Reviews of the Ephemeral

Archive for the ‘Pamphlets’ Category

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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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‘Remains’ by G. A. Pickin

In Pamphlets, Short Stories on November 15, 2011 at 2:01 pm

-Reviewed by Elinor Walpole-

Pickin’s Remains is a tale of a walker (and a very particular type of walker at that- the protagonist is keen not to be associated with the middle class ‘Walking Business’) who, to his shame, loses his way. Opening with the warning from the third person narrator ‘He had set out too late, and now the light was dying’ the tone is neatly set for the rest of the story as the protagonist faces the challenge of finding his way back to the holiday cottage where he is meeting his friends.

Distinguishing himself from others is important to our protagonist, and his failure to return at a sensible hour is ‘a deviation from his self-image as a seasoned traveller’. The friends to whom he is meant to be returning he met on a gap year, but again he is keen to self-justify that his gap year hadn’t been the cliché of overprivileged students ‘windsurfing, white-water rafting, and bungee jumping with a few days of slumming it watching other people work in the host country’. Rather ‘He had chosen to do something real, something that called for hard graft but was satisfying… that would be of lasting benefit to his own country’.

Remains by GA Pickin, Nightjar Press, reviewed by Elinor Walpole

With the initial rational challenges of a rough and tricky-to-navigate terrain providing a sense of hard-won achievement for our protagonist, as his discomfort grows – he feels the ‘rhythmic nip of a blister’ and has set out without gloves as it is ‘not meant to be gloves weather’. The tone is introspective as our protagonist walks and reflects, his daydreaming the cause of his late return journey. He takes delight in playing out fantasies, channelling the spirit of a long-gone organist as he attempts ‘Music for a Found Harmonium’ on a broken instrument discovered at a ruin of a church and its surrounding hamlet, and ruminates on the roles of the past inhabitants, feeling the pastoral history.

The sense connection to nature comes out in the writing as it sensuously describes the elements and increasingly personifies the surroundings as our narrator becomes less aware of his position in relation to civilisation. The wind speaks in ‘chinese whispers’ that become ‘malicious gossip’ escalating to ‘plotting…a secret that concerned him’. The threatening mood is implied from the first page’s mention of ‘the day’s demise’ and as our traveller becomes more disoriented the narrative becomes punctuated with short, dramatic, statements such as ‘the torch went out’. Our protagonist tries to find comfort from reasoning through possibilities of finding his way back to the others in the dark, fighting his physical reactions to the fear that is setting in, and we shiver along with the narrator as his confidence starts to fail. The ruins he has taken pleasure in earlier become the eponymous ‘Remains’, left behind by the dead.

Pickin’s tale is an atmospheric, sensuous and eerie tale with a touch of tongue-in-cheek humour that doesn’t prevent you from being drawn into the panic as our protagonist’s rationality becomes distorted as the landscape that he has taken such pleasure from turns cruel.

[Remains, by G. A. Pickin, is a chapbook published by Nightjar Press, who produce limited edition, signed copies of works. This one was released at the same time as Sullom Hill, by Chrisopher Kenworthy, which we've reviewed here]

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‘How Esmeralda Estrus Got Her Revenge’ by J. Bradley

In Pamphlets on November 10, 2011 at 9:30 am

 -Reviewed by Lindsey Holland-

 What do the words ‘epic poem’ conjure up for you?  Thoughts of gods, myths and battles – Beowulf, Homer, Dante and Milton perhaps?   Maybe you think of Pound, Carlos Williams and Walcott, each of whom adapted and modernised the epic form.   Most people probably don’t think of sex, vernacular language and frequent references to popular culture, all of which J. Bradley’s How Esmeralda Estrus Got Her Revenge has in abundance.

Bradley wrote the poem in response to a challenge: could he write a 300 line poem about a Byronesque, sexual, female adventurer?  As an idea, it comes pre-packaged with 21st Century ideals but also with a historical context: Byron, like Odysseus, the larger than life male adventurer.  The concept almost demands to be written as an epic poem but also to be dragged into the present day.

Bradley has embraced the challenge.  This is fresh writing.  It’s alive, gritty and believable but not without the depth and layers of reference you’d expect to find in epic poetry.  Take the opening canto:

‘In the club, lapping at rum and Coke

like a wolf cub on its mother’s teat,

I see an ass that makes hands clutch

at the thought of grabbing a cheek.

On the dance floor, she twitches.

Oh no, Ian, it is not love that tears

apart my inseam.  I step off the stool,

swagger to the dance floor and do

the I-only-want-to-do-you-in-the-face

dance so she’s not so scared of me.’

It’s typical of the way in which Bradley weaves unexpected images into a contemporary narrative.  We’re immediately struck by the animalistic, but the wolf isn’t simply a predator, it’s a needy, instinctive, vulnerable infant.  It’s only natural that the wolf questions the truth of Joy Division’s ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’.  We’re simultaneously aware, of course, that the narrator is no wolf.  We later learn that his name is Derrick and, as we begin to see here, he’s a calculating individual who rationalises and adapts his behaviour as only humans can.  Bradley continues to play with our emotions and ethics in this way throughout the poem, and does so to great effect.

Structurally, the pamphlet works both as a single narrative and as individual poems.  Each canto is self-sufficient but put together they have far more resonance.  There are two main narrators: Esmeralda and Derrick.  We read their stories alternately, only briefly breaking away when Esmeralda’s gynaecologist and future self each narrate a canto.  I find this effective.  Neither character is allowed to become bogged down and our interest in them is maintained.  It gives the reader a fun sense of omniscience verging on the voyeuristic.  We’re forced to keep secrets, as when Esmeralda describes Derrick as a man whose ‘swagger and dance moves… make tourniquets look sexy’.  Despite knowing this, we can only read and watch as Derrick continues in the belief that ‘She’s into me.  I will make her face / like a belfry and make her moan / in sonar’.   These are not poems that demand a constant dialogue with the reader.  Instead, we’re asked to take a back seat and enjoy being entertained.

Desire and love are central themes and they’re at the heart of each canto, warring with one another.  Esmeralda might reject Derrick in the club but she’s no stranger to sexual urges, to the extent that her future self visits like a Dickensian ghost to warn her:

‘I have become the ghost

the neighborhood children whisper about,

the monster beneath the bed; they almost

renamed gonorrhea after us.  Your lust

is a train with a death wish, you forgot

how to test the worth of your lovers with just

a kiss’

This notion of ‘worth’ is a recurring one.  Derrick later hopes to prove that he’s ‘worthy of knowing with our clothes on’ and Esmeralda comments in the final canto, ‘Boy, you’re not worth the man you’ve become’.  Desire, we’re repeatedly told, is a ‘choke chain’ which, as the narrative progresses, seems increasingly incompatible with worthiness, and with the prospect of having children who ‘remember how we loved each other’.  If I have any misgivings about the poem, they have to do with this.  Both narrators ultimately break down into slightly predictable characters.  Esmeralda finds a new type of strength toward the end of the narrative but she still hopes for ‘the giggle of children’ and yearns for love despite earlier saying that it ‘can tear us apart, / feed us to the ducks and foxes.  We then have to walk / like we were incomplete, broken’.  There’s a positive aspect to her transformation – she believes in love again – but part of me would have liked her to be more of a warrior: to behave, sexually, however she pleases and to make no apologies for it.  I didn’t want notions of completeness, or desire for a family, to be involved in the equation.  But maybe both characters are more believable for admitting to these impulses – less like epic gods or modern day superheroes and all the more earthly, honest and complex.

Take when Esmeralda tells us of her first love (of whom I won’t say too much – he provides an interesting plot twist):

‘It was so awkwardly beautiful.  Then,

he cheated, called me a warm up,

a gateway drug, a practice snatch.

I snapped, almost carved this vow

into my wrists: never again.  I wore

slut like a gold medal, collected hearts,

used condoms and tossed them behind

my shoulders like fuck-me-not bouquets’

Her behaviour is understandable, and not unusual.  She’s a thoroughly modern, albeit damaged young woman and Derrick, in many ways, is similarly confused.

If desire, love and popular culture are key themes, there are also many subthemes.  Violence, natural disasters, god and references to executions combine to create a threatening, darkly gritty atmosphere.  It’s alleviated by a frequent sardonic humour.  Both characters are amusing for the excess of their language and for their use of the vernacular, as when Esmeralda suggests that some men wield ‘dynamite like a golem’s gynecologist’ or when Derrick bathetically stops philosophising and comments that ‘I think she’s really into me’.

Overall, it’s a seething, dark romp of a poem.  Accessible and fun, truthful and surprising, Bradley’s pamphlet hooked me from the start.  I’m particularly reminded of Jane Holland’s Boudicca & Co.  There are also similarities to some of Neil Rollinson’s work, perhaps with a side order of Eliot.   This is a captivating poem for the 21st century.  Anyone with an interest in contemporary, intelligent narrative poetry should buy this book.

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‘Bonjour Tetris’ by Simon Barraclough

In Pamphlets on November 9, 2011 at 9:30 am

- Reviewed by Mark Burnhope-

 

This year’s National Poetry Day had the theme of ‘Games.’ So it feels apt that I should be reviewing Simon Barraclough’s 2010 pamphlet, Bonjour Tetris (and alas, slightly frustrating that this review’s too late to coincide with the day). It comes to us courtesy of Penned in the Margins, whose pamphlets aren’t just… pamphlets but, like the special edition of your favourite album, artefacts. This one comes in a sand-coloured, number-stamped box stylishly decorated with Tetris blocks. Open that, and the pamphlet itself is nestled, like luxury chocolate, inside a folded sheet of glossy sand-coloured paper. The book cover is a desktop PC-grey, with a darker grey stripe striking through it (this displays the title), and more Tetris blocks (in colour) tumbling down the bottom right-hand side.

A confession: emotional content is often a factor in my assessment of any poetry collection’s Overall Level of Win; and neither packaging nor title set me up to expect emotion (the title being a flippant tip-of-the-hat to ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture). And the poetry, in a sense, does ‘what it says on the tin’. But that’s not to talk the writing down: if I’m slightly disappointed to find a low level of emotion in the poems, it’s probably my fault for expecting it. So what else does poetry do? Well, for as long as it has been associated with emotion, it has also revelled in wit (delivering full satirical force in a single blow), cultural commentary and, above all, the love of its own verbal dexterity. Bonjour Tetris Wins, even if it does play its own combo of special moves.

Like Larkin, Barraclough never throws a complicated word into a conceit which doesn’t ask for it (he’s often at home with a plain, conversational style similar to God’s Gift to Women Don Paterson). Like Peter Didsbury, he’s able to manipulate rhythm and line (he can handle a long line), adjusting his grip on metre as he goes (even if that formal ability occasionally threatens to lighten the mood slightly too much; ‘A Villanelle for Jules et Jim’, in spite of its obvious music, just avoids the ‘disappointing ending’ tag by being the penultimate poem). And like Muldoon, he’s able to fuse disparate ideas and imagery seamlessly (even if his juxtapositions don’t get quite as mind-bendingly strange as the best in Muldoon’s Maggot).

All this works together in the first poem ‘Incorrigibly Plural’, which uses weather imagery (a long, nation-halting big freeze) to explore the nature of radio broadcasting, and the implications of rail privatisation. Weather is so often used to manipulate emotion that I found this use complex and original.

‘Examination at Doom’s Door’ is a fist-pump of a poem; they don’t get much more fun than this. I was reminded of The X Files’ Agent Scully reciting her autopsy findings into a Dictaphone. Weirdly, it also works as a videogamer’s creed, with its liturgical call-and-response repetitions:

 

‘Who owns this puny little gun? Doom.

Who owns these fragged-up body parts? Doom.

Who owns this chain-sawed demon spawn? Doom.

Who owns this lake of toxic waste? Doom.

Who is stronger than work? Doom.

Who is stronger than will? Doom.’

 

I won’t give away the punchline. It’s worth waiting for.

Few poetry collections can do everything a reader wants, and I would have liked a few more emotional moments in Bonjour Tetris. That’s not to say it never gets emotional: ‘Jurassic Coast’ begins ‘The house had grown too small for us and so / we spent that final summer in a tent’ and, through a series of transformations, becomes a beautiful meditation on memory and loss (although its blank verse put me at just one remove from its emotional content).

‘In Memoriam Tsutomu Yamaguchi (1916-2010)’ doesn’t entirely drop its slapstick wit (‘General Groves smacked balls around the court / to stop the thought recurring: will it work?’) but in the end is a fine tribute to a double survivor of Hiroshima and Nagasaki:

 

‘But Yamaguchi-san, the luckiest of luckless men,

sidestepped it all despite the ticket in his hand

that took him from Ground Zero to Ground Zero,

moving through the crowds of citizens

who gathered up their skins and draped their limbs

like silent senators in togas of themselves,

and swaddled in twelve years of bandages,

he lived two times to tell the tale.’

 

I’m glad that ‘Jurassic Coast’ and ‘In Memoriam…’ made it into Barraclough’s 2011 collection, Neptune Blue (Salt). A poem which also did is the last one here: ‘Being a Woman You Will.’ Another life-affirming piece, it praises the strength and resilience of an unnamed woman with touching observations (‘The over-the-state-headlines blank, thankfully, / You. You hinge upon the mirror at the elbow / In the Ladies’ Room.’), and ends in the line it started with: ‘Do anything you’ve a mind to.’

Any attempt to define what poetry is will reflect one’s own biases. This book might be akin to T.S. Eliot’s idea: ‘not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion… not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.’ Thank Nintendo, then, that Barraclough has personality and emotion enough to respond to so many other escapisms with poetry. Videogames, TV, film, radio and other media monsters are caught in his lens until fun shares the screen with intelligence, beauty, and a mischievous wit. And that, if you’re the right kind of reader, will be all the emotional content you’ll need.

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