Reviews of the Ephemeral

Posts Tagged ‘Ian Chung’

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‘Bugsworth Diary’ by Neil Campbell

In Pamphlets on January 25, 2012 at 10:00 am

-Reviewed by Ian Chung-

Bugsworth Diary

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

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

So close that for the first time

I could appreciate the silver

On their necks, missed at a distance

And mistaken for black

In previous months of winter light.

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

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

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

I had been enjoying

My Monday morning until the

Part when I came upon

A demolished factory littered

Around the base of a still

Standing though condemned

Chimney. And I realised that

Something resembling a disaster

Resided among these green hills.

Later that night some damp wood

I’d put on the fire began

To stink, and I wondered what

I might be breathing.

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

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Fiction Reviews: A 2011 ‘Top Ten’

In End of year round-up on December 17, 2011 at 10:05 am

-Decided by Richard T. Watson-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks a bunch, we really appreciate it.

Happy Christmas, and merry reading!

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‘Dark Steps’ by Martin Pond

In anthology, Short Stories on November 29, 2011 at 11:15 am

-Reviewed by Ian Chung-

Dark Steps, by Martin Pond, reviewed by Ian Chung

As a reviewer, I always find it exciting to re-encounter a writer’s work in a different context. In this case, my first introduction to Martin Pond’s work was back when I reviewed Unthank Books’ Unthology 1 back in April, which includes the subtly disquieting ‘Waiting Room’, here positioned as the first story in Pond’s Dark Steps collection. The power of this dystopian tale is primarily derived from the growing discrepancy between the knowledge possessed by the narrator and that available to the reader. When the ending comes, it is not entirely a surprise for the reader, but it still packs a punch because of that discrepant awareness. These related techniques—narrator-reader gap and ending with a twist—are exploited throughout the rest of the collection, albeit with varying degrees of success.

Instances where I think they fall short are the festive-themed stories like ‘Egg’ and ‘A Bit Christmassy’, where the reader is able to assemble the full picture too easily, and therefore anticipate the twist too early in the story. Another is ‘Dream Feed’, where the story’s denouement does not feel sufficiently rewarding. Pond mentions in the introduction to the collection that this one was ‘an exercise in writing what [he] like[s] to read – the unsettling short story with a twist ending’, and I think this was one that needed to move further away from the ‘exercise’ aspect in order to really take off as a story. There are interesting elements swirling around, to do with the baby, the Latin overheard on the baby monitor, the temperature dropping in the nursery etc. The potential for profoundly disturbing horror is there, but in the story’s current form, it has been curtailed in exchange for a moment of emotional release: ‘For the first time since our daughter had moved into her own room, the nursery was suddenly filled with crying.’

On the other hand, when the techniques succeed, the outcome is masterful. In ‘Resolution’, using a countdown to the New Year to segment the narrator’s stream of consciousness allows the story to rapidly cover a swath of emotional terrain, only for the ending to take a decidedly sinister turn. The final word, however, is given to the crowd’s cheer of ‘Happy New Year!’, which juxtaposes the normalcy of the occasion and the narrator’s deviant decision in the preceding paragraph to great effect. Or consider ‘Near-Death Experience’, where the surprise reveal of what has really been going on throughout the story comes in its very last paragraph, but this forces the reader to rethink the significance of everything that has just been read. Like ‘Dream Feed’, the twist ending does not provide complete explanations, though in the case of ‘Near-Death Experience’, I think this feeling of incompletion that the reader is left with is less frustrating than intriguing.

Dark Steps closes with two slightly longer pieces. Pond notes that ‘The Inheritance’ was ‘the first complete story [he] wrote after resuming writing in 2007’, and that he ‘had grand plans for this, once’. Reading it, one can definitely see its influence on his subsequent work, although he is right that its central twist, which is integral to the story’s logic, probably does not stand up to the plausibility test. It is also possible to see what Pond means by ‘grand plans’, as the ending of the story does feel more like the finish of an opening chapter than the last word for the character.

This in turn brings me to Pond’s ongoing online novel, the opening of which is excerpted in Dark Steps. The project began in June 2010, and the excerpt combines the first four posts he made on the blog. I found the excerpt promising, and looking at the cast of characters Pond has posted on the blog, it certainly seems like the story has expanded considerably beyond what is offered in the Dark Steps excerpt. Pond’s stated goal is to post a few hundred words every Friday, which reminds me of the way 19th century novels used to be serialised, or more recently in 2002, when The Guardian serialised Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White.

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‘Anatomically Incorrect Sketches of Marine Animals’ by Sarah Dawson

In Kindle chapbook, online chapbook, Pamphlets on October 20, 2011 at 9:42 am

-Reviewed by Ian Chung-

Since this is a review of a chapbook designed for the Kindle, in the interests of full disclosure I should mention that I have never owned one. Nor do I plan to, no matter how shiny the various companies make their e-readers. (To be fair, I do read on my iPhone, but mainly stuff on McSweeney’s Small Chair app that has been specially formatted for it.) I probably own enough books to start my own library lending service, and though my bookshelves at home and at university are groaning under the weight, I would not have it any other way. This is less a case of my hating the digital revolution, and more a case of my remaining largely indifferent to this aspect of it.

 

Frankly, the experience of reading Sarah Dawson’s chapbook, Anatomically Incorrect Sketches of Marine Animals, has not changed my mind about e-books. This, however, has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the poetry or its presentation, both of which are excellent. On her blog Poetry After Ink, Dawson states that her goal was to self-publish a group of poems she was proud of. As for choosing the Kindle format? In her own words, ‘I kept reading that formatting poetry for Kindle was close to impossible, and I wanted to prove it wasn’t.’ I read the chapbook on both the Kindle for iPhone and for PC apps, and I have to say that whatever Dawson did in terms of formatting (details in this blog entry), it works perfectly, e.g. line breaks are preserved when resizing the text.

 

Turning to the poetry, there will always be those who remain sceptical about the quality of self-published work. This is not the place to rehash the debate, apart from registering my assent to Dawson’s comment that ‘[t]he ideas that digital formats cheapen poetry, and that all self published writers are terrible are self perpetuating’. Far from being terrible, Dawson’s poems are lyrical observations, shot through with imagery that is tactile and visceral. The opening poem, ‘Barceloneta, May 2010’, is short enough to quote in full:

You were mining breaststroke – the universal

sign for swimming. Found the beach, whilst I was

 

watching silken laundry sea that lapped the

pillars. Beneath, fish were sewn from thousands

 

of silk scraps – seams that faced out, unhemmed

loose threads, labels, that you ached to cut

 

they brushed each other; coats they ached to shrug off

 

There is a patterning of sounds in this poem, an ebb and flow to the manner in which they appear, go away, reemerge in new configurations. The image of the ‘silken laundry sea’ introduced in the second couplet regulates the rest of the poem’s sounds. The fish become transformed into ‘silk scraps’, as if they have merged with the sea at an essential level. Yet when the poem performs its own merging by pulling in the ‘m’ sound from the first couplet, a curious moment of linguistic play occurs. Pronouncing a word like ‘unhemmed’ presses the lips together, but the meaning points to something coming undone. Cleverly, ‘seam’ is also linguistically janiform, since it can mean both a junction and a fissure. The tension between these two impulses, to join and to separate, is caught up again by the last line, where ‘brushed’ echoes ‘breaststroke’ in the first, even as the fish are still trapped in ‘coats they ached to shrug off’. It is inconceivable not to acknowledge such patterned economy of language as deserving admiration.

 

Another example of Dawson’s craftsmanship occurs in ‘Lug worms, rag worms’. On her blog, Dawson mentions that this poem began life as a pantoum, which she subsequently edited down. The version that appears in the chapbook has been pared down further, and while no longer recognisable as a pantoum per se, still does something interesting in the way bits of the repeated lines seemingly ‘burrow’ into each other, like ‘worms’ moving through the ‘sand’ of the poem. As the poem comes to a graceful finish, ‘Plucked from / our burrows, now exposed, our frayed threads / antagonize each other’, the compass of its central metaphor expands to connect worms and people in the same predicament, the threat of being ‘exposed’, of being made vulnerable. Where a lesser poet might have worked in a pun on ‘bristle’ and linked it with ‘antagonize’, Dawson’s use of the unrepeated ‘exposed’ stands out as a moment of subtlety.

 

Earlier, I stated my lack of interest in e-books. (At least when it comes to buying my own reading material. I read plenty of digital stuff for reviews!) To reiterate, this has never been a value judgement, but purely a question of personal preference. Perhaps then, the highest compliment I can pay Dawson’s chapbook in closing is to say that had it been published as a physical chapbook, I would have happily bought it, which is what I normally do anyway when I read something I like online that is also sold in hard copy. As it stands though, in the case of Dawson’s chapbook e-reader converts certainly have one up on people like me, and I am glad to admit it.

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‘An Animal’s Guide to Earthly Salvation’ by Jack R. Johnson

In Novella on September 23, 2011 at 2:10 pm

-Reviewed by Ian Chung-

In Jack R. Johnson’s An Animal’s Guide to Earthly Salvation, protagonist Jeffrey Rawlings is an assistant at a veterinary clinic, but as the publisher’s blurb notes, ‘it’s not just the animals that need a cure’. Jeff’s family is rife with dysfunction, from his hypochondriac mother Dorothy, to his sister Caroline with dollar signs for eyes, and not to forget the overbearing Uncle Raymond, who has spent his whole life making Jeff feel bad about himself. The neighbourhood Jeff lives in is no walk in the park either, especially when resident transvestite Scott starts handing drugs to Clara, the runaway whom Jeff suspects of being underage after he has slept with her. All in all, a crazy cast of characters that seems ripe with comedic potential.

Oddly though, I think this potential doesn’t get explored fully in the course of the narrative. There is that moment in Chapter Seven where Jeff has brought Clara to visit his mother in the hospital (who was finally warded at the start of the story with an actual life-threatening illness), and at the end, out of Clara’s earshot, Dorothy says to Jeff, ‘She is sweet. But…that girl doesn’t eat enough’, rather than commenting on her chewed and dirty fingernails or her dubious political affiliations. Otherwise, a lot of the humour in An Animal’s Guide to Earthly Salvation involving the human characters tends to come across as overly scripted. Even what should have been the big reveal of Jeff’s mother and Uncle Raymond’s affair in the next chapter feels like it was included for the sake of further (and somewhat predictably) complicating the entanglements of the Rawlings family.

On the other hand, when the animals become involved, the story can rise to a blackly comic level or invoke moments of pathos. Chapter One actually opens promisingly in the former vein, with Jeff trying to break a dead Doberman’s legs, so he can take it out of a cage and to the dumpster. Except he fails and a colleague has to do it for him with a fire extinguisher because ‘That’s the way you have to do it.’ Cue shift of gears in Chapter Two, when Dr. Fitzhugh at the clinic appears to save a German Shepherd through nothing more than the sheer power of prayer. It might be cheesy to some, and Jeff himself is clearly sceptical, but honestly, what kind of person would you have to be in order to hope for that dog to die?

Perhaps the problem with An Animal’s Guide to Earthly Salvation is that after getting through it, a reader might sense that there are two competing stories trying to be told here. One has to do with Jeff’s human relationships, although even the strand of the plot that tracks his relationship with Clara, the most sustained one apart from the drama revolving around Dorothy’s illness, is more a stutter-stop affair than something that organically evolves. The other attempts to tie together animals and philosophy, dropping in a bit of Kierkegaard here and there, while offering up handy aphorisms like ‘Humans are animals that failed’. Yet even Johnson’s breezily readable prose style, capable as it is of propelling readers through the book’s largely episodic structure, is not quite enough to seamlessly stitch the two stories together.

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Curbside Quotidian #3

In Magazine, online magazine on August 17, 2011 at 6:48 pm

-Reviewed by Ian Chung-

There is a range of strong and enjoyable work to be found in Issue 3 of Curbside Quotidian, although the featured artwork in particular is quite diverse, and not all of it may appeal. Personally, I found the two strongest to be Inge Hoonte’s Simulated Travel and Eleanor Bennett’s Sleep Anywhere. The former is a very simple black surface, over which text marches from left to right and five dotted arrows run through the text from top to bottom. The visual impact verges on being clinically sparse, yet pay closer attention and details like how the dotted arrows cut through ‘i’s in the text will emerge, evoking the deeper organising principles underpinning the artwork. The crux of the piece then seems to be the last line of text, ‘get immobility bonus for not flying anywhere’, as Hoonte is interested in ‘how notions of privacy, identity, and behavioral routines shape the tension between reaching out and keeping one’s distance in interpersonal communication and physicality’.

Visually speaking, Bennett’s Sleep Anywhere is the complete opposite of Hoonte’s piece. The colours here are lush and vibrant, but what is most striking is that brilliant blue iris staring out of the top-right quadrant of the artwork. The other eye is not exactly obscured by leaf litter, but because it is still cast in shadow, what is a beautiful image is given a subtly disquieting feel, intentionally or otherwise, as if there were something off-kilter about it that yet cannot be pinned down with any certainty. This juxtaposition of moods finds an echo in one of the poems, Daniel Fitzsimmons’s ‘Underfoot’, which opens with the violently visceral (but sonically pitch-perfect in its alliteration) ‘A dead cardinal is crushed crimson’, yet closes with a measure of wistfulness:

‘and the swift-footed commuters

slowed for a moment to wonder

if the photos hanging on the walls

upstairs were black and white.’

The editors of Curbside Quotidian must also be commended for their lively sense of humour, which surely played a part in their choosing to publish a poem like Kevin Heaton’s ‘Castaway’. Poems concerning literary rejection may run the risk of sounding bitter, but Heaton’s poem deftly avoids this by approaching rejection from a subtly different perspective. Rather than writing a poem about rejection from the poet’s point of view, he goes a step further and imagines a poet rejecting a literary magazine’s request that he take out a subscription. Substitute a few nouns here and there, and the poem would read like any polite form rejection from an editor, which detractors might say is too gimmicky, but as a one-off, I find it quite ingenious. The shape of the poem on the screen also plays on this familiarity with rejection by editors, with indents drawing attention to phrases like ‘thoroughly / reviewed the work’ and ‘lacking / in laudable characteristics’.

It is in the fiction offerings though, that Issue 3 of Curbside Quotidian really shines. The element of humour is again displayed in a story like Yaki Margulies’s ‘Failed Expectations’, which imagines what would happen if God actually came back to Earth and started living a celebrity lifestyle, only to become fed up with humanity all over again. Zealots will probably take offense, but more level-headed believers should be able to appreciate the satire, especially given the rise of megachurches and their celebrity pastors. Also carrying on the religious theme is Christine Utz’s ‘Ingénue: A Girl in Three Parts’. The three-part structure of the story may be a nod to the concept of the divine Trinity, but its subject matter is strictly mortal. The love stories that unfold grow progressively weirder, and by the third section ‘3. The Herpetologist’, the narrator is in a relationship with what is clearly stated to be a lizard. Even leaving aside the metaphorical implications of shedding one’s skin (‘To ask him to claw me so my new skin could emerge, too.’), this narrative hangs together precisely because it is never self-conscious about its oddity, allowing the story to coast smoothly to its end.

On the other hand, Danny Lalonde’s ‘\A Simple Function\’ deliberately fractures language, repeatedly defining (or appearing to define) specific words at scattered intervals. There is something almost schizophrenic in the way these definitions are mixed together with the parsing of grammatical functions, snatches of Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’, and the refrain ‘a space and then a line’. This effect is heightened by the story’s being narrated in the second person, a relatively uncommon choice, but which impels the reader to inhabit the story as it is being read. Finally, it is also worth pointing out that Nick Kowalczyk has an excellent non-fiction piece in Issue 3. ‘Dispatches From Home’ details through a mixture of anecdote and reportage Kowalczyk’s relationship to his hometown of Lorain, Ohio, and is an excerpt from a longer work that I would very much like to see in its completion.

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Brittle Star #27

In Magazine on August 4, 2011 at 11:05 am

-Reviewed by Ian Chung-

For a literary magazine that has been around for more than 10 years, Brittle Star’s online presence still feels curiously disorganised, despite the official website having been revamped in March 2010. A quick check with Google reveals that Issue 28 is already out and the magazine is reading for Issue 29, but on the magazine’s official website, clicking on a picture headed ‘Latest issue’ leads to a separate WordPress blog entry about Issue 27 (bizarrely, the actual URL ends in ‘/issue-24/’). Neither the blog nor the magazine’s Facebook and Twitter accounts have been updated since January 2011. If this were my favourite literary magazine, I would regard the effort required for keeping up-to-date with what it was doing as bordering on excessively complicated.

That said, it would be a shame if potential readers/subscribers missed out on Brittle Star because of this. For as Issue 27 proves, there is commendable work to be found in this slim magazine. The official website notes that Brittle Star ‘has earned a reputation for providing a platform for writers at the beginning of their careers, many of whom have seen their work in print for the first time’. In this issue, one such writer is Nick Boyes, whose poem ‘To a Slug’ strikes a balance between applying a child-like imagination to nature’s creatures (‘The ant is a Victorian strongman’) and deploying a more adult awareness (‘the hiding spider / is a cold war secret agent’, ‘you slug, you are a fat friendless child / who doesn’t know why’).

This knowingness also manifests itself in poems like Terry Jones’s ‘Birdsong’ and Michael Bartholomew-Biggs’s ‘A Beginner’s Guide to Fructiculture’. In ‘Birdsong’, ‘Their call-and-repeat-and-warn tapestries’ are immediately reinterpreted in the next line as ‘Sung territories of threat and feathered lust’. The sonic echoes in word pairs ‘tapestries’/‘territories’ and ‘threat’/‘feathered’ (with ‘repeat’ creating a visual triple) subtly reinforce the transformation of meaning. Although the poem closes with the apparently hopeful ‘Somewhere Cuckoo muscles into light’, in opposition to the evocative phrasing of ‘a dark rain of birdsong’, one wonders if a more ambivalent reading is not called for. The previous line (‘Rook guards his crown of thorns’) contains a Biblical allusion to the Crucifixion, which in turn points back to the rook’s folkloric association with death. Furthermore, many cuckoo species are brood parasites, laying their eggs in other birds’ nests, so the element of deceit further undercuts the attempt to read the ending as hopeful.

With ‘A Beginner’s Guide to Fructiculture’, Bartholomew-Biggs relocates the fruit of the Holy Spirit from Galatians 5 to a literal garden. The language of cultivation admirably sustains the conceit with startling ease, allowing the poet to play with both levels of meaning throughout the poem. While the final injunction concerning ‘Self-control’ is to ‘Prune away / extravagant growth’, this is surely not an issue for this poem. While the poem is not divided into stanzas, each attribute is economically dealt with in what almost feel like three-line aphorisms. Personal favourites follow:

Low-bush Kindnesses

are easy to pick. They bruise

with careless handling.

Small unassuming

Blossoms mark true Goodness from

Self-righteous hybrids.

Brittle Star also features short articles and literary fiction, and in this issue, Brittle Star intern Saskia Katarina Hidas’s article on the Norwegian poet Gunvor Hofmo is particularly interesting, drawing attention to a European post-WW2 poet who has been compared to Paul Celan and Emily Dickinson. However, in comparison to the featured poetry, the fiction largely feels like it falls short. Luke Thompson’s ‘Quick small steps’ is too chatty without seeming to go anywhere in the end. As for Michael Ranes’s ‘Jani and the boy’, it should just manage to avoid giving offense despite its unsubtle treatment of racial themes, seeing as there is always the excuse that the entire story is ultimately mediated through a biracial narrator. Even if that revelation feels more gratuitous than illuminating.

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‘The Tradesman’s Entrance’ by Cameron Vale

In Novella on July 12, 2011 at 4:00 pm

-Reviewed by Ian Chung-

The Tradesman's Entrance by Cameron Vale, published by Vagabondage Press

If humour writing were crossed with erotica, one imagines the result would read something like Cameron Vale’s The Tradesman’s Entrance, a novelette from independent publisher Vagabondage Press. The ‘About Us’ page at the publisher’s website states that they ‘dislike the tendency in mainstream publishing to categorize and pigeonhole authors and their work into literary ghettos’, going on to declare ‘a commitment to providing an alternative’. Indeed, with its frank (but not entirely gratuitous) descriptions of gay sex, it is hard to imagine a work like Vale’s being put out by any of the mainstream publishers today, even if the sex is really secondary to what the publisher calls a ‘laugh-out-loud gay romantic comedy and treatise on class dynamics’.

For on one level, The Tradesman’s Entrance really is a straightforward story about fantasy coming to life. Protagonist Stephen Patterson writes romance novels for a living under the pseudonym Patience DeVere, but as the reader subsequently discovers, he also happens to be a virgin. As if just to pile trope upon trope, Vale introduces Dave the plumber (hence the title’s sexual pun) two pages into the first half of the novelette, Act I – Unexpected: Stage Left. Dave conveniently happens to be ‘a tall, tanned Adonis…sprung straight from the pages of one of [Stephen’s] over-wrought novels — dark, shoulder-skimming hair glinting copper in the sunlight, tastily trim and muscular body squeezed, but not entirely contained, by a low-slung pair of blue jeans and a tight, white workman’s vest’.

What follows is plenty of bantering between the two men over cups of tea and biscuits, which primarily serves to build up sexual tension that gets consummated in the second half of the novelette, unsubtly headed, Act II: The Cherry-Popping of Patience de Vere. Admittedly though, it is entertaining, watching Dave steadily break through Stephen’s uptight defences (psychological and physical alike), and ultimately, bed him in graphic fashion. As far as repartee goes, Vale’s writing is slick and solid enough to carry the fantasy forward, seeing it through even to its perfect ending that has been telegraphed pages before it actually takes place.

Yet what saves The Tradesman’s Entrance from being simply a casual romp is precisely how self-aware the storytelling is. From the sprinkling of deliberately bad writing (courtesy of Stephen’s abortive attempts at his new Clarissa Hart romance novel) to the grotesque physical perfection of plumber Dave, it is hard to escape the feeling that while Vale is unabashedly deploying the tropes of the erotica genre at full force, she is also implicitly skewering them because of how over the top their cumulative effect is. Personally speaking, there is also something aesthetically satisfying about the circularity of the narrative, all that sexual comedy being bookended by scenes of Stephen writing at his desktop. (I would definitely read a novel called The Biscuit Tin Philosopher.) The biographical note at the very end tosses out one last titbit, revealing that ‘Cameron Vale’ is itself a pen name. Calling The Tradesman’s Entrance metafictional would be a stretch, of course. It is, however, undoubtedly a good-natured blending of two writing genres that are not the most obvious of bedfellows.

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‘The Day of Small Things’ (Valley Press)

In anthology on July 5, 2011 at 1:02 pm

-Reviewed by Ian Chung-

The Day of Small Things is the second charity publication put out by Valley Press, a publishing house based in Scarborough, North Yorkshire. It features articles, photographs and creative writing by supporters of the Bridlington Romanian Project, which is aimed at helping those living in a Romanian shanty town named Odoreu. The impetus for the project came from Bridlington resident Val Taylor, who first encountered the plight of ordinary Romanians more than 10 years ago, when she was visiting Romanian orphanages as a volunteer with the Women’s Voluntary Service. However, the catalyst for her to act occurred nearer to the present day (as recounted in the book’s forward), when she received a call inviting her to revisit the country. Funded fully by donations, The Day of Small Things is but one expression of Taylor’s continuing efforts to improve the lives of the Romanians in Odoreu, which have thus far included building wells to supply them with clean water and ferrying gift boxes from the UK to Romania.

On the back cover of the book, it reads: ‘It is hoped the book will raise awareness and generate funds to continue offering the hands of friendship and faith which have achieved so much so far.’ That phrase ‘friendship and faith’ is instructive. As the project is based out of Christ Church, Bridlington, there is a very strongly Christian element in the accounts describing the work that has been done, as well as in the creative writing that is interspersed throughout them and collected in a separate section in the second half of the book. Nonetheless, the aim of the book is assuredly not so much to proselytise as to highlight the work that has been, is being, and still remains to be done. In this respect, the book is unquestionably successful.

In a brief introduction to the creative writing section, Valley Press author Deirdre McGarry explains that most of it was the fruit of a workshop that she ran at Christ Church. It consists mainly of rhyming verse and haiku, accompanied by several short prose pieces. The poems are by and large disarmingly touching, almost like nursery rhymes, except rather than returning the reader to the incantatory simplicity of those familiar childhood nursery rhymes, what one gets instead are poems that poignantly narrate the stories of the Romanians in Odoreu and those from Bridlington who have tried to do whatever they can to help. What also makes the creative writing pieces interesting is how they have been inspired by photographs, usually printed alongside the pieces, thus becoming a demonstration of ordinary people reacting to the extraordinary circumstances depicted in the photographs.

On the Valley Press webpage for this book, it states that ‘every penny made from sales of the book goes towards providing more of the aid and friendship which have achieved so much already, and will continue for many years to come’. Reading The Day of Small Things, there is a pervading sense that while much has been accomplished so far for Odoreu, even more remains to be done, and more importantly, that the people of Bridlington possess the will to make this happen. This slim volume is a step in that direction, and deserves to be supported. Purchasing it may be a small act, but as the book repeatedly emphasises, even small acts are not to be despised.

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Saboteur Awards – The Results

In Saboteur Awards on June 16, 2011 at 5:40 pm

Saboteur Awards

The Saboteur Awards are a new award celebrating literary magazines. Over the last few weeks, a team of volunteer judges have been poring over the shortlist, posting to each other copies of the print magazines, getting angry at the mail and dealing with technical hitches. Whilst the top three became clear early in the discussion process, judges were impressed with many of the other shortlisted magazines. Positives could be found even in the magazines that were described as ‘not being my cup of tea’ (can you tell that the majority of judges were British?) In light of this, we would be happy to provide any of the magazines shortlisted with feedback, should they be interested in the particulars (get in touch at editor@sabotagereviews.com).

The magazines that most impressed us were those that had a unity of purpose, in other words a strong, cohesive editorial vision. Their design matched and enhanced their content. We feel that our top three deserve recognition for the contributions they’ve made to the literary world. They are exciting, innovative, fresh, and stretched the boundaries of what we thought literary magazines could achieve.

1st Place: Polarity

Judges were impressed by Polarity’s ambition and praised the range of formal innovations within its pages. They commended its strong editorial and aesthetic vision and deemed the magazine as ‘not just displaying art, but being a piece of art itself, without the form taking away from the content’. The theme of ‘Tax vs Death’ was deemed broad enough to allow inspired approaches, whilst still being a cohesive and echoing thread. The integration of the visual with the textual was seen as a particular success. Finally, as one judge said: ‘Who would have thought that surrealism could feel so…welcoming? […]  I could pay no higher compliment to the magazine than to say it has fostered in me a newfound appreciation for surrealism in art/literature.’

2nd Place: >kill author

Judges were all agreed that this was an outstanding magazine that successfully made use of the internet. Whilst conceptual and experimental, the content was still deemed accessible. Judges admired the integration of poetry with prose (and resulting cross pollinations). The slick, minimalist website received high praise; one judge said it was ‘like Jil Sander in website form’. As one judge said: ‘It was one of those things that made me glad that I’m alive now – in the times of the internet, anonymity and internationalist art. It really grasps the spirit of our time for me.’

3rd Place: La Petite Zine

La Petite Zine was deemed a touchstone for experimental poetry in bite-size forms. The content was found to be of high quality with one judge commenting on the ‘brilliant variety of truly potent poems’. The website was admired for being minimalist, clean, functional, yet iconic. In particular, judges appreciated the taglines that led into each poem. La Petite Zine, again, has clearly embraced the internet as a medium, and its multi-platform presence was praised.

Highly Commended for its use of web-integration: Moon Milk Review

A running interest during discussions was whether the magazines fully made use of their chosen medium’s potential. In particular we paid attention to online magazines that attempted to go beyond what a print magazine could achieve. For instance, judges appreciated the integration of recordings/video in Stone Telling (as well as in Goblin Fruit) as an example of added value and accessibility.

However, the magazine that most impressed us in terms of web integration was Moon Milk Review. The magazine was praised for its abundant use of links, giving the impression that it was a fruitful launching pad. As one judge said:

‘that’s what beautiful (and dangerous) about the web – everything links up together and there’s a vast sea of information out there. Most other zines we’ve looked at feel much more insular by comparison, [...]linking to other places is something you can’t do in print and as such is very much an advantage of the online form. Moon Milk Review gives us an article you can dig around if you like, or can skim over if you don’t like it.’

The use of YouTube was also appreciated, whilst the Prosetry section was praised for taking advantage of the online platform and reinventing communication between the visual and the textual.

The judges were Anna Bogdanova, Ian Chung, Caroline Crew, Claire Trévien and Richard T. Watson

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