beat of a life both everyday and beautiful. The music’s reverb highlighted such lines as ‘reverberations, bamboozlements, a bomb or two’ and after the closing line of ‘I am continuously, all the while continuously … inescapably falling in love with you’ the music’s flow swelled and broke like a wave washing over the audience, driving home Anna’s words.

‘Nth Entities’ was similarly excellent, Phil’s guitar reverb’ing soft thunder that Anna’s voice rolled over, before Phil’s beat began to build dangerously beneath her. It’s Anna’s love poem to everything that has made her herself, explaining that she ‘come[s] from many rivers’, that she ‘season[s] everything with anything I can think of’, and Phil repeats a nice harmonious chord throughout that emphasises each different current of the rivers that have made her. And as Anna weaves her words around the music, announcing ‘I am the nucleus of my destiny’, Phil builds the music into a discordant storm around her voice, ending in a simple heart-like beat.

‘Mountaintop Dreaming’ was possibly the only piece where I felt the music added little to Anna’s excellent poem on race, politics and Black History Month. Starting with the amusing idea of a computer virus “from Enoch Powell corrupting [her] PC” asking her “why an entire month is dedicated to black history?”, it ranges onwards in a complex dissection of Black History Month’s importance in helping our society get to a stage where we no longer need something as potentially patronising as Black History Month, describing it as another “jagged piece of the perplexing puzzle”. The music for this piece took a necessary back seat, retreating into a more relaxed kind of easy listening that let the poem make its point (which was needed), but adding little other than (possibly) a bit more urgency.

The Poetry highlighting the Music

In ‘Jimi’ Phil’s Hendrix-esque guitar riffs and soaring solos took centre stage, while Anna’s words formed a steady build and backbone of the piece. Phil’s guitar work really summoned the spirit of Hendrix to the audience, while Anna’s lyrics matched the riffs with effective repetition (a particularly nice moment was the “his-his-his-his-his-history” repetition that echoed the barely constrained ‘dum-dum-dum-dum’ of the guitar) and mirrored the solos with her aspiring and spiralling wordplay and impressive vocabulary. And as the cascade of guitar span into silence, Anna left us with the simple words “James Marshall Hendrix, music misses you.”

‘Scratch’ was another poem where Manzanera was given free reign to play music (clearly inspired by Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry) with real swerve and sway to its rhythm, getting the whole audience swaying their hips in time. It’s appropriate that Anna talks of Perry’s “musical voodoo” just as Phil is employing some pretty powerful melodic mojo himself; while Anna’s verses spin on between the music, providing us with a moving and imaginatively described biography of Lee Perry’s life and the “simplicity that made his approach complex”. My only criticism is that the words get a little bogged down in the details of his life, but this may be necessary to allow the music to take the forefront.

‘Lego Limbs’ was a poem transformed by the music. Always a hugely sweet poem, the Dylan-like quality that Phil gave to the jangly guitar, complete with harmonica, really set off the whimsical beauty of Anna’s piece about getting to know a new lover through the night-time wrestle of trying to get comfortable (the lover tells her “wouldn’t this be easier if we had limbs of detachable lego?”). The jauntiness of the music perfectly set off the comedy and romance of the poem, and it was very impressive how Anna’s words were detached from each other to fit around the music, just like the ‘Lego Limbs’ she’s talking about.

Buy this Album

Is the only conclusion I can come to. It’s a great mixture of different styles of music blended seamlessly with Anna’s powerful, funny and moving verse. It’s clear a lot of love and care has gone into making it work this well.

It’s available in a truly gorgeous book/cd combo that has the text of the poems, lovely intro’s from Phil and Anna, and all the poetry and music on CD. It’s also available to simply download (at a much cheaper price).

If you like the sound of this then Anna’s regular poetry night Sage & Time resumes tomorrow night at 7.30pm at the Charterhouse Bar in Farringdon. Be there.

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‘Across The Water’ and ‘Swamp Area’ by Alistair Noon

In Pamphlets on April 16, 2012 at 10:28 am

- reviewed by Susie Wild -

Noon invites us to experience life seen as ‘A matinee at the Theatre of Water’ in these two pamphlets, plunging hidden depths and murky shallows. His chosen forms both follow rules and break rank. A pleasing, readable rhythm pulses through these slim volumes, ebbs and flows like the tide.

In Across The Water we glimpse fragments that have captured Noon’s attention. His poems blend fleeting flitting thoughts with snapshot word sketches to give us a sense of those moments. The 20-part title sequence is a good example of this brevity of style and expression, using little to say much. His sharp pen portraits capture the city and her people with mica glimmers of tongue in cheek humour. Sun shines, saplings grow and bubbles blow as failings are confessed, skies sag, rubbish is bagged and the dark is disturbed:

’15

A half-built
tower,

windowless
in the rain, as if

towelless
in a bathroom,

I walk in on it.’

Noon’s poems chart the liminal and the littoral, dot-to-dot points along horizon, coastline and tideline, as ‘Revocable gusts / design the dunes: we write / our footnotes on their sides’. Across the Water was originally published as joint winner of the Mimesis Digital Chapbook Initiative in 2008 and an earlier version of Swamp Area appeared online through Intercapillary Editions in 2009, however both pamphlets have been revised and expanded for 2012 publication with Longbarrow Press.

From saltwater surf and sailors we move to the marshy, watery terrain of Noon’s second and more promising pamphlet collection Swamp Area, an astute examination of the sinking motions of modern life whether at a Media Studies conference or by ‘the vanished cliffs of the Berlin Wall.’ In ‘Filling the Triangle’ suits stagnate in the daily commute, a people freight chain who live by the tracks:

‘Three lines disperse us
on zigzag seats;
our overalls and suits
make a daily diaspora.

The terminally bored
have grooved the glass.’

The turning of pages moves us from the bare skin, Cold War air and graffitied thoughts of track and station to the squatters’ breath of the street. Sequences depict the vascular networks that guide vehicles and vendors across the urban terrain. A land scattered with expired permits and echoes through history. 10 in this series describes two tenements: ‘On one, disrepair has skimmed first letters / off ream, utter and ilk.’ The other offers a peachy, glowing future. It’s sign is: ‘the floating seaweed that predicts the shore: / Events, Consultancy, Design.’ Life moves with the times, against the tide.

In Swamp Area the land that shifts and crumbles, shape-shifting and pooling around the jetsam and flotsam scars of half-remembered times where ‘New towers berlinned on the banks,/ and new banks berlinned in the towers.’ and:

‘We hurtle across the surface
on the lines of its changing face,
through the napped-out terrain.
We are the talking trains.’

Where Across The Water allows us to tuck ourselves into the gaps between Noon’s thoughts, providing us with people watching fodder from afar – across shore, or horizon – Swamp Area allows us to draw closer, to dig deeper and to snoop through holes in the fence, or a twitch of the net curtain. Like city life it strips its subjects of personal space, and gives us a head-full of eavesdroppings to mull over.

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‘The Backlists’ by Ben Stainton

In Pamphlets on April 4, 2012 at 9:58 am

-Reviewed by Ian Chung-

On the back cover of The Backlists, Todd Swift describes Ben Stainton’s chapbook from The Knives Forks and Spoons Press as ‘challenging both lyric and avant-garde modes’. This remark is borne out by the chapbook’s first poem, ‘Off the Barents’. This poem is awash with images that taken in isolation are themselves already charged and evocative (‘a pleural sac takes on black air’, ‘our tramping ground a piece of carpet Delilah / cut off after the war’), but placed together, they act to rough up the poem’s texture and trip up the reader. After all, this is a poem that initially appears to be about deep-sea divers in the Arctic, but ends with the utterly incongruous lines (which contain a pun about ham hock as a cut of meat from a pig), ‘DIVERS PERISH AFTER STUPID GOOSE-CHASE / ‘Is there any other kind?’ the big old pig / hocked up into Marie’s burger’.

‘Off the Barents’ makes for a good opening poem because it introduces poetic techniques that Stainton continues to employ throughout The Backlists. The most obvious is Stainton’s usage of what Swift calls ‘idiosyncratic typography, as delightfully original as e.e. cummings’. Within the first four lines, there is a mixture of italicised, broken and capitalised words. The two instances of broken words in the poem (‘pea / s / eek’ and ‘clod / s / scrabble) are especially interesting because of how sense carries over the line, with the typography indicating that the single letter belongs to the next line’s word, and yet the letter would make equal sense by forming the plural of the preceding noun, which is what the eye scanning across the line would instinctively do. The effect is to foreground the malleability of language, showing how its meaning is (de)constructed by the very act of reading.

Another technique that Stainton makes use of is the repetition of whole phrases with subtle variations that affect their meaning. In ‘Off the Barents’, the phrase ‘DEEP-SEA GOOSE-CHASE’ becomes ‘STUPID GOOSE-CHASE’, marking a shift from the purely descriptive to a value judgement. Midway through the chapbook, in ‘Parkin’s Rooms’, ‘We’ll both be eaten by / hours, by mislaid flowers, my northern caff’ undergoes a noun swap to become ‘We’ll both be eaten by flowers, by mislaid / hours, my northern town’, transforming the poem into the site of surreal scenes, where ‘One boy trips over / another’s tongue’. Amidst this hazy atmosphere, the sexual also begins to infiltrate the poem, ‘Miss King rinsing her parts / in the bathroom of my mind’, only to be rudely punctured by the final line of the poem, isolated into its own stanza: ‘She kept her blouse intact. What a cheek.’

Even when Stainton eschews such word games in favour of a more straightforward ‘narrative’ in the poem, moments of sexually-inflected oddness still persist in erupting. In ‘A Dream, Found in the Papers’, the first sign of this is the opening stanza ‘I realise the severity of the situation / when she removes her underwear – / a wicker building where the vagina should be’, but the reader is soon ambushed by further bizarreness:

‘Have you ever considered italicising your sex life?’
Squeaking last-minute directions onto a whiteboard,
she sucks my clothes up a thin proboscis.

Sex Education needs a serious rethink, I think.‘

My favourite moments in The Backlists, however, come in shorter poems like ‘Tasks’ and ‘Geneva’. ‘Tasks’ is unpunctuated, which allows for all the lines to be parsed in several ways. As an example, consider the opening lines, ‘Create the perfect sandwich using only Kraft lose at least $25 / before Lent learn to relish the taste of loss’. The first task could terminate with ‘Kraft’, but consider the odd humour of an alternative reading like ‘using only Kraft lost at least $25’. The phrase ‘before Lent’ could also be added on to this, or it could be read as part of a new task beginning at ‘lose’, but interpreting the task as ‘before Lent learn to relish the taste of loss’ invokes a sentiment that would be perfectly at home in the lyric mode. With ‘Geneva’, the second stanza is almost haiku-like in its compression of imagery: ‘the embassy hosted a glittering ball / but we (now tangled at the neck) / lost our invites in the fog’. Yet that italicised phrase skews what would otherwise be a clichéd moment of two people sharing a kiss into a deliberately awkward but refreshing image.

I believe the examples cited above demonstrate what Swift means when he describes Stainton’s poems as ‘pivot[ing] on the expected – film, sex, travel, good – then go[ing] off in all directions at once’. This is poetry that demands to be reread, in order for the different possibilities of its meaning to emerge. This is where Stainton’s unusual typography actually works to slow the reading process down, so that the poems resist quick scanning for meaning, their content and form working synergistically. Readers who share Stainton’s respect for language will appreciate the unsettling effects he achieves through linguistic bricolage, allowing words and images that might not otherwise share a poem, a line, to rub up against each other.

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‘Words Through a Hole Where Once There Was a Chimpanzee’s Face’ by Kelvin Corcoran

In Pamphlets on March 29, 2012 at 10:44 am

-Reviewed by Afric McGlinchey-

Kelvin Corcoran has already published eleven collections of poetry. But this Longbarrow Press chapbook is really ‘an intimate work for a few friends’ he tells us, obscurely, in broken-up words. The title is also portrayed as a scrambled series of letters on the cover, which, in itself, is a striking image. The dedication reads: ‘For and from…’ followed by twelve names, all of which are mentioned in subsequent poems. So it’s with a sense of voyeurism and intrigue that the reader (who happens not to be one of those named) approaches the poems.

Part 1 is titled ‘Going Down’, and down we go, with the narrator, into the abyss. He finds himself, after a stroke, among ‘the blurred and breathless dead’, the only thread connecting him back to reality being ‘you / sifting through my hands – a shadow’. The impact of the poems accumulates as meanings are unscrambled. The title symbolizes the narrator’s mind which is hallucinating, seeing noises, being invaded by colours. He touches a mouth, a nose: ‘This is your face isn’t it?’ he asks his lover. The title comes from a second-hand book, The Wonder Book of Wonders, sent to him by a friend and from which, on p.88, ‘someone has cut out the face of the chimpanzee’. When even the face of his loved one is insubstantial to him, this absence is all the more alarming. Through the hole, the narrator reads random words:

wet season

most for

animals                  earth

Herr Forelegs

These words acquire a resonance for the poet, and act as a springboard for many of the subsequent poems. He uses prose to give the reader some context: ‘I was blind and suffered some short term memory loss because that area of the brain was hit by the blood clot’. But I wonder if explanation in an otherwise lyrical collection is really necessary.

‘Herr Forelegs’ becomes a human entity, ‘a lurking confident bastard / his shirt of bloody platelets / his heart like a fist – bastard’. The tone of the poems swerves from bewilderment to hostility, to a dark humour: ‘come on you anti-coagulants – take these chains from my heart and set me free’.

In one sense, The Wonder Book of Wonders takes him out of his own terrifying mental experiences, to focus on external images: ‘A man in a weighted diving suit, / acetylene torch in hand makes wrecks fit to float’. This of course suggests the resurrection of his own physical and mental wreck of a body.

Other outside influences, such as music (a motif throughout the chapbook) penetrate his altered state: ‘John Coltrane bends time / Bach straightens it out again’. But Herr Forelegs continues to haunt him: ‘in the crowded darkness, you belong to me,’ he says.

His friends call and email, and Herr Forelegs calls too: ‘with eyes for inner darkness: the shit’. Here there is a little too much telling, when simple showing would do: ‘Andres called, his voice / his restorative conversation’. There is an echo of Frost when ‘Goldberg skips decorous sprightly / along the neural tracks, / down the digital wood dark and deep’ where ‘light walks through the trees’. And we remember, ‘I have miles to go before I sleep’. Corcoran blends nature images with technology in a number of poems:

‘These trees look designed,

them birds is on fire

in loops and swirls the sky ablaze.

A radar script inscribed

what does it say? what does it say?

the word as non-conductor of electricity’

In ‘He stared at death. Death stared straight back’, Corcoran writes:

‘MRI shows the riot here and here,

let it rip, Elijah, roll us in our boat;

phosphor trails a migrant route’

but moves from this bravado to sincerity when addressing his lover:

‘Did you fear I could leave you so easily…?

…I would see you leaning over me, your dark hair,

your eyes stare down burning

like the first night we spent ourselves on each other.’

Poems are connected by motifs: boats (the journey, salvage), animals, words, numbers, faces.  The narrator slowly begins to return from ‘katabasis’ (from the Greek, meaning retreat or descent) when he realizes that:

‘there’s no shape for me out there if not you,

our days like silver boxes open in our hands.’

Part 2 is titled ‘Coming Back’, and in the first poem he sets out on the journey to recovery, observing the external world: ‘Three women walk down the street / red coat, black coat, something else coat’. Still very susceptible to the surreal effect of stimuli, colours pulse into the narrator’s consciousness: ‘an unknown yellow world…lettering the sky;’ ‘a square of yellow light;’ ‘a man in a red t-shirt’. The narrator continues to struggle to get a grip of reality: ‘I think I taught that girl, worked with that man, but…not in the world’. Still, ‘that my legs hurt tells me I’m coming through’.

A sense of wonder and awe touches the narrator, as he becomes aware of his surroundings again and begins to recognize people: ‘To walk away from all of that / and to say I know you, I know your names’. Surreal events still occur, however. In ‘Eight Things About The Arctic’, ‘the faces of tourists rip and fly over the white hill’. In the next poem, he seeks ‘the source of chill in my bones; and says ‘leave me here where nothing moves…empty and endless for the mind to lodge at zero’. Letters and numbers surface frequently in these poems: ‘a language holding low around the edges of the world;’, ‘random numbers’ that are uttered aloud, ‘twists of light’ that ‘letter the air’.

In the last few poems, Corcoran moves the landscape several times, from the freezing Arctic to the warmth of Greece. In previous collections, he has drawn analogies from Greek mythology to universalize his themes, and does so again here, linking his personal journey with the story of Odysseus. The poems are narrated in different voices, with threads connecting to the first part of the chapbook: ‘I poured my heart into a hole in the air’. These are polished pieces, but their inclusion here is possibly a little self-conscious, the style and tone quite different. All in all, however, this collection is a fascinating journey through several mental states, worlds and weathers until finally it is love which brings him back from the brink: ‘the only thing to hold onto at the dark door.’ These poems reflect a voice that is assured and sometimes refreshingly original.

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‘All the Rooms of Uncle’s Head’ by Tony Williams

In Pamphlets on March 14, 2012 at 10:30 am

-Reviewed by Charles Whalley-

Nine Arches Press have a well-earned reputation for high production values, and so it is not surprising to see such a visually arresting and distinctive publication as All the Rooms of Uncle’s Head coming from Rugby. With it, Tony Williams has produced a confident and ambitious collection of poems and a strong statement on behalf of the art form.

This bold pamphlet incorporates elements of conceptual and concrete poetry. Purportedly, each poem reproduces a painted tile from one of Hanz Prinzhorn’s mentally ill patients. (Other reviews of the pamphlet have focused on this ‘hoax’, or have even accepted it). The pages mimic facsimiles of these tiles, including cracks (suggesting the etymology of ‘crazy’) and missing fragments. Each poem is surrounded by a rotating border of text and appended by sidenotes, disturbing the experience of linear reading from page-to-page, and encouraging taking each page as a self-contained artefact. Altogether, this slows and alters the reading experience. W.N. Herbert, in Poetry Review, writes that Williams is engaged in ‘repositioning the reader’s experience as something balanced between text and image, or between text and concept’. I also suspect that the excessive marginalia in All the Rooms of Uncle’s Head, with its horror vacui, are intended to suggest the creative process: how to redraft is to write on top of old writing, and how it can be hard to know when to stop. As its title suggests, the pamphlet’s poems, as a series of boxed squares, are like the rooms of the unnamed speaker’s Uncle’s head, just as the head becomes the asylum when ‘[d]oves strut on the finials of Uncle’s crown’ (‘Uncle Imagines’) and his eyes, like windows, let out their light ‘on the empty lawn’ at dusk (‘Garret Brain’). The poem as a space to contain the mad is the central idea behind the sequence, as All the Rooms of Uncle’s Head explores the relationship between containment and freedom, and the implicit comparison between madness and poetry.

Many of the aims of poetry, or even of fiction, are conditions for speech which, in any other social context, would be signs of madness. Metaphor is close to hallucination, and Williams’ speaker is, accordingly, haunted by this further edge of metaphor; for instance, in ‘Enroute Nowhere’:

AGAINST A WINTER SKY the thin
Fingers of a tree are shivering,
Dotted here and there with leaves
That have not understood their death–
Perverse as fingers that grow hands
To wave goodbye to all their friends.

Here thin branches are likened to fingers, but this metaphor doesn’t yield to reality, to the fact that fingers grow on hands, not vice versa. It persists alongside the second metaphor, that a leaf is like a waving hand, to combine and create something altogether more striking and ‘perverse’. The madman’s perception of the world resembles the poet’s derangement of the senses, and refusal or inability to privilege one reality over another. As the example demonstrates, it makes for some powerful images, in part because it feels somehow profoundly unsettling. Jon Stone perceptively notes that one of the themes of the pamphlet is ‘the tension between creativity and the strict order of a methodology or regulated structure (social, spatial, psychological)’. The Professor, typically, represents restriction via the conformity required of ‘curing’ the mad, which precludes poetry; as the Professor, whilst eating a bird, says in ‘Ox Looking Behind Him’: ‘Your dreaming never comes to any good!’ Poems, like asylums, provide an acceptable social space in which language needn’t ‘make sense’, but this space is also restrictive, as poems are, for instance, economically useless.

The paradoxical freedom borne out of containment is expressed in the theme of flight, the (proto-)symbol for freedom and for poetry/creativity. Williams refreshes the trope of the prisoner’s dreams of Daedalus-like escape by rotating through different grotesque variants, which constitute the main subject of the speaker’s thoughts: a balloon made of ‘[h]uman hides […] stretched on a bird-bone frame’ (‘Heliotrope’); a wounded Gregor Samsa-type winged beetle; an archaeopteryx; a great auk eaten by the Professor; and a swan:

[…] FLY,
White lung, illiterate bagpipe, king of the ponds,
Look down on men’s divisions

There is a similar freedom granted to Williams, who is restricted and freed by writing in the persona of a madman, as a madman’s speech, since it has departed from the necessities of ‘making sense’, signifies for the most part by tone. Whilst there are elements of a narrative thread which Williams allows to be glimpsed from time to time – real or imagined characters, the spectre of the Great War – we are generally caught in the loops of irrational thought. Williams is free to range as wildly as he wishes in the knowledge that his lines are effective not for their explicit meaning but for their tone, for the sound they make as they pass, which is electric for such a talented writer. The danger, however, is that we become so estranged from the speaker’s mode of thought that we are unable to have any sympathy. It does not take long for madness to become clowning. But the sequence masters this too and, in ‘King of the Wood’, it ends powerfully:

[…]Worth the tiredness and tears

TO STAND SOAKED among the hawthorns and look
East across a mile of withered beans,
Fuel for next year’s crop on the rolling slope,
And see the fine rain greying out their black,
Coming towards us as the sky lightens,
Coming towards us at the end of another trance,
Coming towards me I won’t let it stop.

To produce a moment of quiet in a pamphlet which is so fantastically noisy shows that Williams has a great command over his craft. This is a clever collection of poems, and an insistent reminder, as Sean O’Brien has remarked of Williams, that ‘this is an exciting time for poetry’.

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‘Poland At The Door’ by Evelyn Posamentier

In Pamphlets on February 27, 2012 at 10:30 am

-Reviewed by Ian Chung-

Reading Evelyn Posamentier’s Knives Forks and Spoons chapbook Poland At The Door, which Michael Heller describes on the back cover as ‘resembl[ing] a series of atomized clusters’, I was reminded of the poetry of Paul Celan, whose later poems especially were often similarly short and compressed. The work of both poets is also shot through with the horrors of Eastern European history, marked as it is by wars and the Holocaust. However, although Heller also characterises Posamentier’s poetry as being ‘semi-effaced characters like those inscribed on ancient rune-stones or stelae…double-edged ciphers’, I personally found Poland At The Door less opaque and enigmatic than say, Celan’s Fathomsuns and Benighted, while still making for an intriguing read.

Poland At The Door essentially functions as an extended poem cycle, the individual verses always preceded by the chapbook title in capitals. At the typographical level, this has the effect of partitioning the page into what increasingly resemble little rooms in which the verses are to remain safely corralled. The room-as-protection motif runs throughout the language of the poem as well, but here it is the poet seeking protection in the physical integrity of the room’s space: ‘oh god, I’ve left / the door unlocked’, ‘hold on. hold on. / don’t answer the door’, ‘they can’t find me in this room’, ‘it’s good to be a portable room. / ‘i gather the walls around me.’ Towards the end of the cycle, however, the ‘wobbly room’ appears to take on greater agency:

which door? the portable room

steps forward to accept the challenge.

the guests know not why

they have come. the room

shields itself with its own

pretense of freedom.

With this shift, the room mutates into something that paradoxically seems to simultaneously expose and hide the poet, expressed in lines like ‘the room withers my walls / closes in to conceal me’. Yet if ‘poland at the door’ is cast as the threat of history waiting outside, the room never seems to become entirely complicit in endangering the poet (‘this room / can carry me anywhere. / it is my lover, stepping lightly.’), functioning rather as a kind of interface with the world beyond the door (‘someday the room will escort me / to the free air, which of course / is no longer free’). It is also within the cocoon of the room that the poem reaches its crisis point on the penultimate page, as language symbolically fails to turn away the knock of ‘poland at the door’:

i shred these frozen notebooks

who make a mockery of my desk

i don’t care about their smirks

& willful pages, sneering

through helpless words.

a typewriter seethes in the corner.

wait for me, says the wall.

it doesn’t matter, says the opposite

wall. the neighbours read their lines.

i feel them pass the door.

Seen from this perspective, the last lines of the poem might appear curiously passive: ‘my planet stands still’, ‘the footsteps have followed history / into the town square. / they have passed.’ After pages and pages of attempting to avoid ‘memories of / ancestors on the attack’, ‘the guests’, ‘the neighbors’, ‘poland at the door’, has the encounter with history then not palpably changed the poet after all? I would suggest this apparent problem can be resolved by recourse to earlier lines in the poem: ‘did someone say something / about a meeting point? / it must be beyond the door.’ If ‘the door might swing open / like a shiny new century’, then stepping through it is to look in two directions at once, embracing the future even as one is embraced by the past. Since the final lines of the poem imply that the ‘i’ of the poem is still observing from within the room, the ‘meeting point…beyond the door’ has not yet been approached. Thus in declining to offer a tidy and convenient resolution to its ongoing narrative, the poem instead leaves the reader poised on the cusp of change and meaningful engagement.

Ultimately, I believe that Poland At The Door is a fascinating read because it carefully regulates its own approach to that singular final moment, paring the journey into manageable portions. Taken in isolation, the verses’ imagery can sometimes seem downright hallucinatory, but what binds the cycle together and keeps it grounded are the linguistic repetitions running through it. While the repetition of the title fosters a looming sense of urgency, this runs parallel to permutations of the phrase ‘the days of awe, the days between’. This seems an apt description of what history actually looks like to most people, with days that leave an indelible psychic mark on personal or collective memory and the days in between them that can just pass us by. Typically occurring as single lines interspersed among the other verses, the phrase acts to slow down the poem’s pace. What could otherwise have been a frantic attempt to shut out the memory of the past is transformed into a moving chronicle of the poet’s steady journey towards engaging it. We all have our personal ‘poland at the door’. Reading Posamentier’s chapbook is one way we can begin to address and welcome it.

 

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‘Frankie, Alfredo’ by Liane Strauss

In Pamphlets on February 24, 2012 at 10:30 am

-Reviewed by Afric McGlinchey-

To read Liane Strauss’s poems is to sharpen your mind, deliciously. This chapbook is full of witty, clever, wry poems, which build up the impression of a consciousness resisting vulnerability, developing a sassy voice in response to perceived ‘sour grapes’: ‘you, full of voluptuous objection, / because my verses spill over with push-up / bras and low riding tangas think I’m a girl!’. There is a sprung energy and edginess to her language and content that continually subverts expectation. Perhaps as a defensive gesture, perhaps to satisfy her own intellectual thirst, she references Archimedes, Catullus, Lady Suwo, Socrates, Jesus Christ, Lady Macbeth, Éluard, Byron and Li Ch’ing Chao, among others.

She invites questioning at a conceptual level, by her use of simultaneity, as in the opening poem, ‘Alone in the Night’. Here Strauss jumps between apparently disparate situations, a news piece where ‘Emergency rescue has just freed / the woman trapped for twelve hours / underneath the ice’ and the speaker’s own state of loneliness, where ‘I try to write a poem in which / two ice floes drift and dissolve like willows’. Although there is a self-consciousness here, the wry tone makes it deliberate. This self-consciousness is apparent again in ‘Boy’, where the loved object is treated carelessly, until lost, and then anger sets in and the child turns merciless: ‘She snapped / the head off every last doll she possessed / and heaped the headless bodies on her bed’. She tells us these details, ‘to satisfy those for whom cause and explanation, / and not the simple disposition of parts, is paramount’.

A number of poems deal with the mental engagement, jousting and flirting that occur in relationships, as in the brilliant ‘Archimedes and Me’: ‘that mock-indulgent tone you adopt / whenever you don’t want me to know / how adorable you find me’; and later in the same poem: ‘just as when I really am talking to you / I’m talking to myself again.’ In the title poem, ‘Frankie, Alfredo’, the speaker throws down a gauntlet: ‘Name the dawn. I’ll take your mouths and your money / both hands tied behind my back, in a blindfold / and ten bona fide inches of stiletto’. In other poems, there is a sense of aching sadness for the earlier days of blossoming love: ‘how I used to navigate the corridor as if I always wore / a careless coy chignon in hot weather’ (‘Transcriptions from Éluard’).

Strauss explores all the processes of relationships, from beginnings, to middles and endings, where, it is hinted, the treacherous damage of rumour and gossip are a factor: ‘Like an airborne influenza, word got around.’ (‘Rumour’); ‘although nothing happened, / I have become the subject of gossip’ (‘Variations on a Theme by Lady Suwo’). In the latter poem, Strauss takes a stanza by Lady Suwo, and in a kind of Chinese whispers sequence, cleverly alternates and elaborates on the lines to distort the original meaning.

Many of her poems convey different states of mind using the symbolism of objects: ‘my cold cream’s gone off / my hair clip’s yanked too tight’ (‘Alone in the Night’); ‘I lay gorgeous, enormous eggs / and hatch the most beautiful babies’ (‘Three Ostriches’); ‘a fox dangling from a chair-back / like a provocative suggestion’(‘Self –Portrait’).

These different facets / personalities are revealed in the sequence of sonnets called ‘Three Ostriches’. The first has ‘legs long as summer afternoons and quick as convertibles’. In the second,

‘like a felled tree, I collapsed,

my poor knees buckled back,

thump, in a great roar of dust

like some defenestrated sack

for everything I know I lack.’

Then in the third, where the ostrich has her head buried, ‘I find treasures all the time, / And it’s so wonderful to be invisible.’

Desire and longing are never far away from these poems, but they need to be kept hidden until safe to reveal. In ‘The Museum of Desires’, there is a subversion too, so that the speaker is not only talking about her own desires, but the desires of the person addressed: ‘here are the thoughts you can’t have / And here are the feelings you can’t touch’. In ‘Hymn (to Sappho)’: ‘in your eyes / neither mercy nor the hunger of desire can be detected’.

There are also be-careful-what-you-wish-for warnings. In ‘The Seamless Future’: ‘sidewalks won’t have cracks….doors will open out of walls like in old houses / with fascinating secrets, but without hinges’. But this idealized future becomes more insidious when, ‘given time, even you and I will emulsify’ like ‘face and fathom, like hours, / like every disappearance, seamless.’

Sometimes, however, her cynicism is shelved in favour of naïve hope, as during the eclipse in ‘Transcription of Éluard’, the couple ‘staked all our love against indifference,’ in spite of faking nonchalance.

It appears to be one of Strauss’s defence mechanisms to use transference. Her frequent and witty use of other speakers, different voices, may be a device to shield close-to-the-bone sensitivities and memories. This strategy serves Strauss well.

But Strauss gives as good as she gets, and her powers of observation are arresting and perceptive, often oblique and humorous too: ‘his hands / which were small, and clever, / like a couple of Marx brothers’ (‘Poetry Lover’).

How we live our lives is another theme, encapsulated beautifully in a lovely sonnet called ‘Digging Ditches’, where the epigraph quotes Byron: ‘If one’s years can’t be better employed than in sweating poesy, a man had better be a ditcher.’

These poems describe the connections, transitions, processes of our days and our relationships in an accessible yet stimulating manner, constantly shaking up our perceptions. Strauss’s attitude is encapsulated in a lovely paradoxical line: ‘what’s love but a Molotov cocktail’.

In fact, her work might be summed up in ‘Childhood’, a stunning poem of paradoxes, which manages to capture life’s contradictions, changes of direction, allegiances and discoveries. And here we see her resilience too: ‘Each has seen a world disappear, / seen another rise up out of oceans to meet it.’ She reminds me of Scarlet O’Hara – and I can’t wait to see what she does next.

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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 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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‘Bugsworth Diary’ by Neil Campbell

In Pamphlets on January 25, 2012 at 10:00 am

-Reviewed by Ian Chung-

Bugsworth Diary

A strong sense of place pervades the poems in Neil Campbell’s Bugsworth Diary, published by The Knives Forks and Spoons Press. In an interview with Irish writer Nuala Ní Chonchúir for her blog Women Rule Writer, Campbell remarks, ‘I write poems sometimes, entirely on instinct. Landscape is playing an increasing role in both [my poetry and fiction]. In fact, all my poems are nature poems really.’ In the same way that Egdon Heath behaves like a character in Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native, Campbell’s chapbook is dominated by the natural environment of Derbyshire and the Peak District, as the poet chronicles (all of the poems are dated) moments spent in its surroundings.

Birds are one of the creatures that constantly pop up in these poems. In particular, jackdaws seem to recur the most, with what they signify changing slightly with each (re)appearance. Early on in the sequence, they are a thwarted expectation: ‘Waiting for jackdaws / It’s a raven that comes first’ (‘Black Roses over Portobello’). In ‘Black Brook Heron’, around the middle of Bugsworth Diary, they have become something that can be counted upon, a cyclical pattern of nature (‘Contemplating the return / Of jackdaws at dusk’). As the poems emerge from ‘previous months of winter light’ (‘Jackdaw Fly-Past’), the poet develops a keener awareness of the particularity of this bird:

So close that for the first time

I could appreciate the silver

On their necks, missed at a distance

And mistaken for black

In previous months of winter light.

Although they make appearances in subsequent poems, ‘Jackdaws on Election Day’ feels like the culmination of this species’ trajectory in this chapbook. The poem is dated May 6th, 2010, polling day for the UK election that ultimately saw the current Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition gain power. The jackdaws are transformed into a figure of consolation for the poet (‘I didn’t know what to do, where to put myself / And I was drawn to the jackdaws at dusk’), and this is predicated upon the element of reliability already established by the earlier poems (‘I had watched them so many times before’). Interestingly though, the poem ends with the emphasis of this expectation of reassurance, rather than its fulfilment: ‘I saw there and like never before needed them / To lift from the trees that second time.’

This deferral is suggestive, especially when read against a poem like ‘What We Look For In Animals’, one of the shortest poems in Bugsworth Diary. Given its title, the poem reads like a warning against ascribing too much significance to nature and its patterns. The ‘woman next door’ and the cows do not appear to interact, and although the cows ‘look at her curiously’, they do so ‘While dropping great quantities of shit’, completely undermining any attempt at poeticising the moment. By the next stanza, they ‘turn away and follow each other / To the other side of the field’, while another stanza later, the woman ‘goes inside’, retreating from an abortive encounter with nature. To call this rejection on the cows’ part would only be to fall into the same trap of investing the animals with human agency. What they display would better be described as indifference.

Yet this indifference cannot run both ways. While nature’s cycles can affect human activities (think natural disasters), they also carry on regardless of us (think seasons), whereas human activities are constantly modifying the natural world, practically inviting interference from it at times (think flooding of seafront residences). This is brought home most forcefully by Campbell in the final portion of ‘Chinley Chernobyl’:

I had been enjoying

My Monday morning until the

Part when I came upon

A demolished factory littered

Around the base of a still

Standing though condemned

Chimney. And I realised that

Something resembling a disaster

Resided among these green hills.

Later that night some damp wood

I’d put on the fire began

To stink, and I wondered what

I might be breathing.

The alliteration of the title and ‘Chimney’ points out the industrial aspect of the ‘disaster / Resid[ing] among these green hills’. The sound of ‘demolished’ finds an echo within ‘condemned’, with the consonantal ‘d’ carried over into ‘disaster’, and later, ‘damp wood’, as if infecting and contaminating the latter. Those final lines highlight how the threat emanating from nature can in a way be an unanticipated punishment brought down upon ourselves for our inability to leave nature alone. That said, on the whole Bugsworth Diary did not particularly strike me as an attempt at environmental activism via poetry. What it did seem to be was a heartfelt celebration of the refuge that nature can still provide for the human psyche, if we learn to just be in it and allow it to do its work, as opposed to us trying to work it.

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