Reviews of the Ephemeral

Posts Tagged ‘Alex Campbell’

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‘Convergence and Conversion’ by Neil Ellman and ‘Wherein? He Asks of Memory’ by Jeremy Balius

In Pamphlets on July 24, 2012 at 9:30 am

-Reviewed by Alex Campbell-

Trying to review ekphrastic poetry provides the challenge of either trying to judge the poetry on its own merits, or become an impromptu art critic. Ekphrasis – or the translation of works of art into different media, in this case the visual into the written – is a long standing pursuit, and one which can produce some truly spectacular results, but is one which requires the reader to approach a poem from a different angle to the one they are used to.

Neil Ellman’s Convergence and Conversion, a series of poems drawing their inspiration from abstract art, is a difficult but rewarding collection to explore. At first, the slightly jerking, stuttery quality of the poems, with their frequent line breaks and arrhythmic stanzas, threaten to jolt the reader from being able to derive meaning or hold on to a single idea or thought, but if you look at them, not as poems, but as word-pictures, they have a certain staccato lyricism. In some cases, the jerkiness actually adds to the effect. For example, in the final stanza of “…Whose name Was Writ In Water” (p13) “There is no other/ no other / no other name / other than / my own”, the line breaks convey an echoing quality that has a haunting poignancy.

The question is whether or not it is appropriate to divorce the poem from the artwork which inspired it. There is a worry that without the “map” of the artwork to guide the reader’s imagination, an essential aspect of the art is missing. And yet, even without the context of the art, there is something compelling about phrases like “Whichever way wind blows / imagination / zigzags” (“Dozen and short Dozen”, p10). And poems like “White Flag” (p19) and “The End of Everything” (p8) stand alone very well without the artwork to back them up. “The End of Everything” in particular, for me, conjures up a fascinating image of a rusty car driving off the end of the universe, which isn’t necessarily an image which is borne out by the original artwork, but is intriguing in its own right. Surely, the essence of an ekphrastic poem is that it reproduces the essence of the original art, thus rendering that original superfluous.

Jeremy Balius’ Wherein? He Asks of Memory is, to my mind, a less successful collection. Though based around a single work of art – the oft-repeated For Paul, a sculpture by Ursula von Rydingsvard – it is not exactly ekphrastic. The sculpture is more akin to a character in the poem, and an influence upon it than its subject. But characters require either a narrative or some kind of development, and that is a much more elusive quality in this collection.

This is the kind of writing that always makes me feel as if I have missed the point, or the poet has. It feels like the poet is trying too hard to be intellectual, or deliberately obtuse, and as a result it is exceedingly difficult to penetrate the meaning of the poem. It doesn’t elucidate in the same way that Ellman’s work does. Each of Ellman’s poems are small snippets that can be viewed easily as a whole, much like a painting on the wall of a gallery can be viewed in its entirety, but Balius’ work is a much bigger chunk and can’t be taken in all at once. While this is in some ways more appropriate, since the For Paul sculpture is a much larger piece of work than any of the paintings Ellman has used, it is still a work that can be seen at a glance, while the poems here representing it are not. As a result, Wherin? He Asks of Memory is a far less accessible collection, if for no other reason than the sculpture which inspired it cannot be used as a guide to meaning in the same way, and the reader is left to puzzle out the meaning of such snippets as “sensory incontinence in a dimensionless existence” (“Of the fourth consideration: memorable”) on their own, which proves something of a difficult task.

Whilst I’m sure that Balius has many deep insights and moving scenes to impart, they are in danger of getting lost in his sesquipedalian loquaciousness and his reluctance to employ one word when he can get away with half a sentence. In a way, this could also be said to be a result of problems in translation. The opening stanzas of each of his “considerations” (Part II, form consonants) are an impenetrable wall of text – quite literally, since they are set out in a justified block, broken up by “/” instead of line breaks. And while this does call to mind the brick-like layering in the For Paul sculpture, it is essentially off-putting to the reader searching for a coherent sentence. In addition, the surrounding stanzas are full of extra spacing – again reminiscent of the textures of the sculpture – but it seems to be a case of style over substance as the effect doesn’t really add anything by way of meaning, and the poem becomes a series of jerky fragments that it is nightmarish to try and link together.

It becomes terribly frustrating, because there are occasional moments of lucidity in the poems which offer tantalising glimpses of what this collection could have been. Snippets like “It is easy to detect an onward from a tradition/ rather than the attempt to preserve it” (“Another fiery ordeal”) could perhaps have done with more focus and elaboration. Likewise, the italicised sections of song in “form consonants” have a lyricism to them that I would have liked to see more of.

In conclusion, the brevity and condensed composition of Ellman’s work is more effective at creating an affecting word-scape than Balius’ wall of text. If we look at the work as a canvas, the minimalism of the former wins out, while the latter’s meaning gets lost in the over-layering of brushstrokes; when painting a picture, less truly is more.

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8 Cuts – Lyrical Badlads @ Modern Art Oxford 12/11/11

In Performance Poetry on November 20, 2011 at 5:22 pm

-Reviewed by Alex Campbell-

The Objective

A collaboration between Adventures Close to Home and Eight Cuts, the stated aim of Lyrical Badlads was to blur the boundaries between words and music; an ambitious goal, and one that I think was only partially achieved, however, the attempt was certainly worth watching.

Venue – Oxford Modern Art (downstairs)

  • It was a cozy kind of place, and managed to accommodate a sizeable crowd comfortably, though the red lighting was perhaps a little distracting at first. I also made the mistake of sitting right at the back, on the comfy seats under the stairs, which meant that my view of the projector screen behind the staging area was obscured by a pillar; a decision I later came to regret during the musical acts, and in particular the performance by Grey Children. I think I missed a considerable amount by not being able to fully see the pictures, or the occasional captions, which accompanied the interlinked, eerie stories they performed. From the fragments I could see, and the odd, disjointed sounds which accompanied the monotone performance, I came away with a rather unsettled feeling of having missed something – though from the tone it is entirely possible that this was the aim of the performance.

Performers

  • Anjan Saha’s tabla playing was fantastic, and the introduction to the language of the tabla, either as poetry in and of itself, or merely as an interesting form of notation for percussion, was fascinating. His poetry, on the other hand, was a little more mixed. His first selection was perhaps too conversational in tone for the medium. Occasional flashes of brilliance and lyricism seemed to punctuate short vignettes, which felt much more like they ought to have been prose-poems, or flash fiction. His second poem, later in the evening, showed much more awareness of form, and of the tricks that can be played with sound and rhythm. Perhaps the subject matter – jazz – lent itself better to that kind of improvisation and playing with language, but for whatever reason, it felt a much more confident performance, and I would have liked to have seen the same experimentation and risk taking with his other work.
  • Lucy Ayrton. The poetry in general was of a pleasantly high standard. But Lucy; obviously a seasoned performer (she’s one of the hosts of Oxford’s Hammer & Tongue); stood out in particular, with her fantastic delivery and awareness of her audience. Her comic timing in The Ark in Battersea Park, and Fuck You Corporate Land was spot on, and you could be forgiven for thinking you were watching a particularly erudite rhyming stand-up act. My particular favourite though, was Bonfire Juice. Ayrton has an entrancing sense of whimsy, as already demonstrated in The Ark in Battersea Park, but in Bonfire Juice, she harnesses it to a picture of the perfect summer in a way that manages to be, not trite nostalgia, but instead an enthralling distillation of memory that in its specificity manages to become universal. I never had a perfect childhood or adolescent summer, but I still felt like I could remember one through Ayrton’s description.
  • Claire Trévien was another highlight of the evening, in particular her poem Singbird, which is the first poem with audience participation that I have heard which actually works. The gradual encroachment of the audience’s lines on the poet’s is a brilliant and effective metaphor for the stealing and silencing of women’s voices, and one which came across loud and clear, without being patronising. The use of the tabla against Belleville and Listening to Charles Ives was also more effective than with the earlier, impromptu, poems; perhaps because the performers were more experienced, perhaps because the tone of the poems was more reflective, and the drum provided a quiet heart-beat counterpoint.
  • Dan Holloway’s poetry appears to be emulating the style of beat poets like Ginsberg, and does it better than most, but his finale, to the accompaniment of To The Moon’s musical stylings, was perhaps a bit overly long for a performance. I would have much preferred to read it at leisure, rather than have to take it in all at once. Especially with the addition of the accompaniment. Whilst the idea of blending the two, and blurring the boundaries between music and spoken word was clearly the idea, I think there is perhaps a problem in this aim, especially with Beat poetry, when the aim is usually that the poem is its own music, it’s own beat and rhythm, its own melodies of the voice. When you put music to that, it’s not that you have to focus on two conflicting stimuli, it’s more that their similarities tend to cancel each other out.
  • Perhaps a good comparison would be to the bedding music in film and television. While dialogue is happening, the music needs to be unobtrusive; it can definitely enhance the mood of a scene, but it can’t dominate, or even be particularly noticeable. It’s there to fill up the silence between words with emotion. The big musical numbers that people remember take place where there is no dialogue, and thus take their turn in the spotlight unencumbered by words. In this case, however, the music was given an equal priority to the poem, which did both of them a disservice. You were assailed by a wave of sound and speech; not an unpleasant experience, but one which left you unable to give either the attention it deserves.

Overall though, it was a good evening, and well worth attending. Even if the attempt at blending music and poetry didn’t quite succeed, it was still a worthwhile experiment, and there was a lot of fun to be had in being proved wrong.

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‘Planet-Shaped Horse’ by Luke Kennard

In Pamphlets on April 14, 2011 at 9:24 pm

-reviewed by Alex Campbell-

“Client danger to self, others. Client already sees self as ‘author’. Having book out only exacerbates aberration. And for what? Does book even sell? Editor hangs up.” (Case Notes)

Last month I was fortunate enough to catch a reading from Luke Kennard at a writers’ soiree at Warwick university, where, amongst other things, he read a few poems from his new collection, Planet-Shaped Horse. From the first line I was hooked:  his comic timing is superb, and his deadpan delivery absolutely spot-on. His poems; wry, blackly humorous and revelling in the absurd, are a joy to listen to, and just as good to peruse alone, later.

The actual book opens with a quote and a map, but of the two the map is more interesting. It follows the conventions of map-making, but turns them on their head, with its strange, skewed perspective, a childlike, hand drawn aesthetic, and little embedded witticisms from the start: “Key: Minimise discomfort”. It’s exactly the right kind of map for the world we’re about to explore.

The poems too have a studied naivety, which is charming, warm and engaging (Special mention must be made of the owl singing “Ted Huuuuughes…” who re-appears as a drawing on the ends piece) and just a little bonkers. His imagery is whimsical, but winning, such as the description of a toothbrush that “leans forward / as if condescending to admire a child’s painting.” (The Environment) or minks as being “little apostrophes of teeth and cruelty” (Mink Farm). At the same time, he manages to create a strange world of porcelain horizons (Mink Farm), Hermitologists, scheduled arguments (Farfalle or The Argument) and other absurdities, but litters it with insights, ironies and a hint of sadness that seems to bring out a clearer way of seeing. The titular conceit – that the world is a planet-shaped horse, ‘it gallops faster the more you beat it / with the undersides of your feet’ (Eyes) – is introduced quite late in the book, but works as a sort of pinnacle of all the quirky metaphors splashed liberally throughout the text, as well as a statement about stasis and movement. What could seem like non-sequiturs, here actually have their own logic to them, and when you’re forced to look at things from this 45 degree angle they make more sense than some things do the right way up.

The fact that this collection is a poem-play cannot be forgotten. There is a strong narrative thread running through the collection, which gives it a depth of meaning and character that no single poem could have achieved on its own – though many of them could theoretically stand alone. The characters; Simon and Miranda the case-workers, the Hermit, the Hermitologist, and of course our protagonist, Client 1764, are all engaging and well realised. The format of a poem may require a certain sparseness of detail, but these characters never suffer for it. Kennard’s incisive observation and quick turn of phrase means that a little goes a very long way, and Simon, with “his courteous smile like a weak / line-break, the fashionable cut of his jaw-line.” (‘More Sad News From Your Stupid Planet’) Miranda, who “practically is an exclamation mark’ (ibid) and 1764 himself, with his ‘feet – little decommissioned tanks’ (two Hermits) and his farfalle bow-tie, are alive and vibrant as any.

The best thing about Kennard is perhaps that he doesn’t take himself too seriously, so he’s not afraid to make himself the butt of his own humour. His quiet mockery of the pretensions of art is refreshing – “I Faked My Own Life (Felt, wire wool, craft / knives 65 acres land, 1997)” (Time Capsule), “Second-marker comments: You seem to think / you are being satirical, and your raised eyebrow / prevents you from achieving a higher grade here.” (The Environment) – but he is self aware enough to realise that he is mocking himself as well, and good humoured enough to laugh along with it. Though the joke is almost always on him, it never slips from wryly self deprecating into angst or whining. He is happy to suggest that there are “Too many poems addressed to much better artworks, / too many poems addressed to much better writers. / Oh, Borges, I take off my hat to you, / a hat filled with a million libraries, etc / Let’s at least agree that’s bullshit.” (Farfalle or The Argument), but still accepts that “the incandescent wierdoes who hate you / make up at least 10-20% of your audience, which is quite a market share.” (Mink Farm)

Kennard’s work is clever, fascinating and with an off the wall, tongue in cheek sort of humour that is a joy to read or listen to. Perhaps though, we should take one final warning, from this collection; that “Like most jokes, the joke is on the people who pretend to get it” (Sobranies)…

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‘There are no Americans in Baghdad’s Bird Market’ by Dikra Ridha

In Pamphlets on February 24, 2011 at 7:48 pm

-Reviewed by Alex Campbell-

It’s always hard, as a Westerner, reviewing a collection of poetry centred around the war in Iraq, without coming off as condescending. You are the American being invited into Baghdad’s bird market, and asked to comment, despite the fact that you are, perhaps, intruding. It’s tempting under such circumstances to just give an unequivocally good review – who are you to judge the distant suffering of others? You can’t get away from the fact that these aren’t just poems; the events they describe are real and have happened, somewhere, to someone. You don’t ever want to pass comment on the events instead of the poetry. You always run the risk, as an outsider, of not understanding.

But Dikra Ridha’s collection, There are no Americans in Baghdad’s Bird Market, makes it very easy to understand. It’s a very personal collection, picking out individuals from the mass of destruction and focusing right down to the painful sensations of ‘[becoming] an insect in your own home’ (‘Ordinary Evening’), or the nuts and bolts methods of coping, the ‘two thousand and three hundred [shoe shines... to] buy a can of baby milk on the black market’ (‘Voices from Nadia’s House’). The reader is drawn right in, so close it’s almost painful.

The poem ‘One Hour of Light’ is especially enlightening, juxtaposing a privileged middle-class experience of Earth Hour – an eco-friendly gesture, switching the lights off for one hour in the evening – with the real hardship of someone who only has one hour with the power on, per day. For someone whose hour ‘Off’ is about ‘peace/ and quiet, [ignoring] the day’s chores and [snuggling]/ with a hot water bottle,’ it is the height of hubris to pretend to understand how it must feel in the other situation. ‘You spend all day in your coat/ waiting for the lights and I turn them off when I want.’ Just that bland statement of fact is enough to drive the message home, without overstating the point.

Ridha’s skill is in laying the situation bare for us, and by giving us a new insight into the impact of war, reminds us that we should never presume to know too much. Her style is beautifully understated, giving the images a quiet potency, and allowing the voice of the poem to come through clearly and eloquently.

The poetry never slips into polemic or diatribe, which it could so easily do. The politics are stripped away, for this collection, and it’s not about the rights and wrongs and the statesman’s rhetoric, but just about families trying to survive the day to day. Even as a Westerner, it’s hard to feel alienated by them, as the political is made so much more distant from the personal. Familial customs and relics, like a pack of cards (‘Jiddu’), and every-day sayings (‘The Enemy Came from Above’) are full of so much more depth and meaning than military orders, or the speeches of politicians.

The opening poem of the collection, ‘The Enemy Came from Above’, is based around one of these sayings, which simplified is ‘Me and my brother against my cousin, me and my cousin against my friend, me and my friend against my neighbour, but all of us unite against the enemy’. I don’t know if the saying is originally Iraqi – it may well be – but I have heard other versions of it before, and it seems to have wormed its way into our language as well. Whether or not the poet intended it, the irony that a saying about conflict could actually be a similarity between the two warring cultures is not lost. Yet the dehumanisation of the unnamed enemy from above, and the bombing shutting off communications is a poignant reminder of how war really can break the bonds between all people, no matter how much they may have in common.

Ridha manages to say so much with so little – despite the subject matter, the poems themselves seem effortless, open and honest. The language is simple, but there isn’t a word out of place. Overall, I feel that the good review is the right one to give; not because I feel guilty, or want to err on the safe side, but because I believe these poems genuinely elicit one.

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Different Chemistry / Guage by Rupert M. Loydell

In Pamphlets on January 11, 2011 at 8:00 pm

-Reviewed by Alex Campbell-

Poetry is not visual art. They certainly share many properties, but the bare presentation of a scene, without judgement or even elucidation is not one of them. Visual art is balder, more all-at-once than poetry, which of necessity must be sequential. We watch the individual poetical brush-strokes as they happen before we can step back and examine the whole.

But what about poetry inspired by art? Ought that to emulate the content or the medium that inspired it?  Rupert M. Loydell’s Different Chemistry is described as being “after Joel-Peter Witkin”, the American photographer, and, as you would expect, it touches on many of the same subjects. Here we find “photographs of mirrors”, (“11”), “dead eyes staring upwards” (“8”) “fruit around a baby’s corpse” (“4”) and “grotesque wounds & sepia stumps” (“1”), all reminiscent, and possibly even drawn straight from Witkin’s work.

But there also appears to be an attempt in the poetry to be more photographic in itself. For example, the central line of every stanza of every poem is comprised of three (or sometimes two) italicised and disjointed words or fragments, such as “nonsense   nostalgia   numinous” (“2”) “inane   inept   indecision” (“7”) or “who says   why bother   will you” (“11”), which looks like an attempt to show, as photography does, the entirety of the image at once, rather than building on it sequentially, as written art must. Either that, or it could be reminiscent of flashbulbs going off – each word a photograph in itself.

However, poetry is not visual art, and it seems that in the attempt to emulate, something has been lost in the translation. In attempting to be more like photography, the poems actually become less. There are no sharp outlines, or clear definition. Meaning is blurred and obscured and the poetry becomes an impenetrable mess, from which it is nigh on impossible to derive any kind of sense beyond a few fragmented images. Words are splattered haphazardly across the paper, much like the ink designs opposite each poem. Reading them becomes an exercise like seeing patterns in clouds, or Rorschach ink-blots; Loydell makes the reader do all the work, rarely offering his own interpretation, or even a helpful signpost to meaning.

Which wouldn’t be so bad, if he didn’t keep asserting that there is some sort of deeper meaning to be found here. Every poem of the collection ends with the refrain “the condition of our lives”, tantalisingly hinting at revelations about the human condition, and all that poetry at its best strives to encapsulate. But merely stating it, in amidst such a hap-hazard stream of language does not elucidate anything, does not paint a picture for the reader, or delineate shades of meaning, or even hint at a conclusion which we can draw for ourselves. This isn’t so much Pointillism as join-the-dots. Without the numbers.

Loydell also doesn’t seem to understand the concept of a ballad. While there is nothing wrong with re-imagining a form, the essential quality that makes a ballad a ballad, one would have thought, is the fact that it is a narrative poem. Different Chemistry touts itself as “Ballads of the Alone 4”, but there is nothing narrative about it. The subtitle is meaningless. He might as well have called it “Washing Machines of the Alone 4”. Different Chemistry almost has more in common with the French ballade, for, though it forgoes rhyme altogether, it does still retain a refrain as the last line of each poem. Though it seems a stretch to imagine that this is an intentional comparison that the poet has sought to create.

The second of the two collections, Guage, is, sadly, little better, and just as inexplicable. Though in this there are at least occasional flashes where Loydell demonstrates a greater facility for language and the sound of words, such as in “Tone”. The clicking of “Tacit shift/ /basic alibi/ a stiff fact” as it slaps around the palate is certainly aurally pleasing, though one wishes this skill with sound had been harnessed to a more interesting (or indeed intelligible) message.

There are also moments of either remarkable serendipity or accurate self-awareness, such as in “Hat Tree 2”. Reading the phrase “other language/ clarifies fall / /fill us in”  seems something of a supreme irony, seeing the poet articulate an exhortation the reader has probably been wishing to direct to him from the start. Wonder is not “enough/ for all to guage” (sic.) Sometimes we need something more to wonder at than “words taken out of context / the content of the work / gooseflesh garbage genuine” (Different Chemistry, “6”).

This may seem a harsh estimation of Loydell, but it’s hard to be charitable to a poet when he miss-spells the title of his own collection. Unless “Guage” is supposed to be a nonsense word, or has some deeper meaning that I am unaware of, and isn’t merely a miss-spelling of Gauge, as the quote from “Hat Tree 2” would suggest.

Poetry has for too long held a reputation of being difficult and requiring hard work to understand. Perhaps with a little deeper reading, the meaning in these poems would become apparent, but if one believes that poetry should be an accessible medium to all, then they seem unhelpful to say the least. Modern Poetry does not want to pick up the same negative and elitist connotations as are sometimes attached to Modern Art (e.g. in the public image of The Turner Prize), but with these collections Loydell is in danger of doing just that.

 

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‘Escaping the Cage’ by Kate Scott

In Pamphlets on December 20, 2010 at 6:22 pm

-Reviewed by Alex Campbell-

You have to wonder what cage Kate Scott is escaping from with her new collection of poems from HappenStance, since what the poetry seems to demonstrate most of all is a kind of lyrical freedom that banishes all sense of contrivance or pretension.

Escaping a teeny tiny Cage

The poem which bears the collection’s title, ‘Escaping the Cage’, would suggest that the cage is one of convention and propriety – one which the poem bursts out of delightfully. The image of swearwords, held in the mouth like “some hard-boiled sweet” before being spat out into polite company where no-one really knows how to react, is one guaranteed to make you smile. But it is alone in construing the cage thus.

A more likely cage to bind together the collection is, perhaps, family. Not so far away from ‘convention’ as all that, since in most cases we are talking about the traditional nuclear family; something that fewer of us are growing up in now, but which is still prevalent enough that it will never be a stretch to empathise with Scott’s poems. This is not a question of alienating, or presenting the familiar in an unfamiliar light. The poems of Escaping the Cage feel much more like articulations of something that was on the tip of the tongue – the familiar presented in such a way as to be instantly recognisable, provoking a gut-feeling of instinctive identification.

So many of the situations strike a chord – whether as parent or child: who hasn’t been in that car, driving home late after a family visit with the kids “singing buggerbugger in the back”? (‘Relief’) or been on that family picnic, where the kids are just too old for it, but the parents “don’t know enough / to stop trying.” (‘Outing’), and all too many of us are likely to be familiar with the scenario of ‘Sometimes’; and the mental weight of the knowledge  of “cancerous cells / doing addition in the blood, / in the veins of someone you love.”

In fact, the thread that seems to run through the pamphlet is one of inescapability. The poem ‘Some Afternoons’ is reminiscent of Tony Hoagland’s ‘Perpetual Motion’, in its sense of not-quite-wanderlust, but Scott’s version, though capturing just as much of the romance of travelling as Hoagland’s, manages also to portray the realist’s eye view; “the weight of a life” that holds you back, and all the reasons why you can’t give in to the pull of wanting to be anywhere but here. Perhaps the ties that bind hold more strongly for a woman, but the emotional content of ‘Some Afternoons’ is pitched more vividly than ‘Perpetual Motion’, leaving more of a sense of frustration and longing than merely dissatisfaction.

Some of the poems seem to be about not wanting to escape; of being content to  live with your decisions. Similar to Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’, Scott’s ‘All the men I’ve never slept with’, does not linger on the expected regret. The choice made seems to be enough to scatter the other possibilities “to the walls, rattled like dry rice”, and that the “brand” of that choice is described as “warmth” suggests comfort and security, rather than emptiness or disappointment. Going one further is ‘Blind’. The poems have a similar structure – one stanza of regrets; or rather the things now given up; described in tantalising detail, “their apple tight buttocks, their courgette thighs” “the language of wide eyes and teasing fingers”, followed by a stanza of what has replaced them, “you lay your hand upon my head”, “seeing you folded next to my heart / I am blind, blind, blind.”. Neither of the second stanzas seem less inviting: though something has been given up, what it has been exchanged for seems both smaller and yet more substantial than any of the imagined possibilities. It’s not a question of size, but of weight.  It is that substance, that sense of reality and permanence, that seems to be the key.

‘Relief’, possibly my favourite poem of the collection, conjures such a sense of comfort distilled from the everyday annoyances of life, simply because of the people surrounding you. It’s not a cage if they’re in there with you. Or perhaps they are the cage, but when “he begins to whistle a tune she loves” you realise you don’t want to leave. Scott encapsulates it neatly; ‘Barometer’, on the facing page ends with: “when his granddaughter asks him/ What makes the silver rise? And he answers Pressure, / he means love.” That phrase could possibly sum up the mood of the whole collection.

The poems are deceptive in their simplicity of language. Scott has a real facility for conveying meaning, depth and emotion, without waffle or indulging in sentimentality. Families are portrayed honestly, but sympathetically – a balance that is often difficult to strike. Whatever cage Scott feels she has escaped, this collection is definitely flying free.

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Sparkbright #4

In online magazine on October 17, 2010 at 1:51 pm

-Reviewed by Alex Campbell-

The cover art of Sparkbright issue 4 (courtesy of Julia Spiese) is quirky and imaginative – even if the combination of goldfish and lightbulb personally gives me a wholly false impression that this issue is going to be about the transitory nature of memory – and suggests that the magazine’s contents are going to be equally original and whimsical.

The contents of the issue are something of a mixed bag. There are times when the youth and relative inexperience of the contributors begins to tell, particularly with regards to form and structure, such as when Kate Bergen’s evocative imagery of a pianist’s fingers dripping with sonatas is marred by a slightly clumsily constructed villanelle. Her abandonment of the more usual iambic pentameter in favour of a looser rhythm does not lend the piece as natural a flow as the subject matter deserves, and necessary adherence to the strict rhyme scheme means that some phrases are twisted and ungainly, such as in “Across the silence of my morning heart they quiver.”, which, sadly, is one of the repeated lines.

At other times the poet is so focussed on the structure that they allow it to dictate the content of the piece, such as in The Tangled Web We Weave, by Martin Broad (which, incidentally has nothing to do with lies or deception, so one is forced to wonder why exactly that title was considered relevant). Whilst Broad has clearly mastered scansion, lines like “Slow-burning is the pot that’s watched,” seems like a contrived way of ending the line with the appropriate rhyme, without thought to what is actually being said.

Conversation With My Veins, on the other hand, by Chloe Waterford, forgoes structure altogether, but whilst this gives a certain liberty to express ideas unconstrained, the final piece is a rambling, formless mass, rather more like a brainstorming session; the preparatory sketches, rather than the finished canvass.

Admittedly, the converse would have been much worse – perfectly constructed forms, without a single original idea or experimental thought expressed within. But it does seem to be the case that a lot of these young writers are more focussed on the look and the sound of the poem than its emotional honesty. It feels like they are trying to be clever, rather than trying to be themselves, and it is the lack of an individual voice, rather than lack of ideas, which is predominantly the sticking point for those pieces that don’t immediately grab you.

As to the prose, Dylan Luloff’s Going, and the opening piece, The End of the World, by Lili Leader, read more like they should be poetry rather than prose. They don’t seem to have a driving narrative force behind them. There is no progression; they just describe single moments, and while they do that well, they perhaps miss out on the nuances of flash fiction as a result. By contrast, stories like One Man’s Heaven, by Jessica Dall, or Jason E. Castro’s The Born Loser, are interesting concepts, and while they aren’t badly executed, again, there isn’t much individuality of style, or anything which really makes these stories stand out the way they should.

That said, many of the writers show real promise, and there are one or two gems that do stand out for me. iDrew’s iAmbient is a love song for the digital age, sprinkled liberally with the ubiquitous lower-case i, but not in a way that detracts from the poem, or feels too gimmicky. If anything, the understated elegance of the “i” compliments the quiet lyricism of lines like “…i collected all the passion laced / expired breaths / tokens / for the dream archive / in the cupboard…”: in short, ee cummings meets ipod.

Seduction, by Joe Dresner is a good example of fitting form to purpose, and not the other way round. The poem, arranged on the page to suggest the shape of the stairs, doesn’t waste time with elaborate ways of overstating the case, it instead relies on honesty and clarity to express itself, and its simplicity speaks volumes.

Raindrop Baby (Michael Lee Johnson) and Hey You in the Rain (Luigi Monteferrante), are both short, but punchy and to the point, and slightly reminiscent of the Beat Poets of the fifties. There is an energy to both of them, and each has a distinct voice.

On the prose side of things, Daniel Davis’ It Slips Through Your Fingers Like Rainwater in Jakarta, could perhaps do with a shorter title, but the absurd and wonderful premise of the story is backed up by a prose style so understated it gets away with it, and keeps the reader engaged when it might otherwise have been difficult to suspend belief.

Overall, while this is a very mixed collection, there is enough raw talent in Sparkbright that, with a little more polish, it could shine very brightly indeed. I look forward to seeing what some of these artists produce as they mature more, and find their voices. Roll on edition 5.

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