Reviews of the Ephemeral

Archive for the ‘Pamphlets’ Category

, ,

‘To the Lost’ by Jack Foster

In Pamphlets on May 24, 2013 at 7:37 am

-Reviewed by Ian Chung-

257Foster_Jack_Cov

Memory and loss are inextricably bound in most of the poems from To the Lost, Jack Foster’s chapbook from Finishing Line Press. From a literary perspective, this thematic pairing is hardly unexpected, and To the Lost might be thought of as an elegiac sequence. What is interesting about Foster’s poems, however, is the manner in which their recognition of loss is consistently inscribed within an act of remembering, which itself is situated within a wider awareness of the cyclical nature of life, the echoes that may be observed across lifetimes or generations. While the overall effect of these poems remains consolatory, they also display a tendency to resist conventional elegiac closure.

For instance, ‘Belated’ begins with a graveyard visit that becomes an auditory revivification:

‘I finally visit your grave on a Wednesday
and press my ear to the ground,
thinking the crinkling of the grass
is you telling me a story.’

The word ‘finally’ suggests this is the first step towards attaining a long-delayed closure, while ‘thinking’ conveys the self-consciously fanciful nature of imagining the voice of the dead person. Foster further envisions the person ‘knitting’ and ‘fashioning baby booties / for my children you’ll never meet’. Yet these flights of imagination are curtailed by the fourth stanza’s sobering bluntness: ‘You’ve been atomized and scattered – / reduced down to a slab of marble, / letting only strangers know you in death’. Nonetheless, the final stanza fervently insists, ‘I swear I hear you though’. Thus the earlier ‘crinkling of the grass’ is brought up again, except now there is the certainty of ‘know[ing] the crinkling / is only the insects that separate us’, as opposed to merely ‘thinking’. The final line’s ‘I start to remember your voice’ then reveals the emotional crux of the poem, i.e. the dead person’s voice has in fact already been forgotten until this graveside moment.

This technique of ending a poem with a line that gestures towards new beginnings or at least non-resolution also occurs in ‘Blackout in Nan Ning’ and ‘How Fast We Grow’. The latter literally breaks off in midsentence: ‘She stands by the window and cries, / Not for death, but, finally –’. As for ‘Blackout in Nan Ning’, given its title, it unsurprisingly ends with the image of a blackout, ‘a place beyond my own comprehension, // where the past and the present / reveals itself’. The cloaking of darkness is juxtaposed with the moment of clarifying epiphany: ‘I see as if for the first time’. The poem has rendered absence into a form of potentiality.

The last poem in To the Lost might well serve as an extended metaphor for the act of artistic creation. ‘On Letting Go’ is ostensibly about precisely that, how ‘Like from the hand of a carefree child, / we are let go’, and thus ‘When I am let go, do not cry’. This is not resignation so much as it is an acknowledgement that life and death form an inevitable cycle. (A similar sentiment regarding ageing is expressed in opening poem ‘Orioles on the Windowsill’, where the image of ‘my great-grandfather’ and his ‘boney finger’ becomes ‘the great-grandsons / Of the long-gone birds / … / Seek[ing] a boney perch’.) At the same time, the red balloon of ‘On Letting Go’ could be seen as representing the poet’s work, which attains a life of its own once it has been written, ‘hoping not to burst under the pressure / of an unfamiliar sense of freedom’. So just as there is comfort in ‘knowing that I won’t pop until I’m far from sight’, the poet may rest easy in relinquishing his poems to the reader. Foster’s chapbook indicates he is off to a good start in this regard.

, , , ,

‘The Silence Teacher’ by Robert Peake

In Pamphlets on May 23, 2013 at 9:00 am

-Reviewed by Afric McGlinchey-

silence

The Silence Teacher explores the impact of an infant’s death, and the way perception is permanently altered as a result. Surviving for only a day, Peake’s newborn has left his ghost lodged in his father’s heart and mind. The child’s potential life, and associations with Peake’s own childhood, come crowding in, to drown out other possibilities for him.

Everything he perceives is observed through the veil of his grief. With his poems, he might be saying, as TS Eliot did, ‘these fragments I have shored against my ruins’. His sense of self appears to be that of barely manageable wreckage, the outside world a disparate, disorganized cascade of noise, stimuli, other selves – difficult for him to cope with.

But sometimes, something breaks through, as in the opening title poem, when a mother comes to offer condolences with her daughter, a deaf girl who has just received her first hearing aid. For the first time she has heard birds singing in a nest, and understood her mother’s mimed ‘tweet’. Her joy at this discovery, combined with an insight into what her deafness has meant up to now, swoops the poet back to the silence of the son’s heartbeat: ‘what that silence taught, and how it pressed.’

Causality is at work when the poetic vision includes not just the luminous and particular present moment, but antecedents and consequences. Childhood memories bend towards a resonance they didn’t previously have. A thirteenth pup, runt of the litter, rejected by its mother and adopted by the poet as a seven year old recalls the first emotion of caring for a helpless creature, before his ineptitude unfortunately led to the pup’s death.

‘I stabbed a pin in the tip of my sister’s doll bottle….
palmed you on your back and fed you like a new father,
nervous, doting, repulsed, stroking your minuscule paws.’

In ‘The Spider’, the poet as a child finds that ‘power is pleasurable’ and ‘true to Stanislavsky’s form….anger flashes up…and I think, for a moment, take that.’ Later: ‘I fold him in tissue, swipe the tile so clean/it is as if he were never there at all.’ These fragments of childhood memories accumulate to form a collage that gathers added meaning, a centre of gravity, in the light of subsequent events.

Peake’s descriptions brim with sensibility, but the sensibility does not obstruct or abstract the lucidity of the seeing. Associations infiltrate the scenes of his poems like groundwater.

These are quiet, restrained poems, written in the seven years since his son’s death. They reveal a sense of limbo, non-engagement with the world except in the most peripheral sense, but also develop until the poet is seeking ‘Twelve Reasons to Go On’ (for M.B.). Two examples:

‘3. The moment before falling asleep, when you are free.
11. Sticking an arm in my coat and finding a scarf.’

The psychological burden of this, and the courage required to make such an effort is sensitively conveyed in ‘Double Agent’:

‘Each morning, I make myself up.
I make up what I like: oranges,
say, or rhubarb, how I will walk,
I make up my friends, and reasons
for friendship, make up my love
for collecting small cars, I make
up a me someone can relate to,
and try to keep the “facts” straight.’

Control of his grief is transferred to his poems. There is no Ginsberg howl here. But there is transference, in the form of a Wild Man, who ‘comes down from the forest, smeared with mud, naked’, to accuse him of saying nothing about the transformation:

‘While the body of your child withered under incubator lights
his spirit blazed on the horizon like sun upon the sea
and still, you knew him, in your humbleness, his bright

distance, and understood yourself a flicker in that flame.’

(‘Visitation of the Wild Man’)

This poem blazes with energy, and the first possibility of coming to an acceptance.

For the most part, restraint is part of Peake’s representational ethic, and he turns to nature for his consolation and symbolism. There are birds, spiders, seasons, deer, crickets, the moon. But like the fish in an aquarium, he is also half-aware of other humans: in a waiting room, a bus, a barber’s, a concert hall, on a dock. Most heartbreakingly, hovering on the edges of his consciousness, is his wife, waiting for him to emerge from his grief. ‘The Instrument Is My Voice’ is written to her, and, after listening to a live performance of Bach by a maestro, in a moment of clarity, so attuned to the moment, he hears ‘notes of horsehair / and varnish fading into half a heartbeat / of silence before the applause.’ The attentiveness he has given to the music, he now turns to give his wife:

‘admiring you in the passenger seat, upright,
all buckled in, ready for the trip.’

A heartfelt, emotionally complex poem, it evokes the paradox of a relationship which is barely able to survive – perhaps unable – and yet:

‘our palms
are inscribed with the future, and curl
under latches and handles, even when locked.’

In another beautifully evocative poem, ‘How You Were conceived’, he uses the image of the mocking bird to convey his continuing need for her:

‘Mockingbird sings all night,
and if she did not answer,

I too would become frantic,
baroque, filling the air with trills,

to shorten the distance between silence
and the silence that has no reply.

She steps through the door, out of sight,
and a song gathers up in my throat.’

Ultimately, it is the cadence of tone and the lyrical imagery that render the emotive content of the poems. In this chapbook, Peake has shown his ability – and indeed, has the authority – to transmit the depths, layers and subtleties of the process of grieving. Such a vision springs from a different kind of aesthetic instinct than the merely perceptual. Peake describes moments as seen from his own state of grief, and so his perception of each event, combined with what lies deepest in his feelings, increases the reader’s comprehension of loss.

There are many kinds of poems in the world – and room for them – but poems like these bring things into focus for me. After reading The Silence Teacher, I have a more emotional stake in living, and in loving. A haunting collection.

, , , , , , ,

‘Flying into the Bear’ by Chrissy Williams

In Pamphlets on May 21, 2013 at 9:30 am

 

-Reviewed by Afric McGlinchey-

 tumblr_mktyzwOYYs1rtrx4vo2_1280

There is an extravagance of imagery in Chrissy Williams’ Flying into the Bear, as the title suggests. These are poems that storm barricades, resisting definition, although they may break down ‘against the shore, the shore, the shore’ (‘The Bear of the Artist’). One important aspect of the imaginative flight or alternative realism (as Matthew Sweeney would describe it) manifested in these poems, is an atmosphere of the ecstatic, seen in sudden lateral movement, unexpected surges of the psyche, pleasurable and spontaneous. Yet there’s also something so self-contained and autonomous about these poems that reading them is a little like power steering.

Chrissy Williams is a poet who gives birth to herself over and over again. Each poem is a surprise.  There’s a lightness and quick wit in many that nevertheless reveal, in animation-like sketches, a dash of something subtle, unexpected, mischievously humorous, or delicately poignant.

In one poem, the speaker describes how ‘possibility burst like a horse full of light’ and this is another key element of the collection – the notion of possibilities, embracing the overthrow of analysis. One example is ‘The Invisible Bear’, where we are instructed to enter the vertical moment, forsaking balance, escaping from time and the planet:

‘… fly into the stars…say goodbye to your planet
in the rearview mirror. Goodbye horses, goodbye Boris Johnson,
goodbye the sun, the moon, all our wrong and stupid choices.’

This chapbook, surely one of the most exciting this year, is full of tilted perspectives. What unifies the collection is a fascination with the perceptual versus the actual, the internal versus the external. In ‘The Burning of the Houses’, the poet describes birdsong as ‘a sound installation of birds / cooing outside my office window.’ She captures the crossover of the virtual world into the real, where breaking news on FB and Twitter become more important than the evidence of our own eyes:

‘This is London. Hackney is on fire now
and Jamie is looking up from his desk.
He stops working. He tweets that he can see
people smashing up a bus….
and Anna is Facebooking furiously from Manchester
calling everyone bastards for doing this.
I am watching the BBC and reading Twitter
flicking between #LondonRiot and my friends….
But it’s okay now, some of my friends
are linking to videos of kittens which must mean
everyone is fine.’

The danger of offering a charming enactment of disorientation is that it can become a homage to dissociation. Williams manages to avoid this, however, with her ironic ending. But she also celebrates – and emulates –  the imaginative possibilities of online video games in ‘Robot Unicorn Attack (A love poem for a video game)’, where:

‘Possibility bursts like a horse
full of light, accelerating
into a star…’

In Williams’ poetry, realism and fantasy coexist without apparently creating a logical dilemma for the reader.  While there’s a risk that the avant-garde can succumb to its own rituals, rather than affecting the reader emotionally, the velocity and interesting disruptiveness of Williams’ poetry not only offer a novel point of view, they also provoke thought. The bear inside the poet’s head, the horse full of light, lemon grass that transforms into stars, bubbles that burst with epiphanies, a mask that uncovers the truth, all make the reader pause to absorb subliminal messages.

The appeal of her language is that it’s natural and conversational. Clarity and accessibility go a long way in poetry. She also makes use of the incantatory impact of repetition, and of association. Her poems connect through images, patterns and themes. For example, the bubbles in ‘Bubbles for Reuben’ appear again in ‘Green Lake’ where they ‘swarm’ in the water. Her surprises are in her imagery, form and mental leaps. For example, ‘Instructions to the Lemongrass Artist’ contemplates the time travel, evolution and the origin of the universe from the point of view of a blade of lemongrass. Stanza 7 of eight stanzas reads:

‘7.
Lemon Grass is a thousand stars seen by day, a lit sky, a light formed of many
lights.
TEXT: STARDUST’

Most poets have a preferred form, so that the poems in their collections have a consistent visual appearance on the page. Not so with Williams. If aesthetics are an indicator of temperament, I would consider Williams more exuberantly Latin than British – not surprising that she is half-Italian. Her variety of form shows a lively imagination and playfulness at work. As she writes in ‘On Getting Boney M’s Cover of Mary’s Boy Child by Harry Belafonte Stuck in my Head’, (I haven’t even mentioned the fantastically original poem titles!) she writes: ‘We make things new to make them new. /This is what we do.’

Chrissy William’s gift to the world is her buoyant attitude; as a child says in ‘The Puppet’:  ‘Nothing is grim here when you sing’.  It’s also the insight with which she gathers and blends perception and cognition. I particularly enjoyed her many references to other artists, writers and performers, which adds resonance to her work.

Williams has devised for herself, and learned to inhabit, a kind of poem that is nonlinear and intuitive, one that can incorporate and digest its own doubts and feelings as it goes along, without requiring that they be brought to crisis. Even though the opening poem reminds us that ‘there’s nothing worse than a bear in the face, when it breaks’,  her second last poem, ‘The Invisible Bear,’ whizzes us out to space, to say ‘goodbye to your planet in the rearview mirror’ before exhorting us to ‘Go back, go back, go back. Plant your feet into the earth, into the Earth….be dazzled by the daylight.’  In spite of the warning in the final poem, it’s the dazzle that remains for this reader.

 

, , ,

‘Couples’ by Michael Stewart and ‘Destroyed Dresses’ by Cara Brennan

In Pamphlets on May 13, 2013 at 9:30 am

-Reviewed by David Clarke-

 couples

Scarborough-based Valley Press is a relative newcomer, first established in 2008, but is quickly building a healthy roster of well-produced poetry titles with a distinct regional flavour. It has published a number of débuts, including Cara Brennan’s Destroyed Dresses (2012) and Michael Stewart’s Couples (2013). Both are pamphlet length, but – unlike many first pamphlets from new poets – these are notable for their cohesion and thematic focus. They are not just showcases of ‘best poems so far’, but rather carefully thought-through pieces of work which, for all of their brevity, are satisfying stand-alone collections.

Michael Stewart’s Couples is particularly notable for its use of the pamphlet form, presenting pairs of poems and prose poems which face each other on the odd and even pages of the book. Those on the odd pages are frequently justified to the right hand margin, so that they seem to lean into the poems on the even pages. The poems often talk to each other in a more or less direct way. For example, the openers ‘He’ and ‘She’ describe a bizarre suicide and the fate of the victim’s wife respectively. Similarly, ‘Him’ and ‘Her’ recount the sexual incompatibility of a couple from both perspectives. The trick here is that the reader understands more of the predicament than either of the subjects can, so that the pairing of the poems shows how it is lack of communication, not the problem of sex itself, which kills the relationship. The reader knows what needs to be said, but the characters cannot say it.

Overall, the collection’s take on love and coupledom is fairly bleak. Although it evokes passion and new love in some poems, the focus of the pamphlet as a whole is either on love gone wrong or, where the eponymous couples still survive, on the stagnation of long-term relationships. So, in ‘Cam and Shaft’, the man and wife have been ‘wearing away / like two moving parts / running together / until they stick.’ Similarly, in the prose poem ‘The Longest Married Couple’, a local journalist discovers that the centenarian husband and wife in question have survived by largely ignoring each other.

Stewart is also a novelist, and this is straight-talking poetry which shies away from simile and, for the most part, metaphor. Typically, the writing focuses on describing what people do and say, and refrains from any direct comment on those words and actions. In one of the most effective pairings of poems, ‘Clean’ and ‘The Spring Fires,’ we witness the reaction of a man and woman to the end of their marriages: she cleans her house until her fingers bleed, but he burns the entire contents of his on the back lawn. Stewart subtly comments here on the different ways in which men and women express hurt in our society, but does so skilfully by remaining on the surface of things. In ‘Clean,’ for example, we have the following description: ‘She scrubs the taps with Ajax, / she bleaches the bath with Domestos, / she scours the bowel with vinegar and wire.’ Clearly, it is the situation which is being foregrounded here and which is supposed to yield insight for the reader. A stress on musicality or a playful use of language are not strong features of this poetry, although occasionally Stewart will allow a rhyme to creep in as a parting shot at the end of a poem. Nevertheless, this no-nonsense, concrete style suits the subjects of the poems and Stewart’s unsentimental approach. It will be interesting to see how his future work brings this stance to bear on issues beyond the emotional and the domestic.

destroyed

Cara Brennan’s collection is a more warm-hearted affair, in that the trajectory of the book roughly traces the move from the security of childhood through the dislocations of adolescence to the new security of a loving relationship. As the title suggests, clothing is a significant motif in the poems, both as a metaphor for identity and for that identity’s fragility. For example, the little girl of ‘Fifth Birthday,’ dressed in ‘pink and black check taffeta,’ is protected from a wintery outside world by her mother, whereas a slightly older version of this same child in ‘Bobble’ fears that the wind will pull off her hat as the family attempt to scatter her grandfather’s ashes. The fanciness and girlishness of this hat, ‘covered with scratchy fabric, / lace, a silk bow, pearls,’ becomes pathetic in the face of mortality and the hostile elements. In ‘Wool, Skin, Fur’, one of the most striking poems in the collection, a series of coats worn by the narrator at university charts her progress from insecurity and fear of exposure in her disorienting environment to a new confidence in a relationship with a partner whose coats now ‘hang with mine, against the door.’ Although not all of the poems focus on clothing, there are enough of these in the pamphlet as a whole to allow for a sense of progression and to tie the whole project together.

In contrast to Stewart, Brennan’s is a more conventionally lyrical voice. This is certainly not a criticism, but the poems do often focus on the perceptions of a female subject whose train of thought and feeling leads us to a moment of insight in which the details of the world around her take on a new significance. The already quoted ‘Bobble’ is a good example of this, ending with the fear that ‘A gust may take it away from me’; ‘it’ being not just the hat itself, but the loving family overshadowed at that moment by death. The language is far from showy, but Brennan is more willing than Stewart to develop extended metaphors, introduce evocative similes, and enjoy the sound of words. Just occasionally, these short lyrics fail to pack the punch of the best among them, as in the poems ‘Attic’ and ‘Sequin Dress’, where I found it hard in places to work out exactly what was going on. On the whole, however, Brennan is clearly a young writer who is capable of creating a world which is distinctly her own. She is unafraid of exploring her own vulnerabilities, but her work remains artful and controlled, so that her self-examination stays accessible to and engaging for the reader.

On the evidence of these two pamphlets, Valley Press has a good eye for emerging talent, and great care has clearly been taken over the design of the books. The cover price (£6 each) might seem steep, particularly in the case of Brennan’s slim pamphlet, though the RRP is no doubt a reflection of any bookseller’s potential cut. A better option for everyone is to buy directly from the Valley Press website where they are sold for only £5 each including P&P, or as an even cheaper e-book. Both pamphlets deserve readers, who will hopefully take advantage of the opportunity to buy direct.

, , , , , , , , , , ,

‘The Debris Field’ by Simon Barraclough, Isobel Dixon and Chris McCabe

In Pamphlets, Play of Voices on May 1, 2013 at 1:24 pm

-Reviewed by David Clarke-

 thedebrisfieldlargecover

The Atlantic liner Titanic, which sank on its maiden voyage in April 1912 with the loss of more than 1,500 people, has achieved a remarkable status in western culture. It has become a persistent moral metaphor, serving to illustrate everything from the hubris of humanity (as in Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Convergence of the Twain’), to the failings of the class system (as in Roy Baker’s still harrowing 1958 film A Night to Remember) and the dangers of a misplaced confidence in progress (as in Hans Magnus Enzenberger’s poem sequence The Sinking of the Titanic of 1978). In the Second World War, the story even served Joseph Goebbels as a symbol of the evils of British capitalism, the theme of a 1943 film drama he commissioned on the disaster (see The Titanic in Myth and Memory: Representations in Visual and Literary Culture for more on this). Slavoj Žižek has aptly described the Titanic as a symptom of modern culture in the psychoanalytic sense, a ‘knot of meanings’ occupying a space in our collective imagination that somehow pre-existed the actual disaster itself: as Žižek points out, one popular novel from 1898 had already described the sinking of a ship called Titan in uncannily similar circumstances.

It is this ‘knot of meanings’ that The Debris Field sets out to explore. Here the Titanic is described as a ‘double ship’, ghosted by its own myth. The pamphlet results from a multimedia project to mark the centenary of the Titanic that poets Simon Barraclough, Isobel Dixon and Chris McCabe developed in collaboration with filmmaker Jack Wake-Walker and composer Oli Barrett. The complete film is scheduled for release on DVD, but the publication of the pamphlet stakes a claim for the words to have an independent existence beyond the original project. In a recent article, Isobel Dixon relates how the poets’ ‘aim was to be evocative rather than simply narrative, to draw on striking nuggets of fact, but also ideas of labour and ambition, poverty and wealth, bravery and loss, brotherhood and love and nature’s power.’ This non-narrative approach is achieved in a fragmentary text that, while roughly following the ship’s progress from construction to destruction, does not seek to describe events in detail, focusing instead on the conjuring up of particular moments and images.

This is an exploration not just of the physical debris of the ship, but also of the symbolic field that has survived it and continues to grow. The design chosen by Sidekick Books also evokes this process: printed on blue paper, each page with its own creases and watermarks as a background to the text, the look of the pamphlet suggests this sifting through the debris in a deep, dark place. But the debris field of the ship is also a dreamspace, as the poets suggest when they begin by performing an act of hypnotism on their audience in the opening pages, counting down to ten as we find ourselves going ‘deeper and deeper’.

What we find in these depths is stylistically heterogeneous, but certainly contains some wonderfully effective poetic fragments that, taken together, capture a whole panorama of characters and incidents in precise, controlled language. These carefully observed and economically evoked pieces of the past seem to flare up out of the darkness of the ocean fleetingly before disappearing again. The poets have chosen not to identify their individual contributions, but the impression is in any case that of a compendium of more than their own three voices. There are direct quotations from witnesses and montages of contemporary popular songs, short rhyming lyrics, as well as examples of conceptual and concrete writing. The tone shifts between ironic depictions of the opulent life on board (for example in the sections ‘The bugler calls’ or ‘Rub-a-dub-dub, the Captain’s tub’) and more elegiac elements. There are also attempts to establish contemporary resonances, for instance in a piece of prose poetry that combines the words of a young girl who survived the disaster with fragments of text about contemporary capitalism and the effects of water shortages for children in the Third World.

Once the pamphlet has reached the point in the story where the ship strikes the iceberg, however, it is the elegiac tone that comes to dominate. The penultimate section is a slightly longer sequence of verses giving voice to the ship’s dead, highlighting how even the recovered corpses were treated differently according to their social status. However, this social message is finally held in balance with a tendency to see the sinking of the ship as more of a universal metaphor for human mortality: ‘From debris we come / and to debris we go.’

The Debris Field is convincingly executed as a meditation on historical events, and innovative in terms of its formal hybridity. However, while it was enjoyable as a reading experience, I did not find it entirely satisfying. The subject of the Titanic is difficult to approach from a new angle. As a ‘knot of meanings’ (to return Žižek’s phrase) it has been understood in so many different ways, many of which are explored in this pamphlet, that it has become culturally over-determined. The fragmentary nature of this text is perhaps a recognition of the impossibility of telling a new story about the Titanic. Rather, in a thoroughly post-modern move, the poets can only sift through the meanings that are already floating around in the culture. As a consequence, and despite the undoubted quality of much of the poetry itself, I could not say that the effect of reading the pamphlet as a whole was to make me feel or think differently about the Titanic or about any of the significance that we have been attaching to it now for over a century.

 

 

, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

‘Swarming’ by Edward Mackay

In Pamphlets on April 29, 2013 at 9:30 am

-Reviewed by Richard Watt-

swarming

Swarming by Edward Mackay is in esteemed company. His 19 poems sit in the Salt Modern Voices series, from which several pamphlets have been my favourite poetry releases of the last couple of years. Several pages in it’s obvious Mackay’s a romantic, and very well read even for a modern poet, but the extent of his references and influences do not impede the reader. Often his poetry reads like a personal pilgrimage through the margins of revolutionary textbooks and mythos round-ups. These jostle boisterously against the more corporeal concerns of the body and desire.

So we have, then, the discomforting, iconoclastic stomp comprising ‘Of or Pertaining to a Raven’, which restlessly tosses its bestiary of Gnostic entities across the Risk board:

I’m God Mahakala and long before he rode on fire and sky
I fed Elijah meat and bread. I’m trickster and creator god of Haida.

Mackay introduces here something of a West-East travelogue, on which he could have gone – should Poe have denied the ticket from the weary traveller Hart Crane in his central work The Tunnel.

‘Stone House Asylum, 1932’ methodically weaves a familiar tale of male bonding during the First World War with Helen Thomas’ care for her husband Edward, a poet killed in action in 1915. Looking at her wartime memorabilia, ‘She spreads their youth upon the bed/as if, beneath the ordnance of loss, all three can walk together’. There is a feeling of verdancy in the story-telling which sets the poem apart from the grey, trench-sodden tropes the reader will expect.

A map-poem such as ‘The Size of Wales’ could certainly be described as visually pleasing but it’s also oddly tactile. Reading its several dozen scale analogies, it gave me a great and sudden feeling that I could reach in with my hand and pull out a fragment. As a journalist I laughed at comparisons to ‘166 million Olympic swimming pools’ and ‘39 million fewer rugby pitches’, and as a Scot I sympathised with ‘a great lake of language, each spoken word that’s lost the ears that understand it.’

Musical influences are neatly folioed in tribute to Bob Dylan and Jesus and Mary Chain, in ‘If You See Her’ and ‘Love Song to Feedback’. I got the feeling of the Mary Chain very well – whirling and giddy, disconnected. These poems work well as a pair, a kind of explanatory or biographical lemma for Mackay.

No small amount of pith inhabits the cursive script of wedding-invite-reply RSVP, where Mackay invokes the awkwardness of Church Going, then hurtles it into someone else’s Larkin:

I’ll even think of other things
(between the hymned injunctions that you don’t believe)
To put aside the memory of your fresh grown curves

‘Against Gratitude’ mixes in a frequent capacity for the taste of biological process or (sometimes and) desire.

Cuts, wheezes and fevers re-frame a romantic tryst as hospital diorama – ‘Resentment curdles, call it gratitude:/that marbled belly fat on coercion’s underside’ examines a previous relationship with the disinterested eye of a butcher or grocer inspecting their wares.

‘These Gathering Days’ conjure the spectre of Czeslaw Milosz with solemn, curatorial perspective, and the tidy ‘Pinhole Camera’ introduced me to the photograph of Michael Chrisman (for which I’m indebted).

My favourites here are ‘Midden Burial’ from ‘Postcards from Doggerland’, which hops along with a vague urgency that put me in mind of GM Hopkins, and The Abbat, the high diction of which recalls the stately splendour of modern fiction classic Canticle For Liebowitz. A torch and dictionary are occasionally needed to see into Swarming’s corners because the references are often so outward-looking, but Mackay’s direction and wording always signpost his intention.

To qualify that comment: Mackay’s writing hovers somewhere between the academic and the dystopian revolutionary, and is appropriately dispassionate and sanguine by turns. I believe his writing to be informed by classic British fiction, world mythos and a fascination with ancient cultures.  For all that, a traditional (call it classic) streak runs through Swarming.

, , , , ,

‘i wrote a poem dedicated to god that i considered to be extremely disrespectful’ by Diane Marie

In online chapbook, Pamphlets on April 23, 2013 at 11:00 am

-Reviewed by Charles Whalley-

Diane Marie’s i wrote a poem dedicated to god that i considered to be extremely disrespectful is self-published as a 20 page PDF on Scribd. It appears to have been written for a PDF format: each page marks a new poem in the sequence, and each word is aware of its position on the page. It is typographically quirky; every single I, on its own or within words, is italicised (I won’t attempt to reproduce this in my quotations). In publishing online like this, the sequence marks itself out as part of alt lit, which can be better described as a community than a movement or a genre. Indeed, often the only distinguishing characteristic of alt lit, as i wrote a poem dedicated to god… can be categorised, seems to be its publication practice; however, alt lit, and Diane Marie’s poetry, show signs of a shared aesthetic that is best described as post-internet. The simplest definition of post-internet art I’ve seen is that it treats the internet as banal rather than novel. I suppose the online publication can be seen as part of this, as it is easier to pretend the C21st doesn’t exist when one’s poems are in print. And whilst artists are often placed as pre- or post-internet based on their age – as in, whether they grew up without or with the internet – their art, by birth, is post-internet, and so has no reason not to reflect the same pressures. It is fair to accuse pre-internet poetry written in a post-internet age of redundancy. i wrote a poem dedicated to god… is certainly post-internet in its outlook and aware of the backwards glance in ‘post’.

It is a sequence mostly concerned with connectedness despite everything. The backdrop of the poems is a gentle apocalypticism, of the melancholy of those of us hanging around after the end of history. A dog-walker, who appears in a few of the poems, “thinks about the way the earth moves slower every year” as, we are told elsewhere, “ev’rything is/slowing down”. The dog-walker, with his stopped watch, is trapped in inactivity through the sequence, waiting “for the dog to change his mind about the rest of/the walk”. Something like this idea appears in the sequence: “JOAN OF ARC WAS A WITCH AND A BELIEVER//I AM NOT EITHER”. The first line, to be heretical, can be understood as “Joan of Arc partook in the system by which she was condemned” or “Joan of Arc still drew personal meaning from a system which would kill her”. The speaker of the poem is free from accusations of witchcraft but also excluded from belief. This mood invokes the paradoxical situation of the networked post-internet individuals of the C21st: more connected than ever, yet more aware of our isolation as a result.

It is against this backdrop that the sequence explores the possibility of connections. To quote the penultimate poem in full:

it is the future now
and we are both dead
a long time ago
but i still love you

Much of the sequence covers the characters within the dog-walker’s “tableau of dog and lead and/ man and bench”, connected by their views of each other. Some of the best lines in the poems are descriptive, as they play with sublimity and excess and the way in which the external world connects to the individual, or the individual practices a mode of sight upon the world. The third poem, for example, is one long sentence, beginning:

and the beach below is wild and coarse dark
sand and great green-smeared curves and the
sea is huge and deep and wholly blue and
overhung with a thick grey wall of cotton-wool
sky and climbing the dunes and dry rock bluff
are samphire glasswort aster and thrift

The unbearable excess of the external world is portrayed most in a poem which begins “There was visibility in all directions”, and follows a pattern of slowly varying sentences about the horizon and the sky and everything creating the appearance of being “in the center of some body of water”, accumulating into “The/impression was obliterating.” The impression, the subjective sensation that obliterates the observer’s mode of seeing, is what we are looking at, not the object of their sight. This is important, as the mode of seeing incorporates an emotional response, and it is this emotional response to impressions that gives rise to the empathetic connections between people that the sequence also explores.

Crucially, the characters in the dog-walking tableau never seem to share a glance, as a smoking woman “wonders what would/happen if the man standing still looked up”. Many of these gazes act as a prompt towards connection via the common experience (as a burden and a joy) of the body. As well as the smoking woman, the dog-walker and his dog are seen by a “passing cyclist” who “notices/all four eyes on the man and the dog/blinking in unison and blinks also”. That the man and dog’s eyes are numbered individually rather than pairs implies surprise not only that the man and dog are blinking in unison with each other, but that they are blinking in unison with themselves. The cyclist then becomes aware of his own body, as in a later poem, “suddenly acutely/aware of his eyelids.” This poem then fills the rest of the page with closing brackets, which make the reader’s eyes feel funny too; we are blinking at the cyclist’s blinking at the man and dog’s blinking. As the sequence’s second poem, coming directly after the cyclist’s blink, runs: “oh shit i have//”feelings”.” There is a joke in the faux-ironic speech marks, but it suggests the sense of physical sensation in the word “feelings” (rather than, say, ‘emotions’) and holds this up against C21st isolation. The sequence, like much post-internet literature, exploits the visceral and the physiological as a route towards sincerity, or as a route at least to provoke any sort of reaction at all.

It’s a very impressive set of poems, albeit with some messiness; I can’t get much out of one poem which goes over the words “rain”, “rein” and “reign”, even if it does combine this with some of the wittiest lines of the sequence, such as the sequence’s title or the final lines: “do a radio interview and/i don’t know the exact reasons.” But i wrote a poem dedicated to god…’s patchiness can be forgiven for its cleverness and the direction of literature that it represents.

You can read some more poems by Diane Marie here. 

, , , , ,

‘Then Spree’ by Nia Davies

In Pamphlets on April 15, 2013 at 9:14 am

-Reviewed by Donald Gardner-

then-spree

Much of Then Spree, Nia Davies’s first pamphlet of poems, reads like a focussed, if somewhat wayward diary: ‘Look up. Berries suspended in thorns/ are that same rackety churlish: / an overspill of fluster, / my lurching, a leach of sagey green.’ This poem (‘Born in a moody basket’) closes with what seems like a statement of intent for her poetry: ‘What next in my fidgety solstice? / Heart in the headland – observe the invisible wealth.’ The compactness of her work can feel like a kind of shorthand, sometimes rather too tied to personal references to be easy for a reader to follow. At the same time one’s sense that she is a poet with a strong idea of what she wants her poetry to do invites a closer reading.

Another piece, ‘An Autobiography of the Ophicleide’ is an account of a more-or-less obsolete wind instrument, but she makes a point about Darwinian survival in the last lines, ‘But my throb fell flat in the pond of other pipes, / their other useful selves ascending.’ Davies is attracted by the charm of many things that have ceased to be: is her tone one of mourning or celebration? I think the latter, as her work is mostly too upbeat to stay long in the mode of grief. I think of Hopkins’s line, ‘All things counter, original, spare, strange’, and I’d go further and say that there is something of Hopkins’s spirit in her poetry, as if the medium has in her eyes a protective function – to remind us of the validity and worth of non-go-getters in our materialist world. In ‘Barge in the Slug of Slow’, she again reminds us that ‘history’ is a two-speed process:

‘Extinction, they say, could be at first
near stagnant, submerged, like a barge

in a sewer canal that one day comes
unclogged, moving along to the rapid half of history.’

And in ‘The Gun’, a poem about a historic docklands pub of this name, she again takes issue with this two-speed history:

‘… history
is handcart driven, all the better for its bowels,
previous sorrows and suspect tales.

Across the way, the ever-advertising dome,
that project/folly: land kneed perfectly
in the ribsides to make folk live up

to nothing, from something. …’

These poems don’t always wear her experience lightly, but they do make a tantalizing code of their material, much of which is open to deciphering. Things shine through the lines, and I see a pursuit of ecstasy in her work, that again reminds me of Hopkins. As in ‘I want to do everything’:

‘Bibulous, happy, exploded in the litter
of pomegranate. I want to live long.’

I don’t mean to force a parallel, but Davies’s almost mystical combination of sheer delight and the application of a magnifying glass to out-of-the way detail in, say, a landscape or a city scene, gives her work a similar ethos to his. Also there is her experimental way with language, which is not gratuitous but, as I see it, mystically driven, in that she forces language to reveal things for which it is normally a veil.

I’m not sure which other poets might be ‘sources’ for Davies’s work, except herself. Dai George suggests in the blurb that she is influenced by experimental American work. This may be so, but I was more struck by how individual her voice is. I looked at the early months of her interesting blog, Sky like That, where she has some entries she calls ‘walking diaries’ – in Ethiopia, but also in Hackney and West Wales. They give a clue to her self-shaping as a poet, the compressed nature of her writing and her training as a poet by a close reading of the life around her, city or country. I’d write her up as a promising and seriously original poet who sometimes displays a madcap grace as in ‘Periphylla Periphylla’, which is about a man with a jellyfish heart travelling on the top of a London double-decker.

‘… visible through the greased glass
of the night bus. He travels

sunkenly and half-happy
through a dawdling soup,
the city’s deep midwater.’

It’s some trope, this poem – definitely spare and strange, even, I would say, irresistible.

, ,

‘Body Voices’ by Kevin Reid

In Pamphlets, Saboteur Awards on April 10, 2013 at 10:09 am

-Reviewed by Anthony Adler-

BodyVoicesbyKevinReidfrontcover

I want to like Body Voices, and I want to say nice things about it; I like the concept behind it, and receiving poems through the post always disposes me towards generosity, particularly when they’re sandwiched between handsome endpapers. Reid’s engagement with masculinity and age gives the pamphlet admirable coherence. While he doesn’t seem interested in pushing at the boundaries of form, Reid has a good sense of how to vary the ways that poems present on the page, enhancing the impact of individual poems and giving a pleasing rhythm to the pamphlet as a whole. There are striking images presented neatly: men’s nipples are ‘[p]ocket studs on this male garment’, while surgery transforms its patients into

‘tangible products,
a series of joints and valve innovations’

there are poems that turn well on a well-observed irony, that are given momentum by repetition, that, like the two-part ‘Hands’, are pleasingly inscrutable and wrong-footing. There are, in short, all sorts of things in this pamphlet that are commendable.  But these are all things that potential readers should be able to take on trust. When one buys a book from a publisher, it’s reasonable to expect it to be written and edited to a basic standard, and to be generally competently assembled and arranged; that Body Voices just about meets these standards is nothing to celebrate in itself.

Charitable rose-tinted spectacles folded sternly away, Body Voices is lacklustre, awkward, and unsophisticated. The first poem, ‘Preface’, lists images from each poem under an explanatory first line, ‘Within this supplement of words you will find’, which is both awkward and badly phrased. Reid never establishes how exactly Body Voices could be a ‘supplement’ to anything, leaving his readers with no choice other than to see this as anything other than a clumsy word choice. Poems are made by assembling the right words and joining them together in the right order. A demonstration in the first sentence of a book that the author lacks basic control over how they write weakens it and betokens a lack of craftsmanship that does not bode well.

It’s a foreboding that is borne out by the text. Every poem in Body Voices seems undermined by something – triteness, archaisms, cliché, or naiveté. Artlessness can be charming, but only when it is paired with vitality and freshness; in their absence, innocence turns to juvenility, particularly in those poems that address sexuality.  The best poems were those that were the most oblique, like ‘Hands’ and ‘Navel’ (appropriately rendered as a haiku); the rest tackled their organs literally and head on, with little subtlety or poise, reaching a nadir in ‘Penis’, which begins

I come to the Pubis region,
it’s dark. The point?
To make peace with my penis

and only gets worse. Later in the poem, with no apparent irony, the narrator scribbles graffiti on the wall of a cubicle in a public toilet.

I want to briefly return to the pamphlet as an object. Like almost all pamphlets, it’s stapled together rather than bound with a thin spine (although the publisher’s website claims that it is saddle-stitched); the handsome cover design has been printed directly onto textured card stock, which means that the design and the author photo on the back aren’t as crisp as they could be. There’s an unusually sturdy set of endpapers made from unattached card stock, which makes the pamphlet stand out a little from the homemade pack; unfortunately, the binding and cover also mean that Body Voices doesn’t lie flat. The main body of the pamphlet is printed none too crisply on untrimmed cartridge paper, and while there’s a nice contrast between the sans serif used for the body text and the fussier typeface of the titles, the latter is a poor choice for low-quality printing and looks awkward and off-putting when used for page numbers. Judging a book by how it is presented is a poor strategy, but in this case the conclusions drawn might not have been too far from the truth. Body Voices is the product of a solid idea, badly let down by its execution.

, , , ,

‘Close to Home’ by Michael Crowley

In Pamphlets on April 8, 2013 at 9:10 pm

-Reviewed by Billy Mills-

Micheal Crowley Close to Home

Close to Home is the debut poetry collection of playwright and youth justice worker Michael Crowley. It is a pamphlet in three sections: the first, titled South Oxhey centres around the poet’s childhood home; the second, Her Majesty’s Young Offenders Institution does what it says on the tin; Landlocked, the third section, is less explicitly thematic and opens out the focus of the work to a broader palette of concerns.

South Oxhey is a council-built housing estate on the edge of Watford that was originally designed to house Londoners who were displaced in the post-war era by a combination of Blitz damage and generally poor housing conditions in the capital. It’s the kind of area that would, on the surface, lend itself to misery-memoir writing, but this is not the approach Crowley takes. His poems in this section have a documentary quality that helps prevent them from tipping over into self-pity. There is an awareness of the otherness of those who live on ‘the other side’:

‘Over there they dressed for work,
had bigger windows, cleaner tongues,
porches and mortgages,
their children waited to be asked,
stayed indoors on their own side.’

However, this sense of difference does not imply any kind of inferiority. Crowley’s memories are, for the most part, celebratory. He clearly relishes the proximity of nature,

‘the hour and a half of copse and grass,
the dell deep enough to abseil down’

And his house was full of books, Edna O’Brien and Brendan Behan are mentioned, and political discussion, especially against the backdrop of the 1974 miner’s strike and three-day week. But most of all it is the language that allows Crowley to avoid sentimentality. Clear, clean, matter-of-fact, these poems are quietly insistent that we take them at face value, as a true narrative of a life. Indeed, the very occasional lapses into the poetic, such as when an asphalt road is described as ‘like liquorice’, jar more than they would if the general control wasn’t as good as it is.

The documentary tone of the writing carries over into the second section, but the focus moves from the self to others, from memoir to biography. The stories of these young men caught up in the prison system are allowed to speak for themselves with a minimum of authorial direction. One, an Afghani, is sustained by memories of home, when

‘his father showed him
how to drink meat from a sheep
straight from its bloated teat,
oil his Russian rifle with mutton grease’

Another’s memories are, perhaps, less sustaining:

‘Here he comes with it,
breathing it, wearing it
behind a rendered face,
inside a measured walk.
He has it and he wants to keep it
close. The killing of a man.’

Whatever their backgrounds, these young men’s stories are treated with an even-handed, non-judgemental sense of perspective, and despite the poet’s investment in the power of creative writing in their rehabilitation, as evidenced in his book Behind the Lines: Creative Writing with Offenders and People at Risk, he does not shirk from including the less sanguine view of the prison staff in a poem called ‘It’s a Job’:

‘Do you think those two
who saved up their faeces and urine
in a bucket under the bed
to throw in an officer’s face
can be changed through a drama group?’

Indeed, it is typical of these poems that the problematic nature of the subject is not skirted around in any way. Some of the stories told are frankly horrific, but the poet refuses to either trivialise or sensationalise them.

The poems in the Landlocked section are less overtly linked than those in the previous sections. The narrative perspective returns to the first person, but now it’s an adult ‘I’ and the memories are both closer to hand and more problematic than those of the opening section. These poems are saturated with a sense of loss, rupture and death. The first stanza of ‘Cut Down’ lends one sense to the title:

‘Muriel’s garden got too much,
undergrowth overgrew.
Determined weeds tugged her to her knees,
dandelions got the upper hand.
She gave it up, gave it to us
the day before we got the news.’

The closing lines bring another meaning to bear:

‘Muriel heard about you on the news.
She offered to take the garden back –
I told her no.’

In ‘The Ghost House’, a home rented after the deaths of the previous occupants presides over the slow demise of a relationship until ‘It coughed us out’. A number of other poems, including the one that gives its name to the section, reference ‘the Peninsula’, and this sense of being landlocked in a place that is sea-locked is the clearest expression of the irony at the heart of these poems; the ‘I’ may be locked in, but what it is locked in to is a natural world that shapes our ways of being and nourishes like

‘September heavy sloes,
ready to be swallowed
onto a belly of mud.’

This is an interesting, if sometimes uneven, collection. Despite the occasional lapse into the ‘poetic’, the cool, factual tone and dispassionate handling of what is often extremely personal or controversial matter ensures that the twin pitfalls of sentimentality and propaganda are carefully avoided. It’s a pamphlet of assured maturity and quiet strength and while it might not set your poetic world alight, it will certainly give you much food for thought.

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 2,227 other followers