Reviews of the Ephemeral

Posts Tagged ‘Afric McGlinchey’

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‘The Silence Teacher’ by Robert Peake

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

-Reviewed by Afric McGlinchey-

silence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(‘Visitation of the Wild Man’)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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‘Flying into the Bear’ by Chrissy Williams

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

 

-Reviewed by Afric McGlinchey-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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‘Etruscan Miniatures’ by Tim Cumming

In Pamphlets on January 28, 2013 at 9:30 am

-Reviewed by Afric McGlinchey-

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I love poets who are also visual artists – it brings something extra to their work. Tim Cumming, who was born in an orphanage and grew up in the West Country in England, is a film-maker and painter as well as a poet. This beautiful chapbook, produced by an Australian publisher, is Cumming’s sixth collection, and it is illustrated by his own watercolours, or ‘field paintings’ as they are described.

The poems and paintings take us to a summer in Umbria, Italy, within view of a medieval palace, vineyards and ‘the dramatic tufa of Rocca Ripesena, favoured by Pope Boniface VIII’ we are told. (The same pope who was consigned to hell in Dante’s Divine Comedy.)

The collection opens with a small cameo introduction, where a Leica camera, a child’s chicken pox and a certain light all coincide at a ‘point of the compass/that once disputed/with ocean currents.’ Immediately, the reader is alerted to a setting where past and present merge though both personal and panoramic image.

This alternative perception is revealed again in the poem ‘Orvieto’, which introduces the town via its substrata: ‘Fish bones swam/through Orvieto’s/limestone tufa’. Later in the poem, ‘the ghost flicker/of dead trades and traders’ is seen in the details of frescos, with their ‘bright colours…egg tempura’. Continuing to describe the place from the bottom up, ‘Procession’ introduces the ‘caves for wine/ and birds fattened/ for feast tables’. Pattern and symmetry are important to this poet, who associates the ‘mist rolling in’ with the ‘Holy See’.

In Sean Borrodale’s collection, The Bee Journal, he notes the day to day happenings of the hive as he witnesses them. Here, Cumming observes the slow activity of the growing grapes in this beautiful landscape:

‘Toscano grapes, cool
conductors of white lightning
awaiting the still and
blend and ripening
in cellar chiaroscuco’

Like Borrodale, Cumming’s interest is in the minutiae of nature: he notes, in ‘Surface Depth’, ‘raindrops exploding/on the surface of the pool…the colours of impact and submission’. But sometimes, his associations are more laboured and unconvincing than they might be. The moment here moves from ‘plunging in/deep to life beyond reason’ to ‘tuning in to a tongue beyond reason’ in a corner café in Budapest. I feel the language could have been more accurately and delicately wrought here.

There is an impressionism to his observations. In ‘Mushroom Robert’, a morning mist, across a landscape where deer are grazing, creates the sense of a ‘crumpling hallucination/that swam through every mammal/like images on a closing fan’. There is a self-conscious self-awareness too, in his own placement in this setting: ‘We’re the last ones standing,/scattered around the terrace/like Etruscan statues’. Again, his associations conjure a geographical and psychic leap, between the mushroom-eating Robert (‘the human brain scrabbling for highs’) and ‘the sorcerer at Chauvet dancing/to Bowie tunes from Scary Monsters’.

‘Watermelon’ describes, in two sentences, both a physical and metaphorical journey: ‘wheel-buckling tracks’ which challenge the ‘next hairpin of a marriage’.  This poem conveys through its vivid imagery, a strong impression of conflicting emotions: ‘we cleaved it in two and twice again/and shared it out like an urgent message.’ The ‘cleaving’ seems symbolically suggestive of an imminent parting, but the line continues:  ‘burying our mouths in its soft pink oblivion’.

Oblivion appears to be a state of mind that is sought in this collection, as not only mushrooms but ‘the blossom of a young bottle’ lures with the possibility of ‘tak(ing) us bubbling’, and later (in ‘Fast Stars’), ‘we’re staring up at the Umbrian night sky/watching fast stars stir the drunken cranium’. Such sights lead to reflection: ‘In age, what we have left done or left awry/contains us like a landmark, an orbit’s/eccentricity/a destination in heavy weather/only we can see’.

Cumming’s free-associative, impressionist senses are enhanced in this setting, where a simple observation of last night’s debris, and anticipation of lunch, combine to flow, again in a single sentence, all the way to ‘the soul food kitchen/of Dante’s Purgatorio.’

More than anything, though, what the reader is conscious of (with the assistance of delicate blue and green and white watercolours) is Cumming’s visual focus: ‘The best pictures/are underlit’ he tells us, in ‘Exposure’: ‘a lighter trailing/a flare of gold over/moonbulbs of garlic’, which cause him to make a mental leap to ‘the sexy buttocks/of a spear-carrying/centurion turning against/the writhing of the sun.’

This chapbook, in spite of occasional false notes, is a pure delight. As a reader, you feel yourself cavorting through this ravishing landscape, into frescoes, into history and myth, below ground, and to other parts of the cosmos – all the while holding a dewy glass of white wine in your hand.

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‘Tusitala of white lies’ by Iain Britton

In Pamphlets on January 4, 2013 at 3:43 pm

-Reviewed by Afric McGlinchey-

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I was interested in this chapbook, by a New Zealander, because of the potential of  its culturally different image-base, approach and perception, and also because the physicality of the chapbook is  satisfyingly aesthetic.

Immediately, the title arouses curiosity. What is Tusitala? It is, Google advises, both the name for a spider, and the Samoan word for a storyteller. So we have the exotic element immediately, as well as a provocative theme.

Visually, the poems are experimental, with lower case, forward slashes, spaces, etc., laid out in meandering, double-spaced lines for the most part, with the exception of the last section of the final poem. The titles attract with their strangeness: ‘extravaganza’,  ‘the last lamp post in the world’, ‘tusilala of white lies’, ‘profile of a yellow circle’, ‘spiked’, ‘glass cathedral’.

The first poem, ‘extravaganza’, introduces sunflowers that ‘reflect what has been carefully given’, and inviting the reader to do the same. The word ‘extravaganza’ is lavish and rhapsodic and conflicts with the word ‘carefully’, creating an interesting disconnect.  Part 2 of the poem introduces the narrator’s voice, who, rather than reflecting what has been carefully given, has:

‘been caught out

      demolishing petals

and spitting sap

a Morpheus finger

      pok(ing) holes in the afternoon’s somnambulating journey’

These lines increase the sense of a jarring disconnect, the violence of ‘demolishing’ and ‘spitting’ contrasting with the lulling mention of Morpheus, the somnambulating day, and I find myself wondering what effect the poet intended.  The impact is muddied further with another less clear image:

‘the earth’s curvature

      is a showcase of people peering

through red-frosted light’

The next stanza introduces ‘Hypatia’s theatre / of yellow hibiscus moons’. There’s a sense of underlying dissatisfaction or fear: ‘I risk losing a sea and all its singing companions / I risk the loss of purities’. Later: ‘I’ve been caught in the act / of being where I’m not wanted.’ Images recur, setting up the premise of motifs, and it’s up to the reader to work out their symbolism, for instance, in this repeated image of the earth as a ‘showcase’:

‘the earth’s a showcase

      in a fat man’s skin.’

Of course, we all actively seek meaning in what we read or see. We hope there is some meta-construction in the mind of the narrator, and these are not just random images haphazardly thrown on the page exquisite corpse style, to create an impression of obscure poetics.  Here we find that these often beautiful images do accumulate to suggest a morbid disillusionment with life.

In ‘The last lamp post in the world’, I am reminded of aspects of Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock – the pointless waste of time, the inexorable movement towards an ending, without anything having been accomplished:

‘often enough it’s a creeping

      paralysis

        an advanced decrepitude /

            or exposure’

the pendulum shifts:

    ’from one foul breath to another’

We move from the lamp post, to vineyards:

‘…owned by women

        who drink the earth dry,

              dig in the carcases of their mothers,

              and their mothers’ mothers

        their fathers too’

and then the pendulum shifts again to an island where:

‘the women plump up

        in summer

        shoot botox shoot sun-tan serums

              inflate smiles’

Having set up a mood of hostility towards certain women, the  lamp post begins to gain in symbolism as it:

‘shifts its gaze – stares blindly

its back has been broken then straightened then broken

      the air

         seems artificially sweetened’

The tension of these images effectively culminates in the final stanza:

‘I feel the rain

     the wind’s nerves

          the sky chewing on a power line’

Throughout the chapbook, I am looking for the ‘white lies’ – in ‘celestial presentations’, in the ‘supermarket’s optimism’,  in ‘the room we call home’, in cradle rhymes,  in the ‘flavoured’ future, even in intimacy. But these are not clarified.

In a number of poems, the narrator appears homeless: ‘the river uses me as a thoroughfare’;  ‘I’ve come to a bed where itinerants sleep’; ‘fur coats of grass/are readily affordable/for the scrabbling hungry’ – hungry not only for food (a number of times, food parcels are mentioned, knives and forks, a table, consumption) but for spiritual nourishment:  at the font in the glass cathedral, ‘now’s the time…for the mouth to tell the truth’.

The title poem begins with a potent image of nature fighting back against the ‘white lies’ of society, of the church:’a million blackbirds / fling full stops at the horizon’. As in a kind of Prufrock, there is a series of characters. Who, the narrator asks himself, does he believe?

the lady in black feathers

      who owns and occupies a fig tree

or the slothful bugger

      who lives in the letter box

…..

      or the toilet roll author of Kingdom Street’

The reader is also invited to consider whether to believe the narrator himself. He is, he tells us: ‘the tourist guide bus driver jesus janitor / the son reorganizing the future footprints of a family yet to cement its language in stone in grubby layers broken like old teeth’. Perhaps he is the tusitala. Perhaps there are many.

As for who the narrator will believe, he decides he prefers:

        ’the brunette

her feather cloak

her moulting shadow              her strut’

It is escapism the narrator’s looking for, an ‘astral flight / with no strings dangling’.

The language of this poem is arresting, but non-specific and contradictory, as the narrator retreats ‘into the hood of my consciousness’ while at the same time

‘groping for the lady’s

    anatomy

her tightening grip – this flesh

    and blood

mix of polarities’

While the rest of the chapbook has many imagistic high spots, however, the last poem, ‘glass cathedral’ has a few ‘ouch’ moments:

‘my ribcage’s not for hire

the thistledown’s

    not there for the privilege of matting-up

my groin’

This final poem is six pages long, but the last two pages suddenly change,  from the same form as the rest of the chapbook, to a Joycean stream-of-consciousness prose. This compression might have been intended to intensify the content, but instead, it simply jars visually. The message does end on an apparent note of hope, but while the beginning of the poem instructs us to ‘tell the blackbird’ the final instruction is to ‘tell the bald eagle’.

While there is much in this chapbook that is intriguing, the overall impression, unfortunately,  is of a collage of ‘murky elaborations’ drip-fed onto the page. As a reader, I find myself struggling through these inconsistencies, sometimes tripping, sometimes falling.  Certainly there is an assertive voice here, but while I’m all for visual poetry (and many of the images do have power), ultimately, I feel I’m in a mudbath of images which blur the overall message.

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‘Threadbare Fables’ by Ian Seed

In Pamphlets on December 3, 2012 at 9:41 am

-Reviewed by Afric McGlinchey-

One definition of ‘fable’ is: ‘a short, allegorical narrative making a moral point.’ As this word is used in the title, I found myself looking for the moral point of each fable.

These unusual prose poems – or fables – appear to be fragmented, but chronological, moments from the life of the narrator. There is something intriguing about the way both his internal and external worlds are revealed; the dislocated thoughts that occur at, say, the moment of spelling the alphabet with one’s tongue across a clitoris. Or the ‘regret mixed with relief’ when his father dies, resolving the difficulty of buying him a suitable birthday present. There is often a detachment, or dissociation of emotion in these poems.

‘Bright and Early’ describes a symbolic Paulo Cuelho-type journey where the narrator finds himself in a village, but: ‘Each morning I couldn’t shake the weariness from my bones to get up and leave.’ In another poem, after his father dies, he tells his companion, ‘We’ll miss the funeral,’ but ‘you sat there in silence, admiring the colours of the vanishing sun, as if I hadn’t spoken.’ This ennui, or inability to act, persists throughout the chapbook, and a sense of melancholy accumulates with gathering force. What happens? What doesn’t happen? During a card game which ‘has its adventures’, her stockinged knees press against mine’. Later, ‘I’m trying in vain to restore a face to my mind.’

Some of the poems/fables appear to be simply anecdotal, and don’t work as well as others. Yet an intangible sense of almost-discovery is experienced in most of them. For example, Ex-Pat describes a mugging by a ‘scrawny youth’ whose ‘eyes were vicious’ but whose ‘lips were pretty and feminine’. There is an erotic undercurrent here: ‘I grabbed him round the neck and wrestled him to the ground. The smell of his sweat was sweet. I held his trembling body against mine until the police arrived.’ Perhaps the experience, which left the narrator wanting to ‘chase after him with the vague idea of making amends’ is that he feels guilt/confusion about his feelings after this encounter. At any rate, there is a quality of mystery here, as with most of the fables.

Many of these random, unresolved encounters describe a moment of potential intimacy or connection that nevertheless fails to develop further. The narrator looks for the house of an old acquaintance he hears is terminally ill, but cannot find it. The jovial friendliness of a neighbour changes over some weeks, becoming hostile, as the narrator suspects him of abusing his young daughter. He meets a man on a train, whose manila folder, left on the table, is spilled, revealing suspicious contents. Yet he accepts a drink from him ‘after only the slightest hesitation.’ At work, the HR man ‘never spoke, but I could feel his gaze linger over me with wistful regret.’

In other pieces, conflicting messages continue to occur. The narrator watches a documentary of a man recovering from a mental illness: ‘He could be swallowed at any moment. Yet his smile radiates confidence.’ In another fable, he is tricked by a statue of the bleeding Christ, which turns out to be ‘a man dressed up’ and begging.

These prose pieces, unadorned by simile or metaphor, are all the more thought-provoking for their simplicity of language and anonymous settings – a train, a travel agent’s, a church, apartment block. There is also a cohesiveness to the mood of the collection, which is an achievement in itself. And yet – what is the lesson to be learned? That we are living in an era of moral ambiguity? Existential angst? That nothing is what it seems? These are the questions I’m left with, and the reason I feel compelled to go back and read the fables again. An unsettling, but interesting chapbook, and I look forward to discovering more work by this poet.

Afric McGlinchey

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Top Website for Self-Publishers Award

In Uncategorized, Website on December 1, 2012 at 7:07 pm

-We interrupt the usual broadcast with Claire Trévien-

We were delighted to find out today that Sabotage Reviews was nominated by members of The Alliance for Independent Authors for their Top Website for Self-Publishers Award. Here is the shiny badge they gave us for it:

topwebsite

Also nominated and worth a look were:

  1. World Literary Café http://www.worldliterarycafe.com/
  2. Lindsay www.lindsayburoker.com
  3. Louisa Locke http://mlouisalocke.co
  4. Rachel Abbott http://www.rachel-abbott.com/
  5. David Gaughran http://davidgaughran.wordpress.com/
  6. http://www.bragmedallion.com/
  7. www.janefriedman.com
  8. www.IndiePENdents.org
  9. Joanna The Creative Penn http://www.thecreativepenn.com/

It’s also been wonderful to be name-checked in the Guardian recently by Dan Holloway, who recommends us (along with the fab  htmlgiant and 3:am) as a good place to find out about exciting self-published work (as well as ‘chapbooks, zines and true one-offs’: our favourite things! Send us more of those to review please!)

In this spirit, I have plunged into our archives and come up with eight recommendations of works that can be categorized as ‘self-published’, each interesting in its own right, but please, make use of the comment box to expand this.

I found this task harder than I expected, partly as we have not systematically tagged works as ‘self-published’, partly because Sabotage is so invested in indie enterprises that it is hard to know where to draw the line. I have mostly limited it to works produced and written by the same author. I probably pushed the boundaries by also including an edited work in the selection but it is such a one-off published by Claire Askew’s one-woman micropress that it seemed churlish not to. Some of these reviews have aged better than others, and it was sorely tempting to edit out sentences patting self-publishing on the back for being almost as good their ‘professionally’ printed counterparts. What I have come to appreciate in the two and a half years of Sabotage’s existence is that yes, while self-publishing can equate work of dubious quality, it can also be a veritable treasure trove of unique and exciting ventures, and I hope that we bring more of the latter to light in years to come.

Let’s all remember that fabulous China Miéville quotation:

‘We piss and moan about the terrible quality of self-published books, as if slews of god-awful crap weren’t professionally expensively published every year’

-Living Room Stories by Andy Harrod. Extract from Rory O’Sullivan’s review: ‘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.’

-Muses Walk by Christodoulos Makris. Extract from Rishi Dastidar’s review: ‘the notion of the street as a muse is artfully explored through these sixteen poems, and Makris strikes an excellent balance between a sharp, urban sensibility, an unhurried languor and an elegiac air which reminds us that, even on our streets, there are always stories to be found, to be recreated and to be inspired by.’

-Starry Rhymes: 85 years of Allen Ginsberg  edited by Claire Askew and Stephen Welsh. Extract from Chris Emslie’s review: ‘Starry Rhymes is a loving testament to the work of an undeniably important poet. This shows in the care with which the chapbook has been conceived and collated. Its most powerful moments do not, however, rest in the flattery of imitation. [...] Undaunted by the not-small task of responding to a giant of modern American poetry, this assembly of thirty-three voices reflects (or possibly refracts) Ginsberg at his most feverish, human and heartbreaking. It is Michael Conley who best summarises how the poet himself might reply to a birthday gift like this: “I am grateful / you have kept me alive. / I am. Listen to me.”’

-Everything Speaks in its Own Way by Kate Tempest. Extract from Dan Holloway’s review: ‘Both sound and sight stand on their own (on which note I have to mention the layout of the words – presented on the page as paragraphs more than poems, which works incredibly well, not forcing us to guess or impose rhyme and metre but to let the words flow through us), but this does what beautiful artisan books should do – it is both a full introduction to an author’s work and a collector’s item, perfect for fans and newcomers alike, and a fitting way of bringing a genuinely landmark book to the world.’

-Anatomically Incorrect Sketches of Marine Animals by Sarah Dawson. Extract from Ian Chung’s review: ‘Far from being terrible, Dawson’s poems are lyrical observations, shot through with imagery that is tactile and visceral.’

-Reasons not to live there by Humphrey Astley. Extract from Afric McGlinchey’s review: ‘Today’s world is complex, and in his pamphlet, Astley has captured the confusion faced by the youth in Britain, where identity is no longer established simply by an accent. Here is a thinking poet, with a natural talent, whose work shows considerable promise.’

-lapping water by Dan Flore iii. Extract from Ian Chung’s review: ‘Ultimately, the most compelling feature of lapping water is its intimacy. The danger for the lyric ‘I’ to lapse into solipsism is averted in Flore’s collection because his poems frequently reach out to draw a ‘you’ into their imaginative space.’

-Markets like Wide Open Mouths by Tori Truslow. Extract from Claire Trévien’s review: ‘Truslow’s Bangkok comes across in this work as a culturally rich, touristy, buzzing, cosmopolitan, ghost-infested and endlessly fascinating city. In her hands, even a bus journey becomes extraordinary.’

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‘Lowlifes, Fast Times & Occasionally Love’ by Lawrence Gladeview

In Pamphlets on November 26, 2012 at 9:50 am

-Reviewed by Afric McGlinchey-

The title and the first poem of this chapbook get you right in the mood for a high-speed read. Although the skinny poems race down the page, there’s no shortage of detail – 35 Chevy, stale Budweiser & aftershave – so you’re instantly in the scene.

It feels cinematic at times, with dry, pithy dialogue (nice set of wheels / i told her // you should see it from the back seat) and a sense of being dropped voyeuristically into an intimate moment. The poems link smoothly, from car to car, to bar, to a party, to an apartment; there’s drinking and sex, there are road trips and random conversations. The chapbook also builds up a picture of the narrator, who believes in spontaneity:

‘you gonna /be here long?

my plane
left in
10 minutes
but i found
myself
saying
you bet let’s
have another.’

The crisp style is deceptively off-hand, and these could be read as prose if they weren’t written in sharp, often one-word lines, with the title invariably running on into the first line. Gladeview’s use of lower case letters and ampersands also contributes to the casual effect, as though these are simply jottings in a journal. But the narrow, column-like layout evokes a stance, a setting, and it is this minimalist approach that warrants the definition ‘poem’.

It takes a brazen confidence to translate crude humour to poetry, but because of his lightness of touch, Gladview pulls it off. When asked by ‘a college gal’ what he thought of the evangelical poet who read before him in a bookshop, the narrator answers:

every time
I heard him
say Job
all I could
think of
was
blow.

Gladeview’s line breaks give the reader pause – usually to laugh. While there is an absence (possibly blatant avoidance) of metaphor or lyricism, the pleasure of these poems is in their anecdotal liveliness.  These incidents epitomize youth and reckless, free living, and there’s a keen sense of irony in many of the dialogues:

‘you bought
the book
to use as
a coaster?
bob asked

no you
sarcastic
ass i bought it
at a reading

really?
bob said
what’s
shipwright like?

let’s just say
there’s
no signature
for those
beer rings
to ruin’

Gladeview’s a Bukowski for the Facebook generation; wry, laconic, a shoulder-shrugging hedonist. The speed and terseness of these narratives are cumulatively effective in portraying the lowlifes, fast times and occasional love of the title. At any moment the narrator might convey arrogant superiority, bravado, or just as readily, empathy with random people, such as the passenger who sits next to him on a bus:

‘clutching
her ticket
to
anywhere
but here’

Not all the poems strike home. ‘Carla took me’ is one that has no impact on me – I fail to see the humour or any cleverness. But most of them do work. And Gladeview comes into his own when it comes to dialogue – most of his poems are snippets of backchat or witty banter, capturing the subtle dynamics between friends, lovers, and strangers. Feminists may baulk at his nothing-to-lose laddishness, but I suspect that’ll only entertain him. Note his repeated use of the word ‘gal’:

teeing up
on eleven
I overheard
barry & sam
talking about
eating
a gal’s
pie

try
spelling out
the alphabet!
I shouted

sam
asked
does that
really work?

i wound up
gave
the ball
a good ride
& said
sam
it works
every time.

What’s enjoyable about Gladeview’s work is his off-hand, cheeky approach and the fact that there’s no self-importance. Gladeview takes nothing too seriously here.   All he’s looking for is that smile of recognition from his reader. And he’s getting it, from this one.

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‘Oh-zones’ by Elizabeth-Jane Burnett

In Pamphlets on September 28, 2012 at 9:30 am

-Reviewed by Afric McGlinchey-

Elizabeth-Jane Burnett is a performance poet, and there is something of the immediacy of the spoken word in this chapbook.  But while the spoken word relies on an instant connection, not only to the words, but to the physical presence of the poet, here, we simply have the words on the page. Burnett has used the visual space of the page well, however, offering poems of different shapes.

In the Preface to Oh-zones, Burnett refers to the poems as ‘sensory-zone-poems: ‘inhaling, releasing and resonating through stress’. We are also told that ‘whords’ – words experienced as chords – ‘explore simultaneity in perception and identity’.

In the opening poem, ‘available sky’, the lines are short, the images accessible. The poem manages to convey the sensory overload of living in an urban environment through interesting line breaks and juxtapositions of sales-pitch phrases with nature elements. There is a sense of disconnect between urban and rural. There’s also a bitter wit:

’1/3 off hugs with your son
if you see
something suspicious press the
sky sags with
trees bedecked with plastic bags
from costcutter’

The third line, ending in ‘the’ both cuts off a connection, and also runs on, to a new tangent. The assonant ‘a’ sound of ‘sags/bags’ is effective, and the repetition of ‘with’ adds to the weight of  the sagging sky. The idea of the sky ‘sagging’ with trees is quite arresting and this image certainly stopped me in my tracks, physically inaccurate though it might be. Where daylight fades, ‘gusting neon super / market lights’ root ‘every item to the earth / discounting nature ducting.’ Again, ending the line with ‘super’ is beautifully ironic.

Continuing the theme of neon lights, and equally humorous, is ‘villanelle in green’:

‘asda, with your green light
I prefer you to lidl’

and later:

‘it irons the air bright
yellow with red middle
bricks of sick light’

While I feel that the poem was let down by the word ‘sick’ (too telling), the ending redeems the poem:

‘I look out of light
it is april

the sky is an apple’

These are the poems of an eco-warrior, and  the poem ‘sharks, in their absence’ reveals how the absence of sharks near a coral reef shows that ‘the entire system is under (dressed/duress…’

The poem keeps interrupting itself with bracketed asides and indentations, and the repetition of as…as…as… shows the simultaneity/consequences of every action upon our environment:

‘at 30 degrees these deeds
seethe (look up
controlled environment
marigolds) as the soft
collapse of coral
barely registers as nudity
washes backless
over water freshening
as one thing becoming another’

The oil companies get a battering of course, although ironically, ‘…who funds ethics, but oil)’. And poets are clearly as essential to the ecosystem as (the good kind of) sharks. Because:

‘in their absence
sharks.’

My favourite poem here is ‘refuge wear’, where ‘disturbance is routine’, such as the air ‘unblueing’, causing the narrator to ‘chafe across car parks searching for / a blue fix’. The shape of the words on the page is like a broken up prose poem, effectively conveying the ‘disturbance’. There is a sense of unraveling with all the negative words: ‘unchecked’, ‘unbuttoning’, ‘undoing’, ‘unblueing’.

The last two poems are ‘breath-chords’ and ‘sun-chords’ – in the first, there are lists of words in columns across the page, while the second begins like a kind of yoga class instruction:

‘begin with inhale
together breathing syntax
we arrive at words

The words follow, in small blocks, or in a paragraph of words and phrases. And yes, there is tension, and stress, in the juxtaposition of ‘hot, low, clouds, litter, filter, cost, traffic, sunflowers’. The final three lines don’t save the day either:

‘warning hot shiver
shimmer and lift open pink
unbuckling clouds’

but perhaps, the pink helps us to ‘inhale, release and resonate through stress.’

All in all, the chapbook offers a pleasing soundscape, and impressionist impact. While the poems are political, they are not stridently so, and yet there is substance and innovation too. I would love to see them performed.

 

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‘Organon’ by Meredith Andrea

In Pamphlets on September 19, 2012 at 9:12 am

-Reviewed by Afric McGlinchey-

 

In this chapbook, the reader is challenged to work out Meredith Andrea’s ‘means of reasoning, system of logic,’ which is the definition of the chapbook’s title, Organon.

Andrea’s poetry has a subtle distinctiveness; painterly, with surprising associations. Several of her poems appear to be ekphrastics, indicating her interest in the visual arts. Some of her poems are playful, revealing an eye for detail, and interesting lists: ‘glyphs, pits, holes, grapeshot, blotched freckles tattooed in winter’s epidermis.’ (‘Meltwater’). In fact, a notable aspect of the chapbook is Andrea’s obvious attraction to lists, or linguistic taxonomy – images or words grouped because they almost rhyme, or have other connections.

There is a strong sense of balance and arrangement in this collection, which is not only pleasing, but fun. (Her first poem directs our eye ‘from the bottom left corner/to top right’, and the last poem describes a beagle asleep ‘at the top right-hand corner/of a first floor window.’) The poems almost all engage with nature, or with heifers, bulls, rams and other creatures. Certain other images also reappear, such as ‘latch-click’ in ‘Sneck’, ‘latches’ in ‘Corpus Christi’, and ‘unlatched’ in ‘Remnants of a library of Russian classics.’ As with any recurring motif, the reader is apt to attribute an increasing symbolism to these images. Incidentally, a ‘sneck’ for those, like me, who didn’t know, is a mechanical fastener used for joining two or more objects – an appealing Northern word, and an apt symbol in this collection.

Andrea deals with concerns that at first seem unrelated, but which prove themselves to be inextricably intertwined in her mind. Here, the bees share her compulsion for colour coding:

‘Sort spines by colour. Eau de nil to pistachio
to pink carnation – a working scale of flavours.
Through the glass, sun.
Watch codes in bees answer
codes in flowers, stronger in shadowbounce on brick.
Found the old picture postcard –’
     
(from ‘Grass of Parnassus’)

The change in tone (and tense) with the word ‘Found’ and the subsequent list, indicate the way a mind creates associations, either through meaning or sounds:

            ‘gorse garlic bell heather horse honeysuckle bugles
            waves sounding slow arise arrive departing and
            Grass of Parnassus like many tiny knotted stitches darning evening.’

But Andrea is equally capable of creating an extended cinematic image. From an attic room:

‘First light, prise the skylight
wide to cold fog, sea-breathe, seagulls, larks – stretch up –
dress standing, waist deep in a field of slate.’

(from ‘Giotto’)

The last image is surprising and appealing, one that I keep returning to, and in her best poems these carefully considered, beautiful images are Andrea’s strength. Another, from ‘Overwintering’: ‘the moon/takes its slow turn and/after no applause crumples its silent/white costume back in the dark safe’. There are one or two lines in ‘Overwintering’ that jar for me, but that final image transforms the poem.

Andrea is also diverse, in both technique and subject matter.  ‘A dry old woman with no conversation’, goes back to old Chaucerian language, which, intriguingly, includes quite Muldoonish words: ‘bubblegalls’, ‘resinooze’, ‘bloomsmooth’, ‘pucker-end’, ‘zingy bong’.

Another poem, ‘Stir’, creates a kind of conversation between contemporary language and old, as though the resulting concoction, like a witch’s brew, will inject new life into the poem as ‘with rayn water thyn herbis to renewe.’

There is clearly a pull towards bygone eras, as seen in ‘Little Etruscan’, found ‘among the vast marble gods/in the museum of echoes.’ I particularly liked this poem’s beautifully placed line endings, the way we are drawn into this painting: ‘one muscled creature,/ram and man, listening, full of light.’ I love the idea of these painted creatures ‘only finger-length, the pair of them’, merging into one, as attentive as the viewer/reader. So much is going on, in so few words. But unfortunately, the repetition, later, of ‘listening’ and ‘full of light’ undermines its initial impact.

While most of the titles are arresting, one, ‘Corpus Christi’, appears to be an elephant in the room at first, although, ‘we broke our sandwiches’ saves it – just – by suggesting the biblical breaking of bread. Unlike her other, more exciting images, however, the images in this narrative poem are earnestly environmentally conscientious: ‘The sky is huge on allotments’; ‘I put the plastic in a bag for re-cycling, spat apple pits into the soil.’

Much more interesting, to me, are the more oblique poems, such as (the misspelled) ‘Spicey’ –

‘& what did she see in the rear view mirror as she drove?
Tongue: to paralyse
and then release. To answer
lexis;  ‘Vide: lilies
with an undertone of wet rot; or a morning
of chill rosewater, alone, or: ash on the soles, or:
you step on bladderwrack, and it bursts
            or indecent musk; or in the salthouse.’

Her best poems engage all the senses:

‘Cycle home in the stench of gunpowder,
rain drenched. Coal pigment and bodycolour
more bled in grey from nowhere bearing down
big brushes loaded over slipshod sheds. Crows
rise hoarse against it.’

(from ‘Grass of Parnassus’)

While I found myself visiting Google once or twice for definitions, there’s no fake-clever obfuscation here, just sheer pleasure in nature, and in the sounds, shapes, and meanings of unusual words. I found this chapbook a real pleasure to read.

,

‘Reasons not to live there’ by Humphrey Astley

In online chapbook, Pamphlets on July 23, 2012 at 9:30 am

-Reviewed by Afric McGlinchey-

This small, self-published pamphlet opens with ‘Homework’, a stream of consciousness that flows, like Joyce’s Molly Bloom soliloquy, unhindered by a single full stop. The ‘blood-red Spanish wine seeping my studies’ is in a mug, but as soon as the reader has smiled at that small detail, some unsettling images are introduced. Although the speaker’s friend has a ‘foreign girl’ who ‘begs for him in London and begs for him inside her’, he ‘would never make a slave of a woman who can’t be alone so…he must be good we must be good unlike the young men responsible for the recreational drug rape of my sister…’

The speaker allies himself with his friend who, he feels, is not exploiting someone – and yet he is, by getting her to beg for him. These moral shades of grey are what define this pamphlet. Today, the virtual world has become, for many, almost more real than the concrete world, and the speaker is conscious here not only of his apathy (‘I have no opinion’), but also his altered sense of reality: ‘in the parallel universe known as the real world…’

The text moves from one situation to another, from the present to the past, his Irish mother who ‘gave her youth to England only to be spat on in the street’. But in spite of the injustices he mentions, the speaker simply wants to get drunk and ‘sing off-key and in the azure morn raise with tongues like two dry leaves’. Here again, he reflects the passive stance of those who just want to have fun: ‘I’ll stay here with my wine…’

In the next poem, ‘Resolution’, this notion of taking the path of least resistance persists. It’s the end of a relationship, but

‘you are staying together,
because if either of you leaves,
there will be less warmth for the baby.’

Once more, all is not as it seems: ‘Your happy home is as real to me/as a haunted house.’

‘St Mary’s Road’ opens with a defensive line: ‘They weren’t Pakis to us’. Again, there’s a grey area: while the speaker’s family avoids this politically incorrect word, he uses it here, to show us that this wasn’t the reason for the tension between them. Instead, ‘we had our own reasons/for hating them.’ These reasons appear to include ownership of a ‘two-timing’ tree that grows ‘right through the wall’ between the two gardens. In the next stanza, the kids next door are referred to as ‘Indian’ – perhaps a more accurate word than the earlier ‘Pakis’. The tree gives the kids an excuse for ‘make-believe claims/on its roots’. It’s an interesting poem, because the moral ambiguity apparent in previous poems continues; while there was some sense of patriarchal ownership over women in the earlier poems, here, it’s territorial. And with the mention of ‘us’ and ‘them’, of race, comes the implication of empire. Even between children, in contemporary England, the notion of conquering is all-consuming: ‘How many times could we have/the same argument? As many as it took to give them what for.’

In the more experimental poem ‘A hard-on in the shower,’ the speaker is again sitting on the fence, or more literally, hanging ‘in the doorway.’ But as with other poems in the pamphlet, inexplicable line endings and indentations make this a less than satisfying poem, both visually and in terms of meaning. For example, the word ‘the’ is indented and also stands alone, as does ‘our’ ‘and’, ‘with’, ‘and my’, ‘with the’ etc. As Don Paterson puts it, well-considered line endings allow for key words to ‘resonate into silence’.  There was an opportunity for powerful resonances here, and in other poems, which the poet missed.

‘The Big Society’ is a gentle dig at the PM who chats with his children over breakfast as it’s ‘good practice for dispensing little pearls’ even though ‘at this rate the kids’ll be late for/the best school’. His inner circle ‘seal him in a circle’ and ‘like to smell the money in each other’s musk’. The internal rhymes and assonance (crest/chest, dress/peck/ desk/press; spilling/pillow; golden/yolk/ hook/neck; stack/tabloid/rags; world/pearls) throughout the poem create a neat cohesiveness. Again, the idealistic colour ‘azure’ appears. Twice, for added irony. But after the moral ambivalence of other poems, the authority of the speaker to be critical lacks credibility.

Having said that, the following poem, ‘St Giles’ Street’, is, in my opinion the most convincing in the collection: because the speaker puts on ‘an oversized suit’ and makes a stand, even though the two repeated lines return to his more usual tentative tone: ‘These are not patterns,/but prayers of a sort.’ And yet, what the poem suggests is that a pattern is finally being broken.

‘Reasons not to live there’ and ‘Holiday’ are similarly heartfelt and intimate. Underlying the cynicism (‘I’ll have to get you wet with booze and/mould you into someone I can/use for a foil’) a longing for some kind of constancy can be detected. Remote places, such as the Scottish highlands or the beaches on the south coast, are simplest, where ‘the attractions are old fashioned’.

Today’s world is complex, and in his pamphlet, Astley has captured the confusion faced by the youth in Britain, where identity is no longer established simply by an accent. Here is a thinking poet, with a natural talent, whose work shows considerable promise.

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