Reviews of the Ephemeral

Archive for the ‘Pamphlets’ Category

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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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‘The of of the film of The book and The of of the book of The film’ by Ryan Ormonde

In Pamphlets on January 1, 2012 at 3:26 pm

-Reviewed by Rosie Breese-

 As its title suggests, this pleasingly compact pamphlet from the Knives, Forks and Spoons Press begins with a discussion and questioning of different media/forms of the word – no mean feat when restricting oneself to print on paper. As with previous pamphlets from this innovative publisher, the result is wonderfully unpredictable; a wild ride through the poet’s wordplay-world and the questioning of meaning itself.

From the outset, Ormonde’s collection almost has the feel of an academic discussion, albeit an unorthodox one, carried out through a series of small blocks of text. Statement follows on from statement, quickly moving from the media suggested by the title:

“..in a future where film is (a)
memory We can still say
We do not need to put this
into words because before
now We had film”

..to an altogether more abstract discussion of the fundamentals of ‘saying’ – moving from different representations of reality to the realities of representation:

“            …     Tongue will
make (a) new memory and
or technology will make (a)
New memory.”

Here, we witness Ormonde’s lightning-quick shifts from one idea to the next. He plays with the ideas of saying, recording, archiving and retrieval throughout the collection, putting them through endless permutations which surprise at every twist and turn.

This constant toying with what are, after all, fairly weighty concepts is, in places, perfectly balanced by a playfulness that is a delight to follow:

“Enterpriseis undertake.
Enterprising undertaking.
Enterprisers undertakers.
Enterprisen undertaken.
Enterprose undertook.
Exitprose overtook.
Exitprisen is overtaken.”

Here, Ormonde deliberately and mischieviously follows the patterns of morphological inflection within the two words, transferring these patterns from one word to another to take the words themselves to new frontiers of meaning. Meaning is pushed to its limit; there is no logical answer as to what comes next.

One particularly joyful moment was the discovery of the tiny footnote beneath the 43rd poem-block: “Here the text is infected.” This is the moment that the text begins to consciously comment on itself; on the process of production, archiving and retrieval of information through and beyond the word. The sequence deteriorates into the fugue it depicts, and encounters Psychiatry as a concept rather than a cure. There is a sense of dialogue, deep within the mind, between the shiftiness of meaning and the singularity of this concept:

“Psychiatry. a forgot.
Psychiatry. a forge.
Psychiatry. a fugue.
Psychiatry.”

Before the text is said to have ‘recovered’ from its virus (this fact again communicated by a footnote), the word ‘fugue’ itself is stripped down to pure sound, transcribed phonetically: “(fju:g). Restricted to print on paper, Ormonde inventively communicates the breakdown of a word, a concept, and its rebuilding from pure sound upwards.

If I was to pick something to criticise with regard to this collection, it would be that its many lines of enquiry into mutations and permutations make it difficult to detect an overall coherence behind the sequence (if it is to be read as a sequence, as its numbered text-blocks suggest). There is a sense that sometimes the wordplay is undertaken for its own sake rather than contributing to a structured whole:

“ ‘This is’ ‘nice’. ‘This is’ nice.
‘This’ ‘is nice’. ‘This’ ‘is’
‘nice’…”

Whilst this wordplay is interesting to read, the sheer volume of these diversions into the particulars of ‘saying’ make for hard going reading – especially where, as above, the focus is an utterance which is subjective in itself. I’m not suggesting that all poetry should be instantaneously digestible – after all, there is a joy in difficult texts; they make us think and question. But sharper editing of the collection as a whole could have made for a sequence that facilitates this thinking and questioning by giving the stronger pieces room to breathe, in isolation from their many possible variations.

Another question I had when reading this volume was the reasoning behind the form of the poems on the page. Whilst the justified blocks are visually stark and offer an interesting decontextualisation reminiscent of the wall of an art gallery, in places it’s difficult to see why the potential for experiment with spacing has not been exploited. That said, this sense of restriction is concurrent with the trammelling of meaning into the forms it must take on during the process of communication – through voice, film, or through words themselves.

Having googled Ryan Ormonde, it appears that he is also involved in performance art and work across different media, and this is something that is certainly hinted at throughout this collection. Thinking again of that gallery wall, I’m wondering whether this pamphlet has reached its final form, or whether there’s room for it – or selected, edited pieces – to move still further into the media it questions, taking on shapes and spaces that may be better suited to the fascinating and ever-changing nature of the discussion at hand.

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‘THE MOTH IS MOTH THIS MONEY NIGHT MOTH’ by David Berridge

In Pamphlets on December 13, 2011 at 10:00 am

-Reviewed by Rosie Breese-

It’s awesome being a reviewer, because now and again, a jiffy bag comes through the letterbox containing something completely, wonderfully different. That’s exactly what happened when David Berridge’s superb collection THE MOTH IS MOTH THIS MONEY NIGHT MOTH plopped onto my doormat. A gorgeously put-together pamphlet from the Knives Forks and Spoons Press, it contains a series of poems – or word-equations – which shimmer and morph in the mind as they do on the page.

Words are dangerous things to work with. Their meanings shift. For example, the word different comes with a whole host of awkward connotations. Different can mean difficult; it can mean weird; it can mean uncategorisable. It could be construed as a lazy definition on my part; an attempt to distance myself from something I haven’t really ‘got’.

I’ll make a confession. I don’t ‘get’ this pamphlet. But I’ll make the case that ‘getting’ it might not be the be-all and end-all of this collection. Rather, it’s a space to be inhabited by both reader and writer, its meanings under constant exploration and review. Maybe this could be said of any collection of poetry, but it is especially apparent here, where there is so little conventional signposting for the reader.

The joy and beauty of these poems is that they don’t dictate to the reader how they should be approached. There’s no recourse to convention (except, perhaps, the emerging conventions of experimental poetry?), no rhyme, no metre, although there is a sense of internal cohesion, a progression of sound and meaning:

slake   night

green  snow

Here, there is a progression through the vowel sounds A/E/I/O (or A/I/E/O, depending on which way you choose to read it). The ‘U’ is missing – ‘you’ are perhaps lost or absorbed. There is a progression of ideas: ‘slake’ suggesting satisfaction, and conversely, thirst; ‘green’ and ‘snow’ forming what could be construed as a contrasting set of ideas – fertility and barrenness.

But that’s just one set of interpretations. Meaning, as Berridge’s wriggling word-strings suggest, is a mutable thing. The poems enact this through their constant movement, through the shifting of letters according to a logic imposed first by the writer, then by the reader:

feet  fashion  slake  low  mouth

t*o*n*
g*u*e*

___________

snow = star

There is a mutation, a sequence of interlocking sounds in the first line of this poem. There is a procession of ideas, each word trailing its subjective debris. The asterisks between the letters of ‘tongue’ could serve to defamiliarise, to question; equally, they could be the ‘stars’ referred to in the final statement ‘snow = star’. Then there is the sense of stars as snow on the tongue, of sensation inside and around the tongue; a glorious, unexpected physicality emanating from these isolated, decontextualised letterforms.

This tangibility was what really struck me when reading and re-reading this collection. There’s a vividness, a synaesthesia here. From the outset, the reader is plunged into a sensual world, with the body and environment in direct contact:

feet  lake  green  lake  mouth  lake  felt  lake  night  night  lake  tongue  lake

There is no direction as to how you should feel when reading this, what you should look at first, or take with you when you leave the page. This lack of overt direction brings with it a sense of immediacy, urgency even, which brings the reader into communion with the word itself and the whole sensual world inside the mind.

As for themes, maybe it’s just because it’s the Christmas shopping season, but for me, the repeated ideas of ‘money’ and ‘fashion’ suggested materialism, something which is reinforced through patterning of ‘mouth’, ‘tongue’, ‘belly’ and ‘slake’, all related to the act of consumption. There is the sense of a process throughout – the process of consumption, of mass-production of meanings, shifting and multiplying with each rearrangement and re-reading.

In this context, I found Berridge’s chosen ending devastating. A short sequence of three words with the initial consonants bracketed and brought into question. They can’t be read unless it is accepted that what you are reading here is a vast swathe of possible meanings:

(s)tar     (g)leen     (t)outh

The sequence ends with three simple and definite words, which in themselves open an abyss for further exploration – a sense of absence that persists:

money             mouth  night

This inconclusive conclusion is fitting. The whole sequence revolves around the evasion of grasp – of words, of meaning, of satiety. Intentionally or not, these poems make the case for art as context; for poetry as a negotiable space.

This is a beautiful piece of work which shifts and moves under the gaze like the living thing an artwork should be allowed to be. I don’t get it yet; I might never ‘get’ it, and I’m fine with that. But I am sure of two things about it: that I will come back to it again and again, and that every time I do, it will be different, in the best and most valuable sense of the word.

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‘Zimzalla Object 005′ by Derek Beaulieu

In Object, Pamphlets on December 9, 2011 at 10:08 am

-Reviewed by Suzannah Evans-

Derek Beaulieu has stated himself that ‘there is still no accepted critical vocabulary for concrete poetry‘, and I can agree with this; reviewing his work presents some challenges. He is the editor of the visual poetry section of UBUWEB and the author of five poetry collections, three volumes of fiction and 150 chapbooks / pamphlets. There is no doubt that this man  is a linchpin of contemporary radical visual and concrete poetry.

Having said that, I had not heard of him before I received ZimZalla 005 through the post, an unusual item consisting of a cotton bag containing a magnifying glass and a miniature booklet not much bigger than a postage stamp. The whole thing was delightfully novel for my first ever Sabotage review, and challenged any pre-conceptions I might have had about reviewing poetry in print.

In this collection Beaulieu constructs images which use letters, rather than whole words (as with some concrete poems). The letters are combined with line drawings and this results in tiny intricate graphics, many of which are reminiscent of visual images that already exist in our day-to-day lives; staircases, map contours, chains of molecules, pieces of machinery. There is a great breadth of style in the graphics. In some the letters are easily recognisable, some are abstract and too tiny to read. The visual styles range from dot-matrix to calligraphy.

The collection presents some problems of understanding, however. I say ‘understanding’ instead of ‘reading’ because an attempt to read this as words or letters, from top left to bottom right, would, I think, result in some disappointment and a lack of meaning.

Having looked at other examples of Beaulieu’s work with letters on his website , such as this beautiful piece,  swarms, I think that this collection loses something from its small size. It is condensed and delicate but at the same time it is not as visually appealing as something like swarms and I would be unlikely to go back to it repeatedly just for the pleasure of the images.

This collection sits somewhere between poetry and visual art, a depiction of familiar shapes weirdly altered. It forces the reader to look at letters not just for the sound given to them or the words that they form but for their visual properties. By positioning these letters inside half-familiar settings and arrangements Beaulieu asks the reader to examine language as a construction. This is enhanced by focusing on the smallest possible unit of language, the individual letter outside of the word, potentially somewhat meaningless on a first reading but becoming more significant in an investigation of shape and sound.

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‘Organ Speech’ by Megan Fernandes

In Pamphlets on December 7, 2011 at 10:30 am

-Reviewed by Charles Whalley-

From the Paris-based Corrupt Press, the unremarkable cover of Megan Fernandes’ Organ Speech hides a remarkable collection of poems that are mature, intelligent and bold, ranging over family, memory, desire, botany, neuroscience, Anglo-Saxon poetry, The Troubles, and Alice in Wonderland . The best description of her surreal style is perhaps (to borrow something else) ‘cognitive poetics’, as she exploits the synaesthetic and associatory possibilities of language. The best poems in Organ Speech, such as ‘Here is earnest’, are those in which language itself seems to dictate the content. It takes a poet with a very keen and free awareness of words, the “recipes for moods” – the objective correlative? – , to produce tremendous lines which seem to produce considerable effects entirely out of themselves, like “Teach me about / ghosts and abstractions, / and the caffeine of wrecked space.” (‘Here is earnest’)

For Fernandes, language and thought map on top of each other, and so in many of the poems, and in her dominant mode, she dramatises or allegorises thought to create fantastic (in the proper sense of the word) landscapes and uncanny images where language is the primary logic. So, for instance, in the opening ‘Synaptic Space’, suicide by a gun becomes a way to project “your synapses” across (or on to) the universe, making the mind a microcosm of space (or space a macrocosm of the mind) where you can “[f]ollow the scent / of your childhood pajamas, they smelled something sweet and / deranged: measles, beetles, and boxed apple juice”. The individual becomes an explorer within their own thoughts, which have been stretched out and rendered tangible or spatial. In ‘THE BRAINHOOD ADVENTURE!’, Fernandes starts this exploration by opening the poem with “Eyes turn inwards”, to use the idea that we could look at our own brains to introduce an allegory of thought, desire and memory, mixing the literal morphology of the brain with a dream-like fantasy journey; for example:

‘Beside the swing, on the spongy terrain,
I take you to meet Ida in the Cannibale café,

in the parietal northwest corner of the brain.’

We are simultaneously in the spongy brain and in Paris, and not really in either. Because the events are fantastic the reader can’t create a mental picture independent of the text, and so almost complete agency is given to language. This gives a sense of freedom and of infinite possibility.

The surreal brainhood adventures provide an effective training ground for when Fernandes attempts more concrete topics. A poet who knows that violet “makes grief / but never quaintness or purposeful”(‘Here is earnest’) can produce lines as perfect as “give me / dead lavender and raw milk”(‘Corinne on Bodies of Water’). In the sinister and unnerving ‘Queens’, for instance, which is about hijra in Mumbai, the heart of the poem is provided by a sudden flash of the surreal:

‘They stir me through female nightmares: ash-heaps, fields of limbs, everything in
twos.’

The “nightmares” give a pretext for the uncanny images that follow. (Although the more I read that line the more “stir” seems like the cleverest part of it.) In ‘Archives’ and ‘Hallways’ Fernandes writes about her family, and the mental richness that these subjects provide a landscape in which she can invigorate concrete topics with little flashes of the surreal (often, again, with the pretext of ‘imagining’ or ‘dreams’).

On the other end of this, the poems sometimes falter when they become fixed in the concrete, as is the case with ‘Grendel’, for instance, which is about a murder, and the victim’s sympathy for the culprit. (The ‘pretty murder victim’ theme is a bit LiveJournal.) Fernandes is perhaps a bit too insistent upon the strength of the reality of the moment, and doesn’t seem to want to let language get in the way. As a result, the poem is like the dragons in ‘Here is earnest’ who “read / they were dinosaurs and became / conservative”, and is somewhat dry and thin. However, we expect a pamphlet to be varied, and it’s quite possible readers other than myself will enjoy the more serious poems. (If I have been talking a lot about personal preference in this review, it is because the sort of poetry that is so dazzling in this pamphlet is the poetry most exposed to the idiolect fringes of words.)

It is exciting to discover a new poet and a new press. Megan Fernandes is a sophisticated and sensitive writer, and her poems are, by turn, surprising, vivid and affecting. Organ Speech is unnervingly good.

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‘The New Blur Album’ by John Osborne, and ‘Whenever I Get Blown Up I Think of You’ by Molly Naylor

In Pamphlets on November 28, 2011 at 10:00 am

- An imagined interview by John McGhee-

You sit in Frankie and Benny’s waiting for John and for Molly. You’re new to the city.

John arrives first: wide eyes and logger shirt.  His hair is a home for herons. He orders house red, a large one.

John’s manner is hangdog and you find this charming. He’s got “the likeability factor”. He talks enthusiastically to you about his interests – teletext, television, temping, the mundane, shame, girls (unobtainable), children (unwell), music (loud and unfamiliar), the certainty of underachievement.  You quickly warm to his generosity of vision and askew take on life.

‘I used to play chess with a boy called Michael Jackson.

He wasn’t very good at chess

but that was the least of his problems’

His words are a ramble, precisely planned.  You’re left to guess which incidents are autobiographical or semi-autobiographical, and which are pure imagination.  John tells you about his birthday party – it’s a disaster, naturally:

‘When I told you once I don’t like the idea of surprise parties

this was the kind of thing I had in mind.’

As John concludes his twelfth anecdote, Molly arrives.  She takes off her red gabardine, sits down, and orders a green tea.  They’ve run out of green tea, the tie-and-waistcoat waitress apologises.

She tinkers with her blonde hair and monologues about how the big city takes your hopes and warps them.  Crap jobs are unavoidable, suddenly you’re bussing tables, your potential goes unfulfilled.  You can relate easily to her story, her exact observations.

The screenplay of her life twists sinister at the end of Act One.  She’s blown up.  Her account of surviving the 7/7 underground bombings is agonising, arresting.  Later, she tells you of how she fled the city to a drear Wales and, on a mountainside, imagined meeting her bomber, 22-year old Shezhad Tanweer.

‘You don’t look like a villain.

You don’t look at me but you say –

Well, why would I?’

There’s horror in the ordinary, then wit and tenderness when she talks about moving back home, in an episode where she dissects roadkill with her father.  The effect is just as otherworldly as John’s surreal fragments.

‘A deer.  It’s dead, laid out, perfect-looking with fur your fingers itch to touch.  We can’t help but wonder why he’s brought this home, scooped it off the road, lifted it into a rental van, and is now shifting it onto his Black & Decker Workmate with a disconcertingly hungry look in his eye.’

John and Molly are conversational and comical storytellers, chatty and lyrical.  They each draw on small-town roots – Scunthorpe (pop. 72,000) for John, a small fishing town on the south coast of Cornwall for Molly.  Their humour and melancholy blends as they celebrate the small victories amongst everyday absurdity and dejection: cadged fags, infatuations, one-liners, mothers and fathers, jerkwater recognitions.  There’s comfort in knowing that most people are failing just as hard as you are.  Their stories are unsentimentally poignant.

“We’ve got the same publisher” Molly says, pushes a copy of her pamphlet across the darkwood table.  “Nasty Little Press”, John adds.  You learn that John and Molly are also spoken word performers.  There’s a tension between page and stage, the accessibility needed for poetry to work in performance, and the richness and re-readability for enduring page poetry.  This is managed well in John and Molly’s pamphlets.  Both books are handsome too – the illustrations in Molly’s book, by her brother Max Naylor, are stunning.

The bill is settled.  John and Molly are extremely polite to the waitress.   Then Molly’s off to Battersea to rehearse her new show and John hustles for the Great Eastern.  You’d give him the hug he seems to need but are concerned he might come apart at the seams.  You finish your Sam Adams.  John and Molly have left you with another way to view the world, some hope but some sadness.  For all their quirky words, their goodwill, you’re still in the city, alone.

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‘Talismanic Contact’ by Andrew Nightingale

In Pamphlets on November 17, 2011 at 12:34 pm

-Reviewed by Claire Trevien-

When handing out various The Knives Forks and Spoons Press pamphlets to reviewers there was one that everyone automatically had a negative reaction to: Andrew Nightingale’s Talismanic Contact. It’s not a surprising reaction, the pamphlet consists of six figures that, at first glance appear to be gibberish. Beautiful gibberish of course: these are visual poems that look to me like blood clots, or a city viewed through its paths, or some sort of microscopic body made out of letters. I expect a scientist could pinpoint much more accurately than me what it could be, but even without knowing, one gets a sense of a small organism blown up to such a large scale that it seems other.

The titles, kept on a separate page, each add to the strange beauty of the poems: ‘fig. 4: Talisman for communing with lightning conductors’ or ‘fig. 2: Talisman for contacting a presence’. They hover between the illusion of scientific remoteness and the daredevilry of poetry. By daredevilry I mean the wonderful insolence with which we poets assume that we can communicate with uncommunicative objects or concepts.

There are several ways of approaching the poems they describe, one can simply relish the titles and look upon the figures with detached amusement, picking out the words, or half-words, that hover at the end of the stems. Or, one can plunge in there, forgetting that one isn’t ‘into’ experimental poetry (whatever that means) and try to decipher what is happening. The dive is thrilling in itself, a process of rescuing words from various part, adding letters where necessary, and scribbling the findings on a piece of paper with Indiana Jonesish panache. In essence, each figure consists of about three or four lines of poetry (there is no punctuation so it is up to you to decide if it is one long sentence, or two, etc) which eventually loop around themselves. For figure 2 (‘Talisman for contacting a presence’) for instance, I found the following:

‘sliding through locked doors hovering like a strange smell and melting without reason these ancestors sliding’,… etc

The words aren’t particularly exciting or unusual for the subject matter (though ‘strange smell’ is of course immediately effective) there is a lack of specificity. However, the subject of ancestors haunting a house is particularly appropriate for the format chosen: as we see the words sliding, hovering, disappearing, with letters erased or cut-off, the looping phrase really does seem like a talismanic chant.

The contrast between the ‘experimental’ presentation, and the prejudices that come with it, and the actually rather mundane text is part of the pleasure of this pamphlet. The poem ‘Fig. 3: Talisman for contacting Mars’ is a particularly extreme example of that juxtaposition:

‘we have heard you on the radio it’s getting late there’s fresh tea in the pot we are waiting are you coming we’,… etc

Though the phrase itself seems simple, the format in which it occurs forces the reader to re-examine it. Here the repetition sounds eerily robotic, frightening at turns, with an edge of desperation. The pot of fresh tea is a reassuring reminder of domesticity in a garbled communication with an unknown entity. Tea is a cliché in stressful situations of course, but that is just a reminder that clichés are yet another form of talisman: a well-set stereotype block that one can press when other words seem out of reach.

Talismanic Contact is not an elitist work, but it does reward those who take the trouble to take a closer look at the dabs of paint. By forcing the reader to experience different readings of the work, Talismanic Contact is a useful reminder that poetry shouldn’t always have to be digestible ‘on the go’ or in performance.

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‘Sullom Hill’ by Christopher Kenworthy

In Pamphlets, Short Stories on November 15, 2011 at 2:10 pm

-Reviewed by Elinor Walpole-

Sullom Hill is another discomforting tale from Nightjar Press (this one written by Christopher Kenworthy) featuring a young and impressionable narrator who reveals the pecking order in the social structure of small-town teenagers’ friendship. With vivid description that is almost grotesque at times, and a tangible sense of guilt and responsibility, our narrator tells of his time as the friend-in-common and mediator between the school bully and a boy with special needs.

Nightjar Press's Sullom Hill, by Christopher Kenworthy, reviewed for Sabotage by Elinor Walpole

The use of first person narration gives us a direct insight into the reasoning and motivations of our narrator as he attempts to establish himself as a friend of John Stack, the school bully, and simultaneously distance himself from Neil Kingsley, a local boy with mental disabilities whom he is keen not to associate with as a friend any more. We see the sense of guilt that our protagonist has from the start – the story is framed by the image of him hiding from Neil, and trying to reason with himself that ‘it’s to protect Neil from John’.

Neil Kingsley is introduced by our narrator as pathetic, seen by others as ‘stupid’ and ‘slow’, however our narrator seems to feel that there is more beneath the surface. His grotesque description of Neil, with nauseating detail about the state of his lips, reveals not only the way that Neil is viewed as distinctly odd, but also hints at racism in the community, as he is considered by others to be a genetic ‘throwback’. Again, our narrator is sensitive enough to question this – and he is told by his mother that Neil is ‘Not black, but blue’ due to his having been starved of oxygen when he was born, the cause of his learning difficulties. Our narrator sees this blueness more than the supposed blackness as a defining characteristic of Neil, someone is perpetually cold, outside and looking for a friend.

Our protagonist realises that he is not as nice to Neil as he should be, and acknowledges his unease about this, yet goes on to express the stronger pull of being friends with the bully. The narrator looks back on friendship politics, recognising John Stack as a kind serial monogamist in terms of friendship, but our narrator is naïve enough to feel ‘honoured’ to have been chosen as his friend. There is an unbearable and moving tension in the narrative as our protagonist feels his loyalty and morals tested between his friends, knowing that John’s friendship is potentially dangerous but allowing himself to be seduced by it, even when John sets his sights on Neil as a source of fun: ‘Let’s burn the spaz’. Even as John manipulates Neil for fun our narrator is painfully aware of Neil’s perilous position, watching his reactions to John’s teasing closely, trying to second-guess the situation and make sure it doesn’t go too far.

However John is also a somewhat sympathetic figure. John is set up by our narrator as an unpredictable, violent presence, and witnessing him withstand abuse from a teacher leads them to their unlikely friendship. John is shown to have no respect for authority – he smirks in the face of discipline, is manipulative and smart-mouthed, and even leads our narrator astray to threateningly tease an old man down by the canal. They use Neil as a shield to look like ‘good kids’ to others while they are plotting trouble. However John is himself a victim of domestic abuse, and when he allows his new friend an insight into the horror of his home life it is not without a price – and unfortunately it is Neil that has to pay it.

Kenworthy’s storytelling is fraught with the unease of negotiating one’s place in the world and pushing the boundaries of wrong and right. A moving coming of age story about friendship, bullying, disability and domestic abuse through the eyes of a naïve narrator who struggles to take in the significance of what he has seen, and reacts by desperately trying to do whatever it takes to salvage a friendship without acknowledging what he’s seen.

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