Over recent years there seem to have been fluctuations in the popularity of the short story as a genre. However, over recent months, the genre has certainly been on the rise; proving so popular with readers that we are now encountering the younger sibling of the short story, flash fiction, much more frequently than before. All The Bananas I’ve Never Eaten, the latest release from writer Tony Williams, offers a fine example of why this rise in popularity is happening.

The collection is marketed as a short story collection, although I would perhaps argue that some of these snippets rest better beneath the umbrella of flash fiction given their length. Irrespective of their genre, the stories in All The Bananas I’ve Never Eaten are fascinating insights into the average, sometimes not so average, lives of people.

While I would love to address each story within the collection, given that there are over seventy, it is a perhaps a little too adventurous for this particular review.

It becomes clear from the opening story, ‘Clicks’, that this collection is written from a truly unique perspective, or perhaps I should say perspectives. A personal favourite from the collection is ‘Anya’s Complaint’, a truly intimate and emotional story with a hard-hitting ending that I wasn’t prepared for. ‘As God Intended’ is another forceful story within the book, detailing the suspicions of both a father and son. While the ending is simple, it certainly has an unexpected emotional impact on you when you read the closing dialogue.

A story that stood apart from the rest was ‘The Wonderful Thing’; the title lulled me into a false sense of security from the beginning and, from the first sentence, Williams began to pull the rug from beneath me. The tale is such a painful and honest depiction of a real-life situation, which is undoubtedly something that a lot of readers either have lived or, unfortunately, will live, through. A truly touching addition to the collection.

The likes of ‘Back in Jiffy’ and ‘Call of Duty’ certainly provide welcome breaks from the emotion by littering small fragments of humour in between the more serious tales. ‘Learning to love Mr Lamb’, a later story, also provides a breath from all the emotion with the rather uplifting story of a man who finds himself in charge of a butcher’s shop simply because the butcher shares his name. ‘Laptops’, another humorous interlude, is yet another personal favourite within the collection, demonstrating modern-day flirting as its finest.

‘Markingitis’ is yet another memorable tale, with an amusing beginning that in no way prepares you for the end; something that Williams seems to be remarkably good at, in All the Bananas I’ve Never Eaten at least.

While only a few stories have been mentioned from All the Bananas I’ve Never Eaten, let it not be assumed that the others were not worth mentioning. Each tale within this collection is brilliant in its own right, with many of them being stories I would willingly and pleasurably return to re-read in the future. Tony Williams has successfully used the medium of literature to weave in and out of the life of the average person, re-creating those lives for our reading pleasure. The emotion, humour and awkwardness in these tales is the closest thing to real-life I have read in an extremely long time and I would certainly recommend this book to anyone looking for a good book that will keep you on your toes.

With the Saboteur Awards results to be announced at the Awards Party in just two weeks, we interview Best Regular Spoken Word Night nominees Come Rhyme With Me about their event and its unique food-themed format.

Let’s start with the basics: how long has Come Rhyme with Me been running and when/where does it take place?

Come Rhyme With Me will have been running for 3 years in July. Come Rhyme With Me takes place twice a month.

On the 3rd Friday of each month we travel to The Writers Place (9-10 Jew St) in Brighton and on the last Friday of each month we are based at Cottons Islington (70 Exmouth Market) in London.

How did Come Rhyme with Me come into being? Was it done with a particular ethos or mission statement in mind?

In 2010, Naomi Woddis put out a call for an event to take place at Cottons Islington. Dean and Deanna had previously curated events together at Lyric Hammersmith and were keen to establish their own independent event, one that promoted quality spoken word and poetry. They wanted to create an event they would pay to go to.

Come Rhyme With Me has a really unique spin on it with its “set menu of performers” and focus on food. What led to that decision?

Upon seeing the space and the restaurant the idea for a food and poetry night was formed. They pitched the idea to the owners (Beverley and Andrew) and Come Rhyme With Me was conceived!

You run nights in London and Brighton, do you find there’s difference in style/flavour between the events in different areas?

In 2011 Dean was invited to curate an event for New Writing South, an organisation that promotes writing and writers of all types in the South East of the country. Dean decided to bring Come Rhyme With Me, the event was a part of Brighton Fringe Festival and was a success. New Writing South invited Dean and Deanna to launch a regular Come Rhyme With Me at The Writers Place and so Come Rhyme With Me Brighton was launched!

Who have been your favourite performers that you’ve had at Come Rhyme with Us? What have been the other highlights?

There have been so many amazing performers at Come Rhyme With Me not to mention the performers that come through the appetiser (open mic) section. The Christmas party where we had an array of performers has been a highlight. Not to mention the successful collaborations between Come Rhyme With Me and Oval House Theatre and London Liming at Rich Mix.

What do you look for when you book performers for your “set menu?”

The menu is chosen with flavours in mind. What style the performer is and how they would fit in a holistic sense. Very few acts are rebooked though Starters are brought back as Mains or Desserts.

What have been the challenges of running a regular spoken word event?

Not so much challenges as standards. Come Rhyme With Me is all about quality of experience.

What is your opinion of the state of spoken word and performance poetry in London and the UK?

It’s strong and getting stronger each year. Events such as Come Rhyme With Me, Bang Said The Gun and Chill Pill are constantly bringing in new audiences and showcasing emerging talent.

If you’re trying to convince someone who’s never heard of Come Rhyme with Me to come to your events then what do you say?

The food element is a massive draw as are the unique line ups and open mic aspect. Dean and Deanna have also been praised for their ability to create a warm and welcoming environment for all audiences. Why don’t you Come and Rhyme With Us!?

And finally, have you heard of Sabotage before (if so, what?) and are you pleased to be nominated for a Saboteur award?

Come Rhyme With Me is very pleased to be nominated for a Saboteur award. It’s a first of hopefully many. Massive thanks to all those who nominated and have voted.

Come Rhyme With Me is run by Dean Atta and Deanna Rodger. They’re cool, check them out.

ctrl+alt+del is a magazine that stands out. It’s delightfully compact, neat, and visually interesting, both in terms of the clean lines and generous spacing of issue five, and the busier layout of previous issues. It comes with online instructions for folding it into some kind of super-awesome origami shape. Its dedication to ‘different’ poetry is conscious and deliberate, as suggested by editor Rhys Trimble’s editorial statement, found on the magazine’s site:

‘some readers will consider this a trivial and possibly terrible DEVIATION in terms of amateurishness, IRREVERENCE honesty, willingness to fail & critical inexperience.’

This seems to anticipate some kind of opposition, some kind of backlash. It feels like a deliberate positioning of the magazine against old-fashioned attitudes, against the mainstream, against… something. In fact, it’s not clear what ctrl+alt+del is against, or who might be against it. Maybe that’s not the point. What ctrl+alt+del is for is a lot clearer:

‘…experimental, linguistically innovative & generally interesting modern/ postmodern poetry’

Great! So let’s look at the contents. I’ve chosen to focus on issue five here, being the most recent issue and presumably therefore the most representative of where the publication is at in terms of its range and scope.

The editor’s enthusiasm for the poetry he promotes is clear from his impassioned introductory statement, and it’s easy to see why he loves his work. A lazy afternoon with issue five of the magazine revealed some real diamonds. Among them, Stephen Hitchins’ incredibly evocative snippets of urban and suburban life:

‘…tv noise. paving crackles like
bracken kindling. puddles fizz.
gnat static sparks.’

(From ‘Alarm 2’)

These fascinating sound-and-image collages document the small happenings of daily life, building up a quiet sense of unease, a synaesthetic hyper-awareness of the tiny clashes that make up even the most banal suburban scene. There is no linear narrative; rather, there is a sense of a greater pattern, or a greater chaos, the roots of which we are left to guess at.

‘Linguistically innovative’ poetry takes many forms, and ctrl+alt+del seems keen to represent a varied and balanced range, from joyfully unpredictable prose rambles (Leanne Bridgewater), to the more academically-rooted prose/poetry mashup ‘delueze vs laetzu vs ed’ (Rhys Trimble), a piece that refers to texts outside itself, bringing up the idea of reader as editor.

There is an emphasis on visual experimentation: a confusing technical diagram of the ‘Universal Poem Machine’, as visualised by Andrew Nightingale, draws attention to the difficulty inherent in separating parts of the poetic process, whilst desolate light-and-shade photographs and a concrete piece by Sarah Edwards focus on positioning, gaze and visual backstory: the act of looking rather than the act of reading. Then there is the quiet drama of Iain Britton’s ‘gestures’, a poem as economical and as vivid as a five-minute pose sketched by a sure and experienced hand:

Finally, the engrossing compositions of Linus Slug draw on philology, phonology and visual traces of the writing process (ink splatters, crossings-out) to look at the utterance as process and result: snippets describing the motor aspects of speech are laid alongside short passages that are almost scientific in their tone and precision:

extract from ‘::field notes::’ by Slug Linus

To sum up, what the magazine is for is more interesting than any controversy over its editorial values. Indeed, it’s these values – innovation, honesty, experiment – that have led ctrl+alt+del to discover some really interesting exciting artists and bring them to a wider audience. ctrl+alt+del is not only dedicated to promoting and distributing work from fresh and innovative poets; it’s an instrumental part of the process of sharing of ideas and ways of working that keeps poetry alive and vital. It’s part of a conversation rather than an anti-establishment polemic. It’s fascinating, it’s broad-minded, and what’s more, it’s generous: as all skint poets will be glad to hear, it’s free to download. Do so.

Fog and Other Stories, a collection of stories by Laury A. Egan, is set mostly in the American Deep South, and Egan is adept at capturing the heat and luxuriant language of that area. The dialogue between characters zips along nicely and is perfectly believable; one can almost imagine the slow, relaxed drawl as characters share murderous intentions. Yes, this indeed is a collection where death and killing features heavily. Wives bury their husbands in barns, cops shoot teenagers, an eighth-grade serial killer selects a victim. However, while Egan allows her characters to vocalise their fears and desires in a plausible way, other elements of the collection are clunky and less seamless.

The first story in the collection, ‘Jango’, starts well. The sultriness and oppressive weather is nicely observed: “For several days, clouds had thrust against each other, promising wind and lightning, but each evening the weather forgot what it was threatening to do and slipped into night, carrying over the expectation of storms to the coming dawn”. Jango is taken on as a gardener for an isolated widow but it is clear she has a secret. It would have been more satisfying to the reader had they been allowed to uncover this secret without the obvious signposts; unfortunately, here, and in other stories, Egan is less accomplished in the passages where she is required to move the plot forward. For example, photographs of Audrey’s dead husband are dotted around the house but are slightly askew; Jango wonders if she kept them like that, “implying something wasn’t straight about her dead husband?” Later, as Jango and Audrey share a romantic meal, the conversation becomes uncomfortable: “Jango didn’t like to talk about the war or his mother, so he reached over and topped up Audrey’s glass and his own [...].” Such explanatory passages are awkward and jarring, not as smoothly effective as Egan’s skilled representation of the landscape.

It is a pity, because Egan is convincing in her portrayal of the protagonists’ perspective, with all their thoughts and prejudices. ‘The Man Who Wandered In’ is a touching story about a man suffering from dementia and a daughter regretting lost opportunities for familial tenderness. However, the daughter’s back-story is again heavy-handed: ‘Allyson sighed and took a long gulp of scotch. She had been drinking too much lately, but the stress of her job was terrible, her love life was nonexistent, and her finances were in chaos due to some unwise decisions she’d made on several investments. And then there was the loss of her father’. Too much. These passages remove the satisfaction the reader finds in drawing these conclusions for themselves.

Unfortunately certain parts of the title story of the collection, ‘Fog’, read in a similar way. The protagonist returns to Ireland, though she is not sure why. Her backstory is too explanatory, but Egan does well in her representation of a loving, bickering – albeit ghostly – family unit.

There were stories in this collection that I very much enjoyed – ‘Tiki Bar’, for example, is a clever, humourous feminist daydream – and Egan is a writer blessed with the ability to write effective dialogue. If she can sharpen up the plot and characterisation elements of her narrative, her next collection could really sing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the absence of words and common language, much of human communication happens through non-verbal means: body language, gestures and looks, for example. So it seems right that Sally Ashton’s debut novella, Controller, which follows its protagonist into an alien and foreign city whose language she learns as she goes along, should feature so much looking and touching and sense of watching oneself. The words just fall away.

Laura has arrived in Spain, apparently on a whim, understanding very little Spanish, and her first encounter (in the novella, at least) has the same alienating effect on the non-Spanish-speaking reader as it must do on her. Sure, you can go to Google Translate and find out what the little old lady in the cafe is saying, or you can throw yourself into Ashton’s world and accept that Laura doesn’t entirely understand, and neither should you. You can join her in trying to navigate through a series of polite smiles, guesses, physical gestures and half-meanings: the non-verbal language of those who can’t speak to each other.

She’s not the only one to struggle. Ashton also introduces Bea, the Argentine immigrant whose venereal infection and sexual history have left her almost mute with strangers. She, however, has an eloquent non-verbal vocabulary, and – despite her other difficulties – communicates with Laura, through touch and smell, a message of human togetherness in the midst of a culture and a place neither of them can connect with.

Also on the list of isolated people failing to connect with the world is Eric, the Dutch painter whose chest is a network of scar tissue and whose disability leaves his left arm floating about according to its own will, almost at random. This is a man whose life has been spent in visually recording the world and its suffering, and it is in him that we have the greatest hint as to the controller of the novella’s title. Perhaps unsurprisingly for a fellow foreigner, he speaks English to Laura, but English in an abrupt, infinitive-heavy style. Even with her blindfold on, Laura’s internal gaze reflects Eric’s external gaze, which explores and intrudes upon every part of her exposed body. Just how far can an artist go with his model before he crosses the line into abuse and exploitation of her submissiveness?

Laura’s money comes from being a still life model, and this is the second reason – along with her unavoidably foreign appearance – that makes her often the object of staring, of gazing and of probing eyes. Eric’s eyes explore every curve of her frequently naked body, and she herself is forever imagining what she looks like from outside, picturing her legs touching each other under her dress or the painful angles her back has been bent into. It all gives Controller a visceral quality; this is a novella very much concerned with its protagonist’s body and her relationship with it, as well as her physical relation with the outside world and how she communicates with both.

Beyond Laura’s internal gaze, the novella’s prose is brief and almost bleak. There’s a sense of being in a Spanish coastal town that isn’t a major tourist destination – the sea, the landscape and the language stretch out into the distance with no peaks or splashes of colour, simmering quietly in siesta sunshine. Sentences are often brief, disconnected from surrounding context and wandering through an alien landscape just as Laura wanders the foreign city. This style lends the novella a heavy emphasis on its protagonist and her perspective, rather than any specific location or experience of the world.

Not one for the squeamish, Controller revels in almost literally anatomising the relationship between an artist’s model and her body, and also between the model and the artist, at the deliberate expense of their relationship with the outside world.

It has long been my opinion that editor introductions to anthologies should consist of a single sentence, something along the lines of ‘here are some poems I like’. However, it seems that this is not an acceptable option; publishers need to sell books and editors to justify their inclusions and exclusions, so claims have to be made and cases put forward. When the anthology presents a new generation of young poets, these claims and cases tend to revolve about the sins of their elders and the new thing the poets bring to the art of verse. It’s a tendency as old as poetry itself, I suppose.

In James Bunting’s introduction to Rhyming Thunder, the elders are identified as ‘Oxbridge professors with elbow patches’ and editors of anthologies of young poets where young means ‘born since 1970’ (the poets in this anthology appear to have been born after 1985, and many post 1990). It’s not difficult to sympathise with these complaints; far too may anthologies you pick up nowadays read like the products of university staffrooms, down to biographies of the poets that amount to lists of the prizes they have been shortlisted for, the MFA programmes they graduated from and the colleges they have taught at. It’s almost as if the editors and poets lack the confidence required to allow the writing to stand by itself without this kind of supportive scaffolding. In Rhyming Thunder, on the other hand, the bios list Slams won, festivals read at and TV and radio broadcasts featuring the poet in question. There are even some references to distinctly non-radical readings in Downing Street and Buckingham Palace. Why, it’s almost as if…

These biographical notes also point towards the ‘new thing’ that is being claimed for this generation; they are all oral or performance poets. They represent, again according to Bunting’s introduction, ‘a surge in poets getting up onto stages and reciting poems like monologues’.  Jack Dean then goes on to claim that ‘by saying them out loud’ these poets ‘tried to make words exciting for their own sakes again’. As the blurb says, Bunting and Dean ‘made them write down the poems they were making with their mouths’. This is an anthology of oral poetry which, we are asked to believe, has been translated to the almost alien medium of print.

Now, call me out of touch if you like, but I seem to have missed the day when words stopped being exciting for their own sakes; nobody takes up poetry because they find language dull. More seriously, the claim that performance is a new poetic device that the Slam generation invented is about as reasonable as the notion that teenagers invented sex. There is no question that live events have helped poetry reach a new audience in recent years. However, few Slams have matched the scale of the 1965 International Poetry Incarnation in the Royal Albert Hall. I can’t but wonder how many of today’s oral poets will ever reach the kind of audiences the Mersey Sound gang touched through their books, performances and musical annexes The Scaffold and Grimms. I’m also inclined to wonder how many Oxbridge professors were in the Royal Albert Hall audience or cut their poetic teeth on organiser Michael Horovitz’s Children of Albion anthology. To be fair, Horovitz does get a name-check in one of the bios in Rhyming Thunder and festival ‘star’ Allen Ginsberg is mentioned a couple of times, so the poets at least seem aware of this heritage.

It seems a pity to spend so much of this review discussing the presentation of the work rather than the work itself, but the paradox of the poetry anthology as a genre is that it both points to and distracts from a body of poetry. And with Rhyming Thunder it’s a shame that the distractions are so blatant because there is some very interesting poetry hidden away between the somewhat overstated claims of introductions and blurb.

For those readers who are not familiar with the rules and conventions of Slam poetry there are certain surface textures that have to be assimilated before the words on the page can be enjoyed for themselves. There can be a certain verbosity to some of the writing that probably reflects the different requirements of the ear and the eye when confronted with information-rich text. Also, the facility to rhyme, that most dangerous of gifts for the young poet to be cursed with, is positively encouraged by the need to grab the ears of an easily-distracted audience. Ultimately, however, these are neither more artificial nor more natural than the conventions of the sonnet or the haiku.

There isn’t space in a review to give full attention to all the twenty one poets included, so what follows is a very subjective list of highlights. Rob Auton writes shortish poems with the wit and charm of a young Roger McGough.

Bacon

Francis Bacon and Kevin Bacon are rashers from a very talented pig
The pig could paint
The pig could act
The pig was a genius as a matter of fact

Deanna Rodger’s 22NOW captures the romance of the Routemaster bus and the breathless excitement of teenage nights on the town with acuity.

We move in a cloud of impulse
Wearing inside out blazers
Because we are fresh princesses free from an all lady posh school

Jodi Ann Bickley’s prose poems represent an interesting contrast to the rap-inspired rhythms and occasionally over-easy rhyming of some of the other work here.

We sat in silence. Not because we had nothing to say – we both had so much to say but we knew anything we said – nothing could change.

Zaru Jonson’s PAINTBRUSH is Beat fun.

“my PAINTbrush AINT
crushed nobody’s soul”
he said;
banglehand
banginonna
dustbin lid

The three poems by Raymond Antrobus seem to me to be the most fully achieved body of work in the book, as exemplified by these lines from his INTERROGATING DEPRESSION.

Before you hit the garden party
consider your mood –
is it a water can
or a bad cloud?
You’re doing your best
to feel like the right weather.

In fact, I found things to enjoy and admire in all of the poets in Rhyming Thunder, to one degree or another, and at the end I was left with a definite sense of a common or shared approach to writing that unifies the very individual voices of these twenty one poets. Once you start reading the work carefully it becomes evident that the primary motivations are narrative and subjective. The majority of the poems in the book are autobiographical, with unproblematic first-person narrators presenting personal anecdotes about relationships and the facts of the quotidian lives of sensitive young urban Britons. In this, at least, they are not too far removed from much of the poetry you might find in an Oxbridge professor’s anthology, once you allow for the different worlds the two groups inhabit. However, the Rhyming Thunder poets write with far greater energy and commitment than most of their better-reared academic cousins, and their poetry, while perhaps not signalling the kind of revolution that the editors might wish for, certainly represents a clear alternative to the dreary conformity that characterises far too much contemporary verse.

It’s nice for a change to read poetry by young writers who aren’t trying to be old before their time. And despite this old man’s cynicism it is, of course, important that young writers continue to get excited about poetry’s possibilities as an art form. It is clear that these poets are and their excitement is infectious. It is a pity that the book isn’t accompanied by a CD of their performances so that readers like the present reviewer, who are not in a position to attend events in the UK on a regular basis, might get some idea of the full range of their gifts. As it is, Rhyming Thunder is a well-produced introduction to a world of poetry that cannot be ignored and deserves to be taken seriously and Burning Eye are to be commended for publishing it. Will it make poetry more popular than Eastenders? I doubt it. But that doesn’t matter.

The stories in Rebecca Burns’ debut collection Catching the Barramundi are primarily focused on the moments of realisation in her characters’ lives, where memories from their past or unacknowledged secrets break out and confront them. The stories are set in a variety of locations, though with a clutch of stories set in a rural Australian outback, and others with a Scottish setting and often focus on loners, waifs and strays. This isolation is often deliberate, or a result of where their life has taken them. So in the title story the protagonist, Connie, is isolated after her husband has died, and not immune to the arrival of a new man into her environment. In ‘The Intruder’, a woman has gone into self-exile (and become mute) in avoidance of the horrors of her past, that are now about to come back and haunt her. Elsewhere, characters are stuck in grim towns, returning there because of illness or divorce, or simply to see what has decayed since they last visited. Whether in Scotland or Australia she is interested in those communities that have been left behind by progress.

Though not consciously themed, there is a clear pattern to much of her writing, where landscape is used to evoke our own emotional landscape, and where her protagonists are almost without exception damaged by difficult lives. Yet though there is misery here, they are not ‘misery memoirs’; the stories are often focused on moments of acceptance, realization or even transcendence. That the problems they have aren’t necessarily resolved at that point, but have reached some moment of recognition or crisis, seems central to her writing. The writing at its best has a certain luminous clarity, at one with the desolate landscapes, though at times the lack of specific detail flattens our engagement with these landscapes.

Reading these stories I was struck at first by their somewhat traditional nature, in that tales of isolation and fracture are a mainstay of a certain type of (usually American) realism. In other words, that familiar tradition – perhaps seen most recently in the writing of someone like E. Annie Proulx – means that the writer has to be at the top of their game. In half a dozen of these stories, Burns achieves that; where sparse detail enables the lives of the characters to be made real with just a few words. None of the stories are long, perhaps indicating the contemporary (often online) market for stories like this, but Burns manages to provide enough meaning for the key images of the stories to stay with the reader beyond the page.

Less successful, I felt, were those stories that seemed closer to reminisces; looking back on college years or in one case, showing a love affair from its beginning to its tragic end, through a not entirely convincing male narrator. Burns seems a careful judge of human emotion, but a little less specific when it comes to the physical world around her – more interested in the interior landscape of the characters than the external one. Where this works best is where the landscape seems at one with the lonely characters – in the title story, for instance, in ‘The Intruder’ and in ‘Hades Landing’ where a sports scholarship student returns to the company mining town for one last time after the company has pulled out.

Like a Nick Cave album, every story here seems to have a tragedy at its heart, and this concentration on death and illness does become a little wearing after a while – with several stories focusing on (different) characters suffering from cancer or other illnesses. The lightness of ‘The Mirror Man’ story – where it is only youthful memory that has expired – is therefore more than welcome.

The contemporary short story is being produced in a somewhat crowded field, and a writer can either work within the tradition or try and step outside of it. Burns is very much within the tradition, and in her best stories her carefully structured vignettes on the loneliness of the human condition hold up. ‘The Intruder’, which was longlisted for the Pushcart Prize, in particular, is her work at its very best. Where the stories are a little more humdrum – the kids in the garden of ‘The Night of the Fox’ for instance – I was yearning for some of the precise uniqueness of Lorrie Moore or Helen Simpson, who can use the finest details to elevate a seemingly tiny piece of someone’s life to a higher pitch.

Throughout the stories, Burns is careful to show, not to tell, but almost always has a design on the reader that doesn’t leave a lot of room for interpretation. The excellent final story, ‘Painting the Hay Bales’, stands out in this company for leaving the story’s poignancy unspoken. It’s an interesting, coherent and well structured debut, published by an Australian press, and where all of the stories have been published online or in magazines. Its shortlisting for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize is a testimony to its qualities. I can imagine certain readers enjoying its control and precision immensely; if I had some doubts it’s because when she gets it right, the terse style and controlled narrative fit so well together that I noticed those stories that fell a little short.

JibbaJabba has been nominated for the Best Regular Spoken Word Night category in this year’s Saboteur Awards. Here, I chat with Jenni Pascoe about what makes the event unique.

Let’s start with the basics: how long has JibbaJabba been running and when/where does it take place?

JibbaJabba started at The Trent House in Newcastle in 2010 and has just celebrated its 3rd birthday.

We relocated in January this year, moving into the space left by the much loved ‘Take Ten’ (formerly Ten by Ten) night, at The Cumberland Arms in Newcastle on the 4th Thursday of every month. 

How did JibbaJabba come into being and what’s its ethos/mission statement?

I had just started performing poetry and noticed that though there were many fantastic events happening in the city, at that time there wasn’t a regular open mic available where less established performers could take to the stage without having a fully polished set prepared. 

The ethos is to have an open platform where complete beginners and experienced professionals can all have an opportunity to perform, and any form of spoken word is welcome.

Who have been your favourite performers you’ve had at JibbaJabba and why?

One of my favourite performers was Dominic Berry, who created an amazing atmosphere of electricity in the room with his wonderfully energetic delivery of brilliantly written poems. 

Obviously, it’s great to have a fantastic headline act, but I also love to see anyone getting up for the first time, or people who usually perform in a different medium trying out something new to them. 

What do you look for when you’re booking your feature performers?

It’s usually someone I have seen elsewhere, and instantly decided ‘I have got to have them at Jibba!

I like finding a performer who is a little bit different, someone who has something new to say, or an original way of saying things… 

I want performers who can take an audience by the hand, (or in some cases grabthem by the throat!), and hold their attention through every word, pause and movement. 

You make a point of opening up the open mic to any performance so long as it’s ‘word-based and entertaining’. What led to that decision rather than just focusing on one medium?

From the start, I didn’t want Jibba to exclusively be a ‘poetry night’. The term ‘spoken word’ covers such a wide range of performance styles, and I wanted to create a place where they could all stand side by side with equal merit. 

I have always tried to make the night as accessible and entertaining as possible, and think having a more diverse range of performers achieves this. 

What have been the challenges of running a regular spoken word event?

That’s hard to answer, I suppose there are the usual stresses about timings, wondering whether people will turn up etc, which you would encounter when running any event, but I enjoy it too much to think of any of it as a challenge. 

More generally, what is the spoken word scene like in the Newcastle area?

Newcastle has a superb spoken word scene! New events (such as Hot Words at the Chilli), are popping up all the time, and it feels like spoken word is being accepted much more as part of mixed media events. 

Newcastle has a great mix of cabaret style events (like JibbaJabba), literary based events (such as Trashed Organ), and prose based nights (like Fiction Burn). Apples and Snakes provide great opportunities for performance poets in the area with monthly scratch nights, and there are also lots of regular events in nearby County Durham (like Poetry Jam), and Teesside, (such as Black Light Engine Room). 

There is a wonderful community of poets and performers in the North East of England, who are all incredibly supportive of one another and it is an absolute pleasure to be part of that. 

Everything I’ve heard and read about JibbaJabba has praised it for its lively atmosphere and the quick-fire and fun nature of the open mic. How have you fostered that atmosphere?

I suppose if you’re having fun then the audience do too! 

JibbaJabba doesn’t take itself too seriously, it’s all about everyone having a good night out.

I love the way the audience instinctively follows the mood of the show. The way they can be almost in tears at a beautifully moving, softly spoken poem then be launched into hysterical laughter at a stand-up performance merely minutes later.

If you’re trying to convince someone who’s never heard of JibbaJabba to come to your events then what do you say?

Recently, a stand-up comedian asked, ’Having never been to a spoken word gig, is it just stand up without the need for laughs? 

If so, what is the appeal?’

I replied ‘Sometimes it’s not about being funny at all. Sometimes it’s about making it moving, thought provoking, beautiful, sad, angry, making a point, using word play, or just generally saying something interesting, as well as the funny stuff. It means you can use poetic form if you want, just talk, rap, do a character piece / monologue, tell a story, or do stand-up, because stand-up itself IS spoken word. A spoken word night gives you a mix of everything, covering all styles of verbal performance. Come to JibbaJabba sometime and see what I mean.’

He said, ‘Oh, I might give it a try then’. 

And finally, have you heard of Sabotage before (if so, what?) and are you pleased to be nominated for a Saboteur Award?

I honestly hadn’t, but I have checked out the site since being nominated and will certainly keep an eye on it from now on. 

I am completely over the moon to have been nominated for a Saboteur Award. It means at least one person must like what Jibba’s doing!

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

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

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

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

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

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