-Reviewed by Ian Chung-

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

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

So close that for the first time

I could appreciate the silver

On their necks, missed at a distance

And mistaken for black

In previous months of winter light.

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

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

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

I had been enjoying

My Monday morning until the

Part when I came upon

A demolished factory littered

Around the base of a still

Standing though condemned

Chimney. And I realised that

Something resembling a disaster

Resided among these green hills.

Later that night some damp wood

I’d put on the fire began

To stink, and I wondered what

I might be breathing.

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

Living Rooms Stories is the literary sister of a set of instrumental tracks by Icelandic composer Olafur Arnalds (Living Room Songs), for which he recorded a piece a day for seven days in his Reykjavik apartment. Andy Harrod’s literary counterpart comprises of short stories, each influenced by one of Arnalds’ compositions, following a couple as they contend with their own and each other’s emotions.

Arnald’s music (consisting largely of piano arrangements that accompany delicate violin, viola and cello performances) is inspiring, and I feel it would be a struggle to not pen something of real quality off the back of it. But it’s having the idea to set it to ‘story’ in the first place that makes Harrod’s endeavours all the more fabulous.

Living Room Stories is thus a highly original project. And you sense this before reading a single word: each story is written on the back of square card and they are presented in a neat vinyl record sleeve that is a nod to the collection’s musical influence.

On the piece of card that introduces the collection, Harrod tells us that Arnald’s first song, Fyrsta, “flowed through me; I pictured a couple, I felt love’’. The corresponding story, ‘beginnings’, raises the curtain beautifully for what follows.

We are presented with a scene where a woman is standing below the glow of a street lamp at night. There is a strong feeling of unease. She looks towards the lights of the city further down the hill and, immediately, we are left wondering how she ended up here. Tantalising clues are offered, however:

Turning her focus onto the rain, she notices how it glitters in the light before softly
disturbing the puddle at her feet, reflecting her worn out shoes.
Memories of chalkboards, puzzles and a bearded face fill her.

Allowing a character to recall memories in this way is a rather Proustian device, and is something that features prominently in the stories. Memories are stirred up frequently, summoning emotions – nearly always negative ones – that give these stories their thrust. In ‘month eight’, past torment is roused by the sight of a soft toy cat: “its neck squashed and bare through a desire for safety; a desire for a love that won’t bind and abuse.”

Memory of the past and its role in the present is clearly important to Harrod. In ‘the third person’ music is the instrument of memory recall and provides a direct invitation to the reader to consider the role of the past and how it affects the characters: “she hears the sweep of bows across strings in her head, repeating, repeating. It plucks at her memories”. The story develops in order to follow her thoughts at this point and, by now, a picture of a very troubled soul is being painted.

‘light’ is perhaps the most optimistic of all the stories. Moving on through time, and after stories that chart the couple’s wedding (‘together’) and hosting a gathering with friends (‘home’), ‘light’ winds the clock on even more and we are introduced to their children. As the brother and sister play in the snow with their green balloon (a scene that is described superbly in the opening paragraph), we are told:

Their mother smiles at their playfulness and how simple life can be.

Nearby, the father crosses the finishing line in some sort of race:

His body strains with effort, but it doesn’t hide his smile or the enjoyment in his eyes.
He blows her a kiss as he crosses the line. Looking up he laughs at his children
sliding down the hill.

He never thought that these days would be his.

Beautiful. What’s more, its juxtaposition within a rather downcast narrative (in terms of the whole ensemble) makes this story all-the-more positive. There is, however, an ominous feel at this point. Like Arnalds’ corresponding song, Near Light, something is missing. Perhaps, deep down, the couple aren’t truly at one yet with their happiness and that closure remains a distant goal. The imperfect cadence at end of the song compounds this. Something isn’t right, and imperfection seems to supersede absolute positivity.

Over the course of the collection there are no names, no places. Yet somehow the stories feel so ‘real’. Attachment to objects is limited because of the absence of proper nouns, and this heightens the sense that the emotions explored in the stories are universal and not only confined to the characters who illustrate them. Related to this is Harrod’s extraordinary ability to attach a lyrical and poetic quality to his descriptions.

He likes to give us detail, to invite us into a scene, image or setting. This feels all the more deliberate when you consider that each story weighs in at a mere 15 lines on average, making references to detail all the more meaningful. What is the significance of the mulled wine glass, the ash from her cigarette, the child’s green balloon? Parochial detail is abundant and helps make the characters and their emotions as real as possible.

The order of Arnald’s original pieces has been cleverly re-aligned in order to create a saddening history of our couple. It is more than simply a like-for-like, ‘story for each song’, rehashing of the Icelander’s collection. Rather, it is an artistic interpretation, a beautiful tribute to a fellow artist’s work, and represents an innovative means of finding inspiration.

At its heart, Living Room Stories is a study of love and emotion, characterised by the torment, heartache and hope that consumes our couple.“The focus was on love, love as destructive when conditional … and love as healing when truly unconditional. I wanted to keep this theme uncluttered, for without love I fear we are nothing”, Harrod tells me.

What a collection this is. It would be no exaggeration to say that I have not taken pleasure out of a reading ‘experience’ quite like this before. I think that this was helped by reading each story aloud while listening to the corresponding piece from Arnalds’ collection. Harrod’s work should be regarded as a new form that calls on influences from literature, poetry and music. This project is a stunning marriage of the three, and I cannot wait to see what comes next.

Henry Bowers is awesome. A spoken word artist who burns with passions, spitting intricate and affecting rhymes, coming at familiar themes from odd angles that are often filled with disaffection and anger. And are really fun.

In October I had the thoroughly enjoyable experience of seeing Henry twice at Hammer and Tongue Camden and Oxford events. Here’s a bit about Henry:

Background

He’s a hip-hop artist as well as a poet, having started writing hip-hop aged 10, and his music is available on CD and vinyl and for download from his website. He began performing poetry in the 90’s and started slamming in the early 2000’s.

He’s won a slew of slam competitions (in Swedenand internationally) and placed highly in many more, appeared at various festivals and high-profile poetry slam events, and frequently tours internationally. Full details on his website.

His hip-hop shows apparently often include elements of his spoken word, and his spoken word shows seem to contain elements of his rap (if you listen to his music, a lot of the same lyrics are used for both songs and poems) and the focus on the quality and poeticism of his language really shines in both.

Poetry

Apparently some people tell him “Henry, you write some pretty good poems” to which his response is that he knows: he’s a Swedish and European slam champion, you don’t need to tell him he’s good. But I’m going to say it at least one more time: Henry Bowers writes some amazing poems.

My favourite is ‘Stories forSale’ a beautifully crafted piece about a boy, a kind of waif-prophet ignored by the masses, selling stories to survive on the street. The poem speaks of disenfranchisement, of poverty and of grasping onto what you love to do in the worst of circumstances. It’s like listening to words laced with fire, building up this character burning with the words he wants to share, who “lives more in one day than we do in our lives”.

‘I’m all Outta Dog Food’ is another cracker. It’s impressively put together, with flowing rhyme keeping it moving through his unique phraseology, he seems to be creating words and music for the disaffected masses, it’s “poetry to make the mad sane, or drive the sane mad … depends how you look at it”. It’s a poem that dances over a wealth of imagery and topics, without ever landing, but giving you the feeling of summing up an aspect of existence.

And ‘I Like Darkness’ gives you a plethora of examples of his wicked wit. A list of things in life he actually likes (as he’s accused of being too negative), that starts with “I like DARKNESS, not evil, just the absence of light/ I like movies in black and white/ Not without colour, just with diametric opposites”. It’s a great list, creating a kind of quirky canon of himself out of his likes and ending in the pathos-inducing “and I’m slowly starting to like myself too”. Which is strange, as it took all of one poem for the audience to realise they loved him.

Delivery 

And his delivery is amazing. A lot of his poems are available as hip-hop tracks (available from his website, they excellent), but when delivered as spoken word they sound very different. He is very engaging, oozing laid back charisma and his easy-going stage presence a surprising contrast to sometimes frenetic performance.

Take his ‘Party Rhyme’ the one attempt he’s made at writing a ‘party song’ as he sometimes feels that, as a hip-hop artist, he should do more of. He introduces it with the amusing line “So anyone here listened to the radio … Oh, I feel sorry for you, you shouldn’t have done that.” And he means rhyme literally here, it’s just one rhyme. “Throw your hands in the air like they’re not attached/ then realise that without hands, they’ll be hard to catch.” He says it in faux-party style, initial enthusiasm quickly fading as you get to the punch-line.

Or ‘Night Time’ where he gleefully storms through the end times, fast and furious rhymes matching his joyfulness at his desire to bring the world to and end with his words as he was “born with the ability to destroy the world”. With superb imagery and machine-gun delivery, it’s powerful stuff expressed powerfully; and when he tells us “Doomsday’s even better live!” I believe him wholeheartedly. And the line “You all spit metaphors, while I spit meta-fives” is priceless. As a rule, he comes off as Robin Williams re-imagined as a street preacher.

It’s probably quite telling that even when he does poems in Swedish and the audience have no clue what he’s on about, it’s still frighteningly compelling. In “Take Us to Your Leader”, he sets the scene of an alien coming down from the sky in clouds of green smoke in English first (making it clear it’s ok that we don’t understand, the English just don’t learn other languages, “it’s not your fault you’re arrogant”) and by the time he starts the audience is already rapt. And stays so. Through a whole poem in a language they don’t understand (except for the odd words like “brie and camembert” which gets a laugh solely on recognition). He’s just that entertaining. He’s also a disturbingly convincing alien.

To sum up, he’s a ferociously entertaining and thought-provoking performer. Blending the personal and the social/political and managing to preach without sounding preachy, I heartily advise you to see him if you can. And if you can’t, go to his website and buy his music (he does let you download it for free, but I think you should buy it: it’s worth it).

- reviewed by Koel Mukherjee -

Review of the last Sage and Time of 2011

This was my third time at Sage and Time, and the last event of the year, and that sense of community, supportiveness and general good humour that makes this event so special was very much in evidence, with poets referencing each other and the event itself in their pieces, and plenty of laughs throughout the night.

Hosting:

• Hosting duties were split between accomplished poets Richard Marsh and Anna Le (both members of the Dirty Hands poetry collective), and the obvious friendship and sense of fun between these two set the tone for a relaxed and welcoming night.

• Richard Marsh kicked the night off with a sweet, whimsical tale of two misfits who find love at the gym. His characters were touchingly relatable and vividly rendered by a fluid, engaging delivery. As a host, he’s charming, always taking the time to compliment and engage with each performance, picking out a line he likes, or making a friendly joke.

• Anna Le hosted the second half, and as always I was struck by the obvious passion with which she introduces performers. Her introductions are both a rousing welcome, and a great anticipation-builder.
• She performed a piece of her own called “Spine”, which I loved, an exploration of courage, fear and determination animated by a mesmerising delivery that used dynamics and careful pacing to great effect.

Open mic highlights:

• Stephanie Dogfoot’s ‘Equus’ was a wonderful expression of sisterly love and support. It had its share of serious, grown-up emotional content, but masterfully set against the surreal backdrop of childhood –the bizarre worlds that people who have grown up together create, complete with burnt teddybears and clown phobias. Through this lens of shared imaginings she made the serious, adult crisis at the heart of the poem achingly poignant: A surreal exploration of the intense, enduring, and weird nature of sibling love.

• Donall Dempsey’s ‘A Bridge Is Only A Bridge When…’ imagined a woman’s parting words at the end of an unpleasant marriage. The elegantly phrased poem compared the failed relationship to the striking image of a “half-built bridge, silhouetted by sunset” but “startlingly surreal in its unfinishedness”. He also performed an intimate tribute to his partner Janice’s philtrum (the little cleft between your nose and lip, non-anatomists!), re-imagining it beautifully as “the indent left by the finger of God.”

• The Janice in question was Janice Windle, whose own pieces were imbued with an elegant, conversational delivery.  One of them was a companion piece to Donall’s, which declared, “I’m in love with your mandible, darling” which concluded an affectionate exchange.

• Among James Webster’s pieces was an unexpectedly touching musing on his ideal superpower. He would choose to be “quietly super”, with the power to find lost things, especially people. Acknowledging that he wouldn’t be able to take them home, he’d be glad, at least, to “give them someone to talk to”.

•  Amy Acre’s gorgeously life-affirming “love poem to the sea” was one of my favourites.  “As old men talk to their dogs”, she talks to the sea, and the sea both sets her free and inspires her to love of all the messy wonder of life; from dandelions and dragonflies to the delight of Sage and Time itself. It was intensely sensual and personal; proclaiming the “red earth” as her church, she let us glimpse her relationship with the world. And did so with a graceful, inspiring passion that made me want to run to the nearest beach, take my clothes off and dance around naked in the sea.

• During Keith Jarrett’s inspiring performance of ‘Parting Words’ I had to work to keep my tearducts from boiling over into undignified spillage. Masterful use of repetition and assonance gave the piece a mesmerising, mantra-like quality, while his quietly determined delivery complemented his perfectly measured pacing. A resolutely optimistic self-reminder to not be defined or limited by one’s postcode, by one’s past, or one’s fear of the future – something I’m sure most of us need from time to time. Keith Jarrett is awesome.

Featured Performers:

• The first featured poet of the night was Sh’maya, an engaging performer whose first piece was a meditation on ancestry, history and loneliness developed from the image of a tap-dancing boy on city streets, rendered with a passionate, electrifying delivery and skilfully imbued with a sense of urgency and movement.
• Sh’maya’s second poem was about a quest to find the most beautiful word in the world. His protagonist imagined travelling around the world, meeting different people who suggested different words with special meaning to them and their lives. Full of potential, but the poem was seriously hobbled by the cliché-riddled depictions of some of the characters, which often verged on patronising stereotype. The worst offender was a depiction which verged on romanticising suffering: a childless woman standing on a Kenyan beach looking yearningly out to sea, clinging to the hope of a child, proclaiming the most beautiful word to be ‘yearn’. As if she (and therefore, the poet) were revelling in her misery. The problem was not the attempt to give a voice to diverse characters, but that they did not sound like real people with real ugly and beautiful life experiences, rather, magical props placed where they were for the sole purpose of providing Sh’maya’s protagonist with a story (and in the woman’s case, a means of transport). This was intensely problematic.

• The second featured act, Anthony Joseph, was new to me. And he blew me away.
• Joseph read pieces from his collection Bird Head Son, “an autobiography in verse”, and a few more from his latest, Rubber Orchestras. His poems ranged from touching character portraits, memories of childhood and experimental jazz-poetry, to musings on family heritage and history against the backdrop of colonialism. A prose excerpt about a future colony of Afro-Caribbean people on an alien planet, from his novel The African Origins of UFO, was infused with vivid detail that brought to life the Caribbean cultural roots of the community while retaining the extra-terrestrial, futuristic strangeness of the setting (where exist such wonders as “surrealist butter”).
• His startling, inventive use of language, vibrant musical delivery and persistently brilliant animation of memory, place and history were a constant delight.

Sum-up:

Anthony Joseph (the crowning moment of the night for me) talked about the need for poetry to be more than flat words on a page, to be alive and affecting, and like all good poetry events, this night of Sage and Timey goodness was full of that. Brisk-moving waves of poets inviting the room into their worlds. While not every performer was as compelling as Anthony, the night was still packed with strong, inventive voices (not all of whom I could mention here sadly) and by the end of it I was filled up with poetry – with language, ideas and glimpses into people’s personal universes, their senses of humour, their stories, the inside of their brains and hearts and marrow. A fitting finale to Sage and Time’s 2011.

 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 43^rd 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.

Outdoor speakers blare
Drummer Boy once too often–
where’s my bazooka?

Juliet Wilson has reviewed for us a fair bit in the past, with a particular focus on environmental magazines, you can read them all here. Her second chapbook of poetry, Unthinkable Skies was published in 2010 by Calder Wood Press. She blogs here. Enjoy!

Snow covered fields.
Reindeer dig for lichen,
their breath rising like steam.The ancient ones told stories
of flying with an old man,
of many roofs in foreign lands,
of boxes, brightly wrapped.

The herd eats steadily,
heads down,
ears alert in the solemn matter
of survival.

In the distance –
a faint red glow,
the sound of sleigh bells
–Juliet Wilson

It’s the time of year for lists again: lists of things, lists of people, lists of events and occasionally, just occasionally, lists of lists. I think lists of lists are my favourite.

It’s also a time to look for Christmas presents. Sabotage’s own Claire Trévien has already provided a Top Ten list of pamphlets for the poetry-lover in your life (or soon-to-be poetry-lover, once you’ve wowed them with your poetry pamphlet selection), so now here’s a list of suggestions from Sabotage’s fiction division. A Christmas Top Ten, if you like, of prose presents for the people in your life who like a bit of short story or novella every now and then.

I say it’s a Christmas Top Ten… It’s not a Top Ten based on any sort of reader feedback, bestseller charts or in-depth critical reading on my part. [The critical thinking has mostly been done by Sabotage's reviewers, who are a lovely and hard-working bunch – thanks, guys!] I’m basing my list roughly on our most popular reviews on Sabotage, so maybe even if you don’t get the books themselves you can enjoy the reviews while hiding away from the family over Christmas and New Year. But y’know, the books are worth getting hold of too.

It’s more of a ‘Who did well this year’ list. Oh, and there’s only three entries, not ten. So, maybe a Christmas Sabotage Fiction Top Three…

1. Armchair/Shotgun #2 (indeed, all of their issues, but we covered the second) has an admirably egalitarian attitude to authorship, claiming: ‘Good writing does not know one MFA program from another. It does not know a PhD from a high school dropout…and it does not care what you have written before. Good writing knows only story.’ Good storytelling is central to Armchair/Shotgun #2, with our reviewer (Rory O’Sullivan) saying: ‘Many of the pieces illustrate grassroots story-telling at its very best [...] and there is a freshness and a spice to this collection that brings to mind the originality of the Beat generation.’

2. We’ve had a review of Steam-Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories before Sabotage had a fiction division (I’m going to keep calling it a division, until someone suggests a better word), but the follow-up publication, Steam-Powered II: More Lesbian Steampunk Stories definitely makes this list in its own right. Both collections have been popular on Sabotage, and they sound like really great reads. Certainly if our reviewer’s opinion is anything to go by (and it is). The review (by Tori Truslow) says: ‘this anthology was a marvel to read, a real magical mystery airship tour crewed by rebel mechanics and guerrilla historians. If the first Steam-Powered was daring, the second is dazzling.’

3. My third entry to this list is a bit of a cop-out. We’ve reviewed both of the anthology publications from Unthank Books this year, winningly entitled Unthologies, and both have sounded well worth the read. Ian Chung reviewed Unthology #1 back in April, and agreed that it ‘largely achieves what it sets out to do in terms of ‘showcasing unconventional, unpredictable and experimental stories’ and ‘inject[ing] fresh venom into the shorter form’.’ Then Elinor Walpole reviewed Unthology #2 in October and concluded: ‘With such a variety of styles, voices and visions of what it is to be human, I believe that this makes up a very decent and edgy selection of ‘resonant tales for anxious times’.’

I’m also going to add this one (Ian Farnell’s review of Stefan Tegenfalk’s Anger Mode) in as a consolation fourth place, mainly because it’s amusing and references Bruce Springsteen a few times.

Finally, on a deliberately Christmas-themed note: if you haven’t bought presents yet, can I ask a favour of you? It’s not a difficult one, don’t worry.

If you’re willing to shop online, please have a browse through the retailers on Sabotage’s Spend and Raise page. Spend and Raise allows not-for-profits like Sabotage to raise a bit of cash via the commission on your online Christmas shopping – most importantly, it doesn’t cost you anything extra: you pay the amount you’d pay anyway, and Sabotage is given a percentage. All you have to do is go to the retailers through our Spend and Raise page, instead of directly.

Thanks a bunch, we really appreciate it.

Happy Christmas, and merry reading!

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.

Pamphlets make the perfect Christmas present or stocking filler. For one, they’re usually gorgeously produced objects, for another there’s something manageable and enticing about their small size. So, if you’re trying to convert a loved one to poetry, you could do worse than spring one of these chapbooks on them. This list is a mixture of favourite pamphlets reviewed on Sabotage, suggestions from others after issuing a call-out on twitter and facebook (democracy in action!) and my own subjective taste. You will find below pamphlets for wrestlers and nature-lovers, for burlesque dancers and do-gooders, for neuroscientists and performers, something for everyone then.

In no particular order:

1. Megan Fernandes, Organ Speech, Corrupt Press. This ‘unnervingly good’ debut pamphlet is the perfect present for those dragons who ‘read / they were dinosaurs and became / conservative’. Technically rigorous stuff that handles neuroscience with learned ease and is still generous enough to let you in. Read the review here.
2. Jon Mitchell, March and After: poems from Tsunami Country, Printed Matter Press. Christmas is all about giving, so what could be better than to offer a limited-edition pamphlet with proceeds going towards Peace Boat operations in Tohoku?
3. Emily Hasler, Natural Histories, Tim Cockburn, Appearances in the Bentick Hotel, and Mark Burnhope, The Snowboy, all from the Salt Modern Voices pamphlet series. A special mention goes out to JT Welsch’s Orchids and Amy De’Ath’s Eric & Enide whose pamphlets, published in December of last year, narrowly miss out from the narrow criteria of a year-by-year list, but are also excellent. The whole series is worth investigating and I am cheating a little by mentioning so many as a single offering but this is in part because they look wonderful together (as well as separately).
4. Sarah Dawson, Anatomically Incorrect Sketches of Marine Animals . For those people out there who can only read on their Kindle, Dawson’s short collection is the perfect present. Created especially for electronic consumption, the usual hindrances of reading poetry on a screen are avoided.
5. Angus Sinclair, Another Use of Canvas, Gatehouse Press. Who said poetry can’t be butch? When the world of wrestling and poetry combine, the reader is treated to a glimpse into a new exciting world. Read the review here.
6. Deborah Tyler-Bennett , Mytton…Dyer…Sweet Billy Gibson, Nine Arches Press. Nine Arches produce beautiful pamphlets too and the content of this one, with its larger than life personalities, is sure to be the perfect present. Hand it out, read it out loud and enjoy.
7. Luke Kennard, Planet-Shaped Horse, Nine Arches Press. Many have tried to imitate Kennard’s wonderful mixture of absurdist, acerbic wit and seeming off-handedness, but very few have succeeded (a trend that’s perhaps worse than Bukowski imitations). This poem-play is a gift you should give at all times of the year. Read the review here.
8. Kirsten Irving, What To Do, Happenstance Press. Irving needs no introduction to regular readers of Sabotage, we loved her numerous collaborative projects with Jon Stone, while this pamphlet got an excellent review from Chris Emslie here. Buy this while stocks still last because Irving is a poet to watch.
9. James McGonigal, Cloud Pibroch, Mariscat Press. McGonigal’s pamphlet was the winner of the Michael Marks award and was also a PBS choice. Don’t let the accolades put you off, this pamphlet is a quietly impressive work that’ll make you look at nature afresh. Read the review here.
10. Wayne Holloway-Smith, Beloved in Case You’ve Been Wondering, Donut Press. If aesthetics are your primary concerns then Donut Press should be one of your first points of call – they make thick, well-crafted objects with beautifully designed covers. Holloway-Smith’s is no exception, but the content is decadently wonderful too. Holloway-Smith gives us a world full of masks, sleeze and burlesque dancers, but of strange beauty too. It must sound like someone you know, give it to them.

A Pamphlet that I Have Not Read but Which I Am Told is Excellent

I have not read Roisin Tierney, Dream Endings (Rack Press) but it has been nominated several times so I put it forward as a Wild Card Bonus. According to the internet, it begins with the poet’s dying sister and ends with an exuberant funeral. Having read Tierney’s poetry in The Art of Wiring I can only expect this pamphlet to be an excellent & well-crafted pamphlet.

Kindles still garble poetry.  Line breaks are a crapshoot and poets who attempt exotic formatting are thwarted.  So, as poetry moves slowly into this post-paper age, perhaps now is a pivotal time for prose poetry, as it is the only poetic structure that is utterly resilient to e-reader distortion.  Sentences.  Paragraphs.  Right-justified.  Simple.

From Cinnamon Press, This Line Is Not For Turning is a timely and rousing anthology of 91 prose poems from 36 contemporary British poets.  In this selection, the editor, Jane Monson, openly favours conversational and pithy examples of the genre, poems with ‘a good story’, ‘surprising detail’ and ‘a sharp ear’.

Consequently, memorable narratives abound, some charming, many alarming.  Snowbound siblings exchange body parts, a halophilic lunatic runs amok, there’s stepson-lobster bonding and an eight-year-old Kierkegaard hides under the dining table (in, respectively, Carrie Etter’s ‘Sisters’, Richard Gwyn’s ‘More About Salt’, David Gilbert’s ‘Lobsters feel pain the same way humans do’, and Jane Monson’s ‘Kierkegaard’s Chairs’).  These narratives work successfully both as flash fictions and as poetry.

There are a handful of longer pieces and these have more elbow room to layer detail upon detail.  George Szirtes does this expertly in his ‘Two of Four Houses’; the first house he describes is filled with music:

‘comprised of creaks, whispers and snuffles; rain on glass, branches on windows, someone yawning, someone singing in a kitchen, someone listening to radio in a distant room, a music always elsewhere.’

His second house, of course, turns out to be ‘much smaller and much more specific’.

More than half of the poems are related by first person narrators, typically offering up personal and often surreal incidents.  Andy Brown uses dialogue subtly to unwrap his characters.  The small girl, the bird and the clown in ‘Clown Alley’ are rendered particularly effectively, with just a few well-chosen snippets of speech.  A dry humour pervades: from Luke Kennard’s profound, and seemingly effortless, drollery, to Rebecca Perry’s elaborate apocalypsing, to Robert Vas Dias’ elegant daydreams.

As each selected poem is relatively short, there are many strong first lines to hook the reader.  There are daring opening moves, offered like wagers – can the poem deliver on the promise of the openings, the underlying premise?  Amongst the opening lines here, there are zingers:

‘By feeding me earth for a week you earned my belligerence.’ (Nathan Thompson)

‘My father had six fingers, a hooked nose and one eye.’ (Linda Black)

‘The oldest man in the world has just died.’ (Anthony Rudolf)

‘The boy built the bridge with just his hands.’ (Lamorna Elmer)

‘This morning she bonded with a biscuit.’ (Joyce Goldstein)

and the especially wonderful:

‘She put the plate down six inches out of his reach.’ (Diana Fairfax)

By including so many short poems, there is a risk that this selection could feel a little choppy – you’ve only just digested one poem when you’re on to the next one, which may be quite different in content and texture.  Actually, that’s fine by me.  One of many favourites in this anthology is the perfectly succinct ‘Unavailable’ by Sylvia Fairclough which, in three sentences, condenses how travellers have to surrender control over their personal surroundings.

As a summary and a signpost, This Line Is Not For Turning is close to essential for anyone with an interest in contemporary British prose poetry.  The book’s introduction raises the question: is prose poetry still a ‘hidden’ form’?  Well, there aren’t many examples of prose poetry in recent state-of-the-nation anthologies like The Best British Poetry 2011, or The Forward Book of Poetry 2011.  But, to me, prose poetry does seem to have increasing relevance and visibility.  The journals and presses from which these poems were drawn continue to show commitment to the form: Shearsman, Salt, Templar, to name just a few.  And, as more poetry is read online and with e-readers, the imperviousness of the form to inconsiderate electronic reformatting can only help.  But I should mention that this anthology is not (currently) available on Kindle.