Reviews of the Ephemeral

Posts Tagged ‘Nine Arches Press’

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‘All the Rooms of Uncle’s Head’ by Tony Williams

In Pamphlets on March 14, 2012 at 10:30 am

-Reviewed by Charles Whalley-

Nine Arches Press have a well-earned reputation for high production values, and so it is not surprising to see such a visually arresting and distinctive publication as All the Rooms of Uncle’s Head coming from Rugby. With it, Tony Williams has produced a confident and ambitious collection of poems and a strong statement on behalf of the art form.

This bold pamphlet incorporates elements of conceptual and concrete poetry. Purportedly, each poem reproduces a painted tile from one of Hanz Prinzhorn’s mentally ill patients. (Other reviews of the pamphlet have focused on this ‘hoax’, or have even accepted it). The pages mimic facsimiles of these tiles, including cracks (suggesting the etymology of ‘crazy’) and missing fragments. Each poem is surrounded by a rotating border of text and appended by sidenotes, disturbing the experience of linear reading from page-to-page, and encouraging taking each page as a self-contained artefact. Altogether, this slows and alters the reading experience. W.N. Herbert, in Poetry Review, writes that Williams is engaged in ‘repositioning the reader’s experience as something balanced between text and image, or between text and concept’. I also suspect that the excessive marginalia in All the Rooms of Uncle’s Head, with its horror vacui, are intended to suggest the creative process: how to redraft is to write on top of old writing, and how it can be hard to know when to stop. As its title suggests, the pamphlet’s poems, as a series of boxed squares, are like the rooms of the unnamed speaker’s Uncle’s head, just as the head becomes the asylum when ‘[d]oves strut on the finials of Uncle’s crown’ (‘Uncle Imagines’) and his eyes, like windows, let out their light ‘on the empty lawn’ at dusk (‘Garret Brain’). The poem as a space to contain the mad is the central idea behind the sequence, as All the Rooms of Uncle’s Head explores the relationship between containment and freedom, and the implicit comparison between madness and poetry.

Many of the aims of poetry, or even of fiction, are conditions for speech which, in any other social context, would be signs of madness. Metaphor is close to hallucination, and Williams’ speaker is, accordingly, haunted by this further edge of metaphor; for instance, in ‘Enroute Nowhere’:

AGAINST A WINTER SKY the thin
Fingers of a tree are shivering,
Dotted here and there with leaves
That have not understood their death–
Perverse as fingers that grow hands
To wave goodbye to all their friends.

Here thin branches are likened to fingers, but this metaphor doesn’t yield to reality, to the fact that fingers grow on hands, not vice versa. It persists alongside the second metaphor, that a leaf is like a waving hand, to combine and create something altogether more striking and ‘perverse’. The madman’s perception of the world resembles the poet’s derangement of the senses, and refusal or inability to privilege one reality over another. As the example demonstrates, it makes for some powerful images, in part because it feels somehow profoundly unsettling. Jon Stone perceptively notes that one of the themes of the pamphlet is ‘the tension between creativity and the strict order of a methodology or regulated structure (social, spatial, psychological)’. The Professor, typically, represents restriction via the conformity required of ‘curing’ the mad, which precludes poetry; as the Professor, whilst eating a bird, says in ‘Ox Looking Behind Him’: ‘Your dreaming never comes to any good!’ Poems, like asylums, provide an acceptable social space in which language needn’t ‘make sense’, but this space is also restrictive, as poems are, for instance, economically useless.

The paradoxical freedom borne out of containment is expressed in the theme of flight, the (proto-)symbol for freedom and for poetry/creativity. Williams refreshes the trope of the prisoner’s dreams of Daedalus-like escape by rotating through different grotesque variants, which constitute the main subject of the speaker’s thoughts: a balloon made of ‘[h]uman hides […] stretched on a bird-bone frame’ (‘Heliotrope’); a wounded Gregor Samsa-type winged beetle; an archaeopteryx; a great auk eaten by the Professor; and a swan:

[…] FLY,
White lung, illiterate bagpipe, king of the ponds,
Look down on men’s divisions

There is a similar freedom granted to Williams, who is restricted and freed by writing in the persona of a madman, as a madman’s speech, since it has departed from the necessities of ‘making sense’, signifies for the most part by tone. Whilst there are elements of a narrative thread which Williams allows to be glimpsed from time to time – real or imagined characters, the spectre of the Great War – we are generally caught in the loops of irrational thought. Williams is free to range as wildly as he wishes in the knowledge that his lines are effective not for their explicit meaning but for their tone, for the sound they make as they pass, which is electric for such a talented writer. The danger, however, is that we become so estranged from the speaker’s mode of thought that we are unable to have any sympathy. It does not take long for madness to become clowning. But the sequence masters this too and, in ‘King of the Wood’, it ends powerfully:

[…]Worth the tiredness and tears

TO STAND SOAKED among the hawthorns and look
East across a mile of withered beans,
Fuel for next year’s crop on the rolling slope,
And see the fine rain greying out their black,
Coming towards us as the sky lightens,
Coming towards us at the end of another trance,
Coming towards me I won’t let it stop.

To produce a moment of quiet in a pamphlet which is so fantastically noisy shows that Williams has a great command over his craft. This is a clever collection of poems, and an insistent reminder, as Sean O’Brien has remarked of Williams, that ‘this is an exciting time for poetry’.

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Two Nine Arches Press Pamphlets by Deborah Tyler-Bennett and Angela France

In Pamphlets on September 28, 2011 at 9:24 pm

 -Reviewed by Afric McGlinchey-

Mytton…Dyer…Sweet Billy Gibson by Deborah Tyler-Bennett focuses on character portraits of three eccentrics from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century, one of whom was Tyler-Bennett’s great-grandfather.

Tyler-Bennett is clearly attracted to larger-than-life personalities, and her poems attempt to capture the essence of these colourful characters, largely through anecdotal narratives. Her use of period language perfectly captures the era, and what I find most compelling is her use of particularly Anglo-Saxon (as opposed to occasional Latin) words: ‘wibbling’; ‘bawd’; ‘smudgery’; ‘smeary’; ‘harlotry’; ‘gawp’; ‘crofties’; – you get the picture. Overall, this creates a strange otherworldliness, due also in part to the cryptic lines and the colourful use of archaic colloquialisms: ‘penny-plains’; ‘hooch’; ‘glegs’.

Another intriguing element to her work is a resistance to using pronouns except where absolutely necessary. Instead, her lines are terse, tight, shorthand, almost as though they are notes for a longer piece:

‘No more ‘Mytton Rides a Bear’,

‘To Hounds’, ‘On Fire’

(mad cure for hiccups),

frames fit only for the byre.’   (Death of the Popular English Print)

Yet Tyler-Bennett does evoke the mood and atmosphere of the day. She often uses vernacular dialogue: ‘Thought ’e said ’e were cousin Norman, / ’e got me messages’. In the wittily titled ‘Horse and Himself’, she captures a scene where the squire turns up at a farmhouse looking for a bed for the night – for himself and his horse.

‘Him, shivered in thinned coats,

impersonating jobbing labourer.

Horse? They’d harbour doubts

but let both in. ‘Wits gone

yon nag comes too!’

Beast and Master blocking fire’s

breath, insane to-do!’

Mytton’s behaviour breaks all the bounds of social etiquette, and he casts off ‘shitten, spoiled’ clothes to hunt naked. Even with animals: ‘when dog-snapped/Mytton seldom hesitates to nip the bastards.’ In ‘Squire Onomatopoeia’, she portrays him in an ‘unconvincing stilled’ moment, ‘clearly/better at mid-gallop, spill, /or thudding lea, this full-tilt chap.’

Her poems consider calling him up during a séance, how his ghost would behave in a different century, how ‘all-in-all’ he’d lived a ‘snarling, snuffing, / yelping life.’

One of her motifs is bees. Telling the Bees refers to the necessity of informing the bees of a death in the family: ‘telling the bees / how it was, how it always is’;  and fingers cupped around a bowl are ‘brawny as bee-bread’. In ‘At the Mortal Man Inn’, the snug is ‘slotted tight as bee hole’. In ‘Dale Fiddler, Downbanks’, ‘Ice bees gather’;  in ‘From Frankenstein’, Mytton’s horse is ‘bee-bothered.’ In ‘Back Lane Ballad Singer’, the musicians ply ‘notes weaving / room-hives, smoking out the drones.’

While the abruptness of these poems can appear too terse or coded on the page, read them aloud and they sing with music. Imagery is often an unexpected delight, and it’s fun discovering echoes in the different poems. In one, the dead have faces ‘closed for business’, whereas Melvin the toy monkey, in another poem, has a ‘worn face, perpetually sunny’, and in Bar One, the drink-sodden Mytton has a ‘red-veined, still comely face.’

Tyler-Bennett’s attention to detail makes these more than surface portraits – she has really envisaged their lives. In Shine: ‘Billy stroked uncombed hair.’ In ‘Telling the Bees for Jimmy Dyer’, the ghost of the ballad singer plays a midnight concert:

‘Only drunken stragglers to hear…

Cabbies waiting on last night’s fare

think strings daggy hill-blown winds.

Passing strays rub though his legs’

Superstitions abound, with all the charm of bygone times:

‘           Cover mirrors when a wake begins;

keep the Skep informed and happy;

Don’t forget to greet the Magpie,

ask after his wife; don’t bring hawthorn in;

or annoy the Hobthrush;

and don’t, and don’t, and don’t…’

In these poems, Deborah Tyler-Bennett chooses to remember the almost forgotten. This includes Billy Gibson’s son, who was ‘dead within scant days of being born’ – now a ‘windfall face safe within a star.’ Here is a voice that is mindful, and careful to avoid sentimentality, while evoking in the reader a genuine affection for her characters. A natural historian, and one who respects the creative, the lived life, the curious and the wayward, her poems brings to mind Chaucer’s portraits or Vivian Stanshall’s Sir Henry at Rawlinson’s End, another quintessential eccentric, as was Vivian himself. Tyler-Bennett’s work is a refreshing change from today’s usual fare, a tribute to eccentricity and a reminder that life would be vastly duller without such characters and their follies.

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The title, Lessons in Mallemaroking by Angela France, sent me to Google, as ‘mallemaroking’ is a new word for me. The definition, according to the Chambers dictionary, is ‘the carousing of drunken seamen on icebound Greenland whaling ships,’ a word as arresting in its specificity as the collection is.

The opening poem, ‘First Person’, is a kind of  manifesto, giving us an indication of what to expect in this chapbook. Interestingly laid out in four sections, the last stanza is as follows:

‘I as I

don’t cage my own stories

I have woven them

into wattle walls entwined

with tangled braids of others’ myths

threaded with magpie pebbles

I speak in my own voice

through gaps left in the weave’

This is something all natural poets, writers and creative artists do – connect their threads to the universal story.

In spite of the first person voice of this poem, most of the poems here, as with Deborah Tyler-Bennett’s, avoid the personal, focusing instead on random individuals in an unsettled landscape.

There is a strong elemental pulse through these poems. ‘Mallemaroking’ and ‘Littoral’ focus on our connection with the sea-world: its salt, ice, risk to life. ‘Mallemaroking’ is stark and simple, the words mainly mono-syllabic: sing, salt, crack, groan, ice, brace, moans, creaks, grip, tide, pitch, roll, screech, fear, throat – the men carouse in ice-bound waters, to blur ‘the fear of being still.’ The poet invites us to empathise, by including us in their fear: ‘as they shift and screech, /drown the shriek in your throat’. There is a lot of music in these poems, the soundscape of this one evoking the ship creaking through ice.

Apprehensiveness is what drives many of these poems – uncertainties, absences, fear of the repercussions of our lack of husbandry. We have not taken care of our earth, and now are faced with the consequences. In ‘A Letter Home’, ‘The well is full of dead rabbits, Mother.’ The animals begin to disappear: in ‘Bad Tidings’, ‘Nights were empty of the vixen’s / yip and screech’.

In other poems, a lack of awareness is noted: ‘People stop looking, drivers / keep eyes ahead, windows /on trains and buses blinded by newspapers, coats, bags.’ Even horses ‘stay in line…don’t whicker or whinny’ at changing weather.

The elements are present but strange: in ‘Dry Dock’: ‘wind/lashes her scarlet-tipped toes with grit’. Even in the urban landscape of ‘Voyager’, ‘skinny trees’ could be found ‘sprouting through cracked concrete.’ Its absence is noted: ‘a rock has been moved/from my path; its shape marked/by the flat of worm-pocked soil,/edges of clustered moss.’

In ‘Hide and Seek Champ found Dead in Cupboard’, a boy who has perfected the art of hiding, ‘waits for someone who’ll seek’.  As an adult, he ‘hides from taxes and utility bills, paternity suits/and parking tickets.’

Like Deborah Tyler-Bennett, France is attracted to the eccentric and the strange. In ‘Voyager’, a man ‘collects paper from the pavement; stoops slowly for receipts, bus tickets, lottery slips’, from which he makes tiny boats. These he places in any crevices and cracks he finds on his way home. In ‘Matryoshka’, ‘below the morning’s clatter/of gym-kit loss, late homework/office-politic moans’ she crushes the ‘smile, the aproned belly’ of the wooden dolls.

There is the sense that our focus is on the wrong things, that we are missing the bigger picture: in ‘Salt’, a woman walks inexorably into a doom-laden future, as she and her friends ‘taste sherbet/and jangle bracelets.’ Yet: ‘I can see my years/laid out on the grey hillside,/and know my mouth will forget/the shape of my own name.’ In another poem, ‘Dry Dock’, a woman ‘with improbable breasts’ opens her fur coat for a photographer, while ‘clenched/calf muscles drive her feet down/onto stilettos’ and ‘her pink and white smile shivers’. Angela France creates disconcerting scenes and allows readers to come to their own conclusions.

While Deborah Tyler-Bennett looks back at a vanished world, Angela France warns of a future vanishing – the world as she portrays it is unsettled, on the verge of fracturing, and yet we are not paying attention, in spite of our awareness. Instead,

‘We watch the river, the barrier,

the water rising. We read tide-tables,

discuss depressions and surges

as if knowledge were sand-bags.’

Like Deborah Tyler-Bennett, Angela France has a command of her craft, and her language has a compelling force and lyricism. In these diverse ‘magpie pebbles’ of poems, there is a universal narrative, a sense of our place in the ‘weave’. And food for thought.

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‘Do Not Pass Go’ Crime Stories by Joel Lane

In Pamphlets, Short Stories on July 20, 2011 at 5:21 pm

-Reviewed by Richard T. Watson-

‘Do not pass go’ has been chosen as the title for Joel Lane’s short story pamphlet, the first in the new Hotwire imprint by Nine Arches Press. But that other Monopoly phrase, ‘Go to Jail’, would have been just as suitable; for these are works of crime fiction and throughout the pamphlet there is a sense of foreboding, a fear that someone’s going to get hurt and it’ll all end in tears.

Do Not Pass Go: Crime Stories by Joel Lane, published by Nine Arches Press and reviewed for Sabotage by Richard T. Watson

But each of Lane’s stories is also shot through with the blues and an accompanying sense of regret, of sadness. Sometimes this is explicit, like when blues band Nine Below Zero play a gig in ‘No More the Blues’ – a brief story that burns as slowly as good, soulful blues and gradually reveals more about its narrator before sidling offstage and subtly leaving him to his fate. The first story, ‘This Night Last Woman’, though much longer is similar in the way that music and regret go together.

“Memories don’t stay the same. That’s why people need music, to help them remember.”

‘This Night Last Woman’ gently ties memory with melody, before letting the association slide, never to return; it feels like Lane’s missing a trick there.

At other times, Lane’s writing is oblique as he fills in one or two details and leaves his reader to plump out the rest of the picture themselves. This is probably most telling in ‘The Black Dog’, a sweaty and morbid story that eventually reveals itself as a Police report documenting a sweaty, sticky death. As with all the narratorial voices in Do Not Pass Go, this one reports back on life/crime seemingly at one remove, as though the speaker is never quite in contact with the life going on around him. There’s a certain disconnect between story and teller, between life and human – and a sense that the one isn’t fulfilling the other.

My favourite example of Lane pitching small details comes in ‘Blue Mirror’ (the story’s name is taken from the – this time fictional – blues band at its centre). David, the band’s singer, slips past two men to whom he owes money and bursts out of a club onto the street…

“Outside, he turned on a loaded shoe and ran in the direction of Hurst Street”

The inclusion of that single word, ‘loaded’, is enough of a small detail to not only remind the reader of the weight David carries about him (literally if he gets arrested with drugs hidden in his shoe, but metaphorically as well), and also of the reason he is now running for his life. With that one word, Lane effortlessly captures the world of music stardom crumbling around David through his drug-fuelled behaviour, as well as pointing up that the drugs cost and David can’t pay the men who are chasing him.

The final story, ‘Rituals’, digs deepest of all into the effect of crime on the psyche – as a gang member deals with the consequences of interrupting a gay porn film before the money shot. That makes it sound more comedic than it is: any laughs found in Lane’s pamphlet are dark and grimy. ‘Rituals’ shows Lane at his most insightful, though, treading close to the edge of showing sympathy for the criminal while the title denounces the habits and face-saving that characterises a life of crime. Indeed, in this case, those rituals seem to be the beginnings of such lives – lives wasted to serve no real purpose but crime.

That sense of regret, of loss, plays all the way through Do Not Pass Go. The abiding impression is that of lives wasted away and ended. Really, though, these aren’t people whose lives have abruptly ended, whose journeys have been pulled up short; they are people who never really had the chance to pass Go.

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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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The Night of the Day by David Morley

In Pamphlets on March 6, 2011 at 4:23 pm

-Reviewed by Rose Davies-

The Night of the Day by David Morley is a pamphlet of poems which traverse the bleak difficulties of a life lived on the edges of society. In the early section of the book the content of the work deals with the tragedy of domestic violence, witnessed through the eyes of a very young boy. Towards the later parts of the volume there are sombre representations of the experiences of those who work within a circus. These depictions are as stark as the tales of violence, which opened the volume. The latter poems also focus on issues to do with racial prejudice. The poems in the centre of the volume offer some relief as they focus tenderly on adventures with friends within the natural environment. However, The Night of the Day focuses largely on the darker aspects of the lives of men who live on the outskirts of society.

‘Three’ is one of the poems, which opens the pamphlet. It tells the tale of a boy who is only three years old and who is subjected to violence at the hands of his young brother and also his father. Within the space of five lines this poem ranges from an emotionless reportage of the crime committed ‘One of us has taken biscuits without permission…’ to ‘he slices our arteries open in the air between us. His house is his abattoir.’

In the centre of the pamphlet a piece called ‘Fresh Water’ is written about and dedicated to the memory of a friend whose life was cut short. The exuberance of depiction of the character of this man, contrasts sadly with the dedication which opens the piece, as the reader know from the outset that this being and his free spirited response to being lost in a field near Woodstock, is someone now gone and that his life was not particularly long. In this section of the pamphlet, tales of adventures with friends in the natural environment occur. The representations of nature are not romantic to any degree. The same code, which dictates the machinations within the other poems, is also present here. The natural world is depicted as having its rules but the world depicted here is one that is far less harsh then the one in which racial prejudice is rife. There is an identification here between the dangers of the natural world and those of performing within a circus, but there is a joy to be found in the pieces which are about nature, wherein making a mistake with a map bring the surprise and joys of finding horses in a field.

The later pieces in The Night of the Day focus on the stark realities of racial prejudice and the bleak employment prospects faced by workers within the circus. The later poems in this volume focus on the cold realities of the commercial and technical decisions made within the circus, which underlie the excitement of the spectacle that the audience perceives. The author depicts the cold commercial decisions made by those who run the circus. He shows us a world where workers are chosen for banal commercial reasons based upon the possession of physical beauty. In ‘Colin Clown’ the lines ‘(o) n every poster, let’s face it, my face. Not Mike’s face. Why is that? Is it because I am so handsome?’ The Night of the Day is an austere and sometimes bitter-sweet collection of poems finely wrought which tell of the experiences of men inhabiting the shadowy underside of the day.

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‘From the Boat’ by Myra Connell

In Pamphlets on October 26, 2010 at 11:15 am

-Reviewed by Richard T. Watson-

There’s something dreamlike about Myra Connell’s pamphlet, From the Boat, published by Nine Arches Press. Look at it, all grey and unassuming:


That’s not what makes it dreamlike (unless you have dreams that are grey and unassuming). There’s a little joke in the way the title is reflected, as though the letters were a boat on water… see what they did there? The cover is grey, slightly textured, and wholly appropriate for the contents of From the Boat.

What’s dreamlike about Connell’s pamphlet is actually that, by the end of From the Boat, the reader has flitted through a range of memories and thoughts but can’t quite piece them together coherently. It’s as though half the links have been lost during the night, leaving the reader to try stringing together a jumble of episodes.

Connell opens From the Boat with an image of a boat drifting, itself an important theme, and waiting for the dawn. It’s night time, with a person waiting, and while waiting there is some soul-searching to be done. She closes From the Boat by returning to that drifting boat, two days (and forty pages) later, by which time both she and her reader have some thoughts and half-remembered dreams to mull over – as the boat drifts into the night.

So everything between those two moments on the boat comes, er, from the soul-searching on the boat. It becomes easy to see Connell’s first-person speaker (who begins ‘waiting for the water’ and ends ‘adrift again’) as searching through her memories. She’s on a quest, traipsing through quiet moments of loss and re-treading old woodland walks (see ‘The Quarry’ or ‘Old Map’).

Connell’s poems describe a world in which something is missing, often it feels like that something has been taken. The lines are stripped back to their basics, no messing about, this is language close to its simplest. That’s not to say the poems are without a sudden power. For example, ‘Note’ throws a curveball when it springs upon the reader the following questions:

‘Are the children screaming more today?

Or is it that the wind

the door-swing wind

is carrying their screams?’

Children screaming in the distance (from school playgrounds, I assume, rather than anything sinister) is a sound you only usually notice when alone. Like those questions, it’s the sort of thing that creeps up and catches you off-guard. Several poems in From the Boat are good at doing that. The faintly illogical ‘Peninsula’ alarmingly draws attention to the reader’s exposed neck, making it seem unnervingly vulnerable.

Admittedly not as vulnerable as necks appear to be at other times in From the Boat: ‘The Beheading of St John the Baptist’ is an obvious example. It’s one of several Connell poems based on a piece of visual art to which she has added dramatic voice. In this case she’s interested in things hidden by the painting (by Puvis de Chavannes, since you ask), again searching for something and  ‘afraid of finding nothing’.

Unfortunately, finding nothing is a constant fear in From the Boat. Frequently, a poem is almost saying something, but slinking off and falling short before it manages to do so (see ‘Journey’ especially). The pamphlet’s blurb describes Connell’s work as ‘the opposite of heroic’, and that’s not wrong; the word they’re looking for is ‘bathos’.

That feeling of searching alone and of isolation that appeared in ‘Note’ crops up throughout From the Boat, especially in moments of people-watching like ‘Prayer’. Here the sounds of the city filter into a poem ostensibly about a woman and her salad, while barristas are ‘holding party court and flirting’. It may be at its strongest in ‘Dad’s Portrait’, where the portrait offers no company at all. Most importantly, this brief descriptive poem offers the biggest clue to the void at the centre of Connell’s poems: ‘he died cold blue’.

That statement comes as another startling twist to a poem, but sheds light on the minor strain of grief running through From the Boat. This opens up some meaning to the soul-searching in the night, as Connell’s ‘I’ comes to terms with her loss. Not that she’s any closer to closure by the end. In some ways, she seems to feel guilt herself; ‘How to treat someone who’s in shock’ throws out ‘She’s killed her father once again’ almost glibly, but the statement feels weightier than that.

Connell comes closest to articulating that sense of loss in ‘Earlswood Garden Centre Café’, a poem combining the isolation of earlier poems with the howling void occasioned by a parent’s death. It’s when she describes a ‘raw place in the gut’, the split ‘houses of a heart’ and being unable to ‘find South’ that she really nails it.

Mixing in with the loss and grief is a certain raw erotic charm to Connell’s From the Boat. Starting with early references to ‘our bodies skin to skin./ I loved a stranger in a sycamore wood’ she moves onto brutally visual descriptions of female forms – women who are fiercely provocative. Again, Connell is putting dramatic voice to visual art, in this case the unflattering drawings of Egon Schiele. Here’s one of the pictures Connell uses in ‘Egon Schiele (II): Squatting Woman With Boots (undated)’.

In this poem Connell’s writing is at its most vivid and edgy, with a playful yet confrontational sexuality. It’s a perfect companion to the expression Schiele’s drawing captures.

Schiele’s image is like Connell’s better poems – sharp, slightly painful and suddenly personal. But in general the front cover is a more suitable graphic representation of From the Boat – grey, bleak and downbeat.


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