Reviews of the Ephemeral

Posts Tagged ‘Simon Barraclough’

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‘The Debris Field’ by Simon Barraclough, Isobel Dixon and Chris McCabe

In Pamphlets, Play of Voices on May 1, 2013 at 1:24 pm

-Reviewed by David Clarke-

 thedebrisfieldlargecover

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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Beaconsfield Reading Series – Poetry and Wine 23/11/2011

In Performance Poetry on February 15, 2012 at 3:27 pm

-reviewed by James Webster-

@ Royal Standard of England

There’s something wonderfully quaint about Claire Trévien’s Beaconsfield based poetry night. Maybe it’s the gorgeous surroundings of the Royal Standard of England (oldest alehouse in England apparently) with its warren of low-ceilinged rooms. Maybe it’s the charmingly mixed audience, comprising all different ages and a mix of locals and visitors. Maybe it’s Claire’s glittering hosting. It’s a very relaxed, supportive and fun environment in which to enjoy some poetry.

Host – Claire Trévien

  • Claire began proceedings herself with her ‘Novella’. Apparently it usually goes down well (woof), and, with its nostalgic and joyful look at pretentious and bohemian youth and incredible turns of phrase, I could see why.
  • Next was a piece written using the ‘hipster poetry generator’ method: start with a place, a list of things, vague references to a person and cut the first and last stanzas. It was suitably pretentious and incomprehensible.
  • Finally she read a sort of sestina called ‘Love From’ that started with expressive poeticism and then seems to wear itself down to flat, but exposed, disappointment.

Features

  • Dan Holloway (curator of 8 Cuts, winner of Literary Death Match and whose books are available on Kindle) was a strong performer and very aware of his audience (and wearing particularly dashing braces).
  • ‘Adam’, the first of two poems on Old Compton Street, flowed with slightly destructive hedonism; Dan talks of ‘this absinthe in my blood’ and ‘haunt[ing] the shelves of Foyles’. It was moving and softly seductive.
  • The second ‘How to Make a Soho Quilt’ was at once both rich and actively stripping itself bare. It spat up pictures and images that formed a ‘patchwork skin’ made up of strange places with an urban-bohemian-grime feel to them.
  • ‘Holly’ was on an artist attempting to recover a lost week by spending 40 days locked away trying to get that mad again. It was filled with verdant language that used slick rhyme to race from one image to the next (almost too fast to follow) that earned a chorus of appreciative ‘mmmmmm’ noises.
  • ‘Petals’ was a piece on the Kurasawa film Dreams. It melded the romantic, personal and political in a harrowingly engaging portrayal.
  • Finally ‘Her Body’, on the way peoples’ lives are appropriated after they die, blended fond remembrance with the jolting and grievous loss of a person ‘made of pieces of pain that no longer hurt’. It was triggering and hauntingly beautiful.
  • Laila Sumpton, of the Keats House Poetry Group, was next. Her poetry was steeped in a family history spanning larger than life personalities and a fair amount of strife that went through Bosnia via Pakistan and Hull.
  • ‘Patterning’ was on the characters in a family’s history that almost blend into mythology. It was resonant, using imaginative, interlocking language, but there’s almost too much to take in.
  • ‘Pakistani Postal Collapse’ was a surreal take on a sugar shortage, amusingly describing ‘black market cafes in upmarket homes’.
  • ‘The Only Photo’ (if I can read my own handwriting) was a moving poem about the two objects that survived the war inBosnia. A rescued coffee grinder becomes a ‘device that would defeat everyone’ and you can feel a real sense of pride and resilience reflected in the image of a family gathered in front of the wreckage. It’s a piece that is planted in destruction and struggle, but becomes so joyous. Ace.
  • Jill Wallis, editor of Rhyme and Reason (a poetry collection-cum-diary), read a selection of poems from their last edition which all offered something different.
  • Her poems, while not always as rich or imaginative as other poets, are full of gut-wrenching emotional honesty that really resonated with the audience.
  • ‘Owl Pellets’ described the ‘horde of tiny bones wrapped in hide’ in eloquent and poignant language, almost digesting the idea of the lost loved one and her own feelings, just as the ‘Owl Pellets’ do.
  • Her poem about dying in hospital built a really strong connection with the audience, as she described clinging to your last night with a loved one.
  • ‘Dust to Dust’ expressed the inability to scatter the departed’s ashes. She used hurt, clipped sentences with the smooth assonance of breath, as at the end of the poem she says ‘deeply, deeply, I breathe you in’.
  • Her final ‘Walk by Moonlight’ was a clear expression of the difficulties of using ‘the grotesque props of immobility’. It invited the audience in, then surprised them with the otherworldly beauty of the moonlit walk.
  • Simon Barraclough has been published in the Financial Times and Guardian, and has three collections: Neptune Blue, Bonjour Tetris, and Los Alamos Mon Amour.
  •  ‘Los Alamos’ evocatively compared love to an atomic bomb test in an entertaining (if pretentious) extended metaphor of destruction and recreation.
  • ‘Saturn on Seventh’ started with some nicely expressed grumpiness, then takes a lovely turn into describing a ‘homeless astronomer’ who lets you ‘See Saturn for a dollar’ leading to a charming and fleeting transcendental moment.
  • Poems on hearts: ‘Starfish Heart’ was pleasantly whimsical; ‘Pizza Heart’ was expressive and alliterative; only ‘Celeriac Heart’ disappointed, as it seemed slightly pointless.
  • Poems on planets: ‘Earth’ was amusingly phrased, with nice interwoven imagery running through it as he described ‘God’s gobstopper’. While ‘Neptune’ was quietly and jocularly fond of the planet that’s ‘so blue/ you probably think that Jarman’s Blue/ is about you’. While ‘Sol’ made the danger of impending apocalypse seem so sweet.

The Open Mic

  • Anne‘s ‘Terminal Therapy’ cleverly summed up how airports seem to distil emotions, with some nice phrasing on the ‘second hand arrivals’.
  • ‘White Noise’, on the sound installations of Bill Fontana, highlighted the contrasts of the bustling city against sea noises, but the imagery was a little suffused and unfocused.
  • ‘Evolution in the City’ gave a well-realised portrait of their life, but both the rhyme scheme and the ‘I just want a man …’ message were a little simplistic.
  • Mary‘s ‘Release Me from This Hell’ about Milton returning to London was impressively resonant of Milton’s rich style, making me feel the heat and smoke of industrial London.
  • And her ‘Ultramarinus’ was a lovely delicate sounding poem, all crystals, gems and precious stones.
  • Ted Pike introduced himself with a confident preamble, his ‘Man of Other Peoples’ Words’ was a concisely clever picture of a committee clerk’s life.
  • While ‘West Whittering’ was a charming celebration of human insignificance compared to nature.
  • Phillip read a series of haiku that were in places beautiful, sweet and adventurous. He gave us some really engaging snapshots of a mixture of subjects; rainbows, capitalism, airports, tears and umbrellas.

Summary: a fun, welcoming and moving night, with plenty of different voices, in a warm and inviting venue. If you feel like venturing out to the sticks for some poetry, definitely check it out.

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‘The Art of Wiring’

In anthology on November 21, 2011 at 11:19 am

-Reviewed by Rosie Breese-

The Art of Wiring is published by Costa-prize-winning poet Christopher Reid’s imprint Ondt & Gracehoper. Inside, elegantly laid out, is the work of six poets, including Reid himself, whose work is as varied as it is hard-hitting. Life’s ‘wiring’ is exposed by each poet’s intense focus on the connections between the everyday and the surreal – but, as we will discover, in very different ways.

The most apt way to tackle a volume like this seems to be by way of a series of ‘mini-reviews’ covering each artist’s work. So, here goes:

SIMON BARRACLOUGH’s work toys with a sense of place – known and imaginary. The language is sharp; his images are fresh and to the point. ‘Tuning Out’ exemplifies both his wordplay and the sense of movement, the crackle of a far-off radio station mirroring the speaker’s drift in and out of consciousness:

“my thin line of wakefulness

bushes like a cat’s tail

slotting into the groove

of Greenwich and passes through

to the final day’s play in Kandy.”

Barraclough plays with distance and sharp focus, zooming in on details which are thrown into poignant relief against vast, shifting backdrops of time and place: “But we’ll always have Paris, / although our eye lines never matched”. There is the occasional sense that a poem is taking a while to ‘wind up’ to these big moments – but then, these long, panoramic opening shots are what contributes to the cinematic effect of his poems.

ISOBEL DIXON’s poems have an intense, exploratory feel, chipping away at an idea long enough for it to show its bones. ‘Upopa Epops’ is one such poem, aiming its intense gaze on a bird which, for all its smart “cinnamon-cum-chestnut raiment” is armed with an arsenal of weapons to ensure its survival, including the ability to aim streams of shit at predators. Dixon’s wordplay is joyful here, exposing these “sins” hidden in the sounds of the bird’s own name: “Oop-oop-oops indeed.”

But it is ‘Pinball Electra’ and ‘Grasshopper’ where her relentless attention to detail really comes into its own. With the weight of grief behind every word almost crushing, these two poems, with their unwavering focus on details – such as the apparent discovery of a grasshopper in the house of a dying man – are stand-out poems within the collection. I’m not going to spoil it for readers by going over them in detail, and besides, there are four more poets to get through. You’ll have to seek them out and read them for yourself.

LUKE HEELEY also likes to focus on the incidentals, switching from the interior to the exterior, exposing the ‘wiring’ that lies within. His seven poems focus on objects – a concrete slab, a phone box – that shift under the gaze of the poet from mere ‘things’ into emotional artefacts, for example here, in ‘To a Phone Box’: “The tone is warm as blood, my own. /Someone picks up. Who’s there? / It’s the boy crouched beneath the stairs..”

There are also characters such as ‘The Imperfectionist’ and ‘The Contrarian’ who question and disrupt the continuum of accepted ideas: “For his party trick he demonstrates / how much white paint it takes / to put a doubt in the mind of black”. However, it is in stand-out poem ‘The Decorator’ where the synthesis between interior and exterior, past and present, character and action, is most perfectly realised. The decorator, through his work, is disrupting time and space, dragging memory from objects: “..shakes out his sheet, snaps free / a cloud of dust, as if the cloth / has severed its ghost.”

CHRISTOPHER REID’s take on the wiring of objects seems to focus on their relationship with the humans who use – or are restricted by – them. An intriguing sequence, each, I’ve just noticed, beginning with the letter ‘C’, takes us from Ancient Greece to the modern day, with desire as the common thread, or ‘clew’, leading us from one poem to the next.

The selection is certainly varied – it begins with the voice of an academic cajoling us to accept a square of chocolate, leads us to the centre of the labyrinth and back again at the behest of a wilful ball of string, then presents us with a “fur coat and no knickers” cougar led around by his mistress on a leash, who, paradoxically, is led unwittingly into fame by the very animal she controls. These poems question our relationship with the objects with which we accessorise our lives and desires, with Reid’s characteristic coolness maintaining just enough distance for clarity.

‘Everything is Black and White’, according to LIANE STRAUSS’s second poem:

“The colour

of blood is cleaner and starker in black

and white, the colour of tears, of love..”.

Like others in her selection, this poem sequences hard, pixellated images until they blur, revealing and questioning life’s grey areas.

Strauss’s work is gutsy and eclectic; she moves between voices and personas, each one examining life’s wiring from a different viewpoint. There’s the nostalgic, almost archaic voice of ‘Coals in the Grate’, the sudden switch to love, architecture and a US dialect in ‘Gentrify My Love’, and the subtle cynicism of ‘We’re All Fine’. Strauss’s focus is wide and the variation, questioning and reiteration of images never lets up. It’s bold, expansive, and worth spending more time with.

Last but not least, ROISIN TIERNEY’s poetry communes with both art and language. ‘Gothic’, ‘In an Empty Alcove in the Prado’ and ‘The Panzemashorn’ reverberate with the products of artists’ fevered imaginations, the protagonists locked in conversation with these, or against their backdrop, as in this moment, where:

“..it was as if

all the characters of the paintings in the Prado

were crowded in that bar in Lavapiés”.

Although rich, there is a danger that these artistic references could lose weight for the reader who is unfamiliar with the works themselves.

That said, it was inside knowledge that led me to enjoy her poem ‘Learning the Language’ so much. As an English teacher myself, I can empathise with the speaker’s frustration at the difficulty that lies in describing and teaching a constantly moving, growing and changing language. The simplicity of Tierney’s  “O fuck it” in the face of the huge questions language presents is wittily satisfying, putting one in mind of Frost’s characterisation of poetry as “serious play”.

In summary, serious play is what this pamphlet does. There is a sense of weight throughout The Art of Wiring, from the classy, unpretentious layout to the scale and variety of themes tackled by the writers themselves. It hums with a heavy current, yet in each piece, language is alive and crackling with unexpected connections.

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‘Bonjour Tetris’ by Simon Barraclough

In Pamphlets on November 9, 2011 at 9:30 am

- Reviewed by Mark Burnhope-

 

This year’s National Poetry Day had the theme of ‘Games.’ So it feels apt that I should be reviewing Simon Barraclough’s 2010 pamphlet, Bonjour Tetris (and alas, slightly frustrating that this review’s too late to coincide with the day). It comes to us courtesy of Penned in the Margins, whose pamphlets aren’t just… pamphlets but, like the special edition of your favourite album, artefacts. This one comes in a sand-coloured, number-stamped box stylishly decorated with Tetris blocks. Open that, and the pamphlet itself is nestled, like luxury chocolate, inside a folded sheet of glossy sand-coloured paper. The book cover is a desktop PC-grey, with a darker grey stripe striking through it (this displays the title), and more Tetris blocks (in colour) tumbling down the bottom right-hand side.

A confession: emotional content is often a factor in my assessment of any poetry collection’s Overall Level of Win; and neither packaging nor title set me up to expect emotion (the title being a flippant tip-of-the-hat to ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture). And the poetry, in a sense, does ‘what it says on the tin’. But that’s not to talk the writing down: if I’m slightly disappointed to find a low level of emotion in the poems, it’s probably my fault for expecting it. So what else does poetry do? Well, for as long as it has been associated with emotion, it has also revelled in wit (delivering full satirical force in a single blow), cultural commentary and, above all, the love of its own verbal dexterity. Bonjour Tetris Wins, even if it does play its own combo of special moves.

Like Larkin, Barraclough never throws a complicated word into a conceit which doesn’t ask for it (he’s often at home with a plain, conversational style similar to God’s Gift to Women Don Paterson). Like Peter Didsbury, he’s able to manipulate rhythm and line (he can handle a long line), adjusting his grip on metre as he goes (even if that formal ability occasionally threatens to lighten the mood slightly too much; ‘A Villanelle for Jules et Jim’, in spite of its obvious music, just avoids the ‘disappointing ending’ tag by being the penultimate poem). And like Muldoon, he’s able to fuse disparate ideas and imagery seamlessly (even if his juxtapositions don’t get quite as mind-bendingly strange as the best in Muldoon’s Maggot).

All this works together in the first poem ‘Incorrigibly Plural’, which uses weather imagery (a long, nation-halting big freeze) to explore the nature of radio broadcasting, and the implications of rail privatisation. Weather is so often used to manipulate emotion that I found this use complex and original.

‘Examination at Doom’s Door’ is a fist-pump of a poem; they don’t get much more fun than this. I was reminded of The X Files’ Agent Scully reciting her autopsy findings into a Dictaphone. Weirdly, it also works as a videogamer’s creed, with its liturgical call-and-response repetitions:

 

‘Who owns this puny little gun? Doom.

Who owns these fragged-up body parts? Doom.

Who owns this chain-sawed demon spawn? Doom.

Who owns this lake of toxic waste? Doom.

Who is stronger than work? Doom.

Who is stronger than will? Doom.’

 

I won’t give away the punchline. It’s worth waiting for.

Few poetry collections can do everything a reader wants, and I would have liked a few more emotional moments in Bonjour Tetris. That’s not to say it never gets emotional: ‘Jurassic Coast’ begins ‘The house had grown too small for us and so / we spent that final summer in a tent’ and, through a series of transformations, becomes a beautiful meditation on memory and loss (although its blank verse put me at just one remove from its emotional content).

‘In Memoriam Tsutomu Yamaguchi (1916-2010)’ doesn’t entirely drop its slapstick wit (‘General Groves smacked balls around the court / to stop the thought recurring: will it work?’) but in the end is a fine tribute to a double survivor of Hiroshima and Nagasaki:

 

‘But Yamaguchi-san, the luckiest of luckless men,

sidestepped it all despite the ticket in his hand

that took him from Ground Zero to Ground Zero,

moving through the crowds of citizens

who gathered up their skins and draped their limbs

like silent senators in togas of themselves,

and swaddled in twelve years of bandages,

he lived two times to tell the tale.’

 

I’m glad that ‘Jurassic Coast’ and ‘In Memoriam…’ made it into Barraclough’s 2011 collection, Neptune Blue (Salt). A poem which also did is the last one here: ‘Being a Woman You Will.’ Another life-affirming piece, it praises the strength and resilience of an unnamed woman with touching observations (‘The over-the-state-headlines blank, thankfully, / You. You hinge upon the mirror at the elbow / In the Ladies’ Room.’), and ends in the line it started with: ‘Do anything you’ve a mind to.’

Any attempt to define what poetry is will reflect one’s own biases. This book might be akin to T.S. Eliot’s idea: ‘not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion… not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.’ Thank Nintendo, then, that Barraclough has personality and emotion enough to respond to so many other escapisms with poetry. Videogames, TV, film, radio and other media monsters are caught in his lens until fun shares the screen with intelligence, beauty, and a mischievous wit. And that, if you’re the right kind of reader, will be all the emotional content you’ll need.

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End of Year Round-Up: Luke Kennard

In End of year round-up on December 23, 2010 at 10:40 am

Like a drip-feed, I will be releasing the answers of authors to my three questions over the coming days. First up: Luke Kennard!

Luke Kennard is an award-winning British poet, playwright and academic. He is the author of three poetry collections The Solex Brothers, The Harbour Beyond the Movie (nominated for the Forward prize in 2007) and The Migraine Hotel, all published by Salt Publications. You can stalk him on twitter here.

Has 2010 brought to your attention any outstanding literary magazines (be they online or in print), if so, which?

This year has passed ludicrously quickly. I’m still catching up with records and books from 2009. I wrote something for the 2nd issue of a lovely art and lit. journal called How to Disappear which I think is out soon. Uni of Lancaster’s Cake poetry magazine is ace (but I think that was 2009. Seriously, I don’t know where this year’s gone). If you haven’t checked out (Liverpool-based design, art and literary agency) Mercy’s 12 Angry E-Zines project, you definitely should, their podcasts, too.

What event sticks out in your mind as the literary event of 2010 (it can be a personal accomplishment)?

Um… The first volume of Mark Twain’s autobiography being published, maybe. I was writing an article on it for The National, so I stayed up every night for a week reading it with a candle. In personal terms, co-judging the Foyle Young Poets prize with Jane Draycott was a real high-point – there are 15 incredibly good poems in this year’s anthology and I feel proud to have been involved. I also finally finished The Brothers Karamazov.

What was your favourite literary discovery of the year (it can be a single poem, a novel, a pamphlet, a press, …)?

Penned In The Margins have started producing these beautiful limited edition things, halfway between a pamphlet and a collection – signed, numbered, bespoke bonus content. It’s the kind of wonderful presentation that really suits poetry; print-on-demand aesthetics always depress the hell out of me. Particularly when it’s my own book. Also the work is excellent. Simon Barraclough’s Bonjour Tetris and Ross Sutherland’s Twelve Nudes are both stunning.


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Pocket Spellbook vs Coin Opera

In anthology on November 21, 2010 at 3:19 pm

-Reviewed by Richard T. Watson-

Dr Fulminare is an excommunicated alchemist who gathers together poems and drawings so that they can be printed by his minions at Sidekick Books. Kirsten Irving and Jon Stone take credit as editors (minions), but in the shadow of the domineering literary persona that is Dr Fulminare. As such, Dr Fulminare seems chiefly responsible for these two micro-anthologies: Pocket Spellbook and Coin Opera.

In one, he has persuaded poets and artists to contribute work on a theme of magic. In the other, he has trapped a group of poets in the near future and released them in return for poems inspired by computer games.

I’ve decided to place the micro-anthologies in a head-to-head fight. It’s like Street Fighter, but with added elements of The Legend of Zelda.

In the red corner…Pocket Spellbook…

As an alchemist interested in publishing, Dr Fulminare would naturally want to produce a spellbook. Like most fighters, Pocket Spellbook talks itself up, in this case as a collection of poems geared toward performing magic – spells and incantations, that sort of thing.

Instead of spells with practical outcomes, however, Pocket Spellbook contains poems and drawings related to magic – some more so than others – and that lack of following through may prove a weakness. For example, Rowyda Amin’s ‘Spell for Calling Out River Horses’ describes riding a river horse, rather than providing the spell used. On the opposite page, Alexandra Lazar’s drawing ‘Wave’ is obviously connected to the river horse, but also fails to land the punch and connect with the fight that Pocket Spellbook talks; it’s not the most fitting of the drawings (see instead Oliver Townsend’s work for eerie, magical illustrations).

That slight disappointment aside, Dr Fulminare’s Pocket Spellbook successfully exposes the magic to be found in everyday life, and within each of us non-magical folk. Seemingly mundane events are invested with a magical quality, like the rolling of dice in Ian McLachlan’s ‘Unpredictability Charm’. Declan Ryan’s ‘Spell for Forgetting’ is exquisite and clever, undermining its stated purpose at every opportunity, and reminding readers of how life gets in the way of any easy/magical solutions. Its description of a break-up and the attempt to move on is heartbreaking, bittersweet and beautiful:

‘Do not note the duck-egg blue

of her iris as she turns from you, tame Basilisk,

the strobes under her skin which blink ridicule

at stars.’

The narrator notes the eyes even as he tells himself not to, recognising the power they once had over him: this is spell, poem and acute observation of life. Coin Opera struggles to match it.

Luke Kennard’s heavyweight ‘Antidote to Curses #1-17, being a reinstigation of free will following its suspension’ also goes a long way to highlighting the everyday magic that people are capable of. The poem starts as a long and complicated spell, but the magic comes in the final moment of self-assertion, not in any of the pointless tasks assigned along the way. Kennard’s writing (with its dry humour and footnotes) is not unlike Susannah Clarke’s novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which also applies a quaint, almost Victorian, tone to the modern day and manages to make magic credible. Such moments allow the Pocket Spellbook to punch above its weight in this contest.

In the blue corner…Coin Opera…

In style, Coin Opera follows the computer game format much more effectively than Pocket Spellbook follows the spellbook format, and has the upper hand there. The reader is welcomed with ‘Player 1 Get Ready!’ and is enticed further with other arcade game-style captions at suitable points.

Coin Opera‘s special moves are also better than Pocket Spellbook‘s: the graphic layout of some of the poems ties them in with the computer format and takes them up to a whole new level (no pun intended). Check out Julia Bird’s ‘For my Brother, Relentlessly’ for a poetic/graphic representation of arcade classic Space Invaders and a title that fully justifies a poetic use of the comma.

The reliance on computer games for content is perhaps the greatest weakness Coin Opera suffers. Some of the poems require more than a passing knowledge of gaming to be really grasped. Ross Sutherland’s Street Fighter poems make it fairly easy by quoting the game’s manual, but poems like ‘An Epic’s Chromatic Scale’ by Amy Key – though it strikes a pleasant aural tone – drop a clutch of obscure references. There’s also a distinct bias toward games of the 1980s, which the younger gamer/reader might not recognise. This renders Coin Opera light on its feet and vulnerable to a knock-out blow.

Coin Opera‘s sucker punch is packed by Sutherland’s ‘E. Honda’, based around the Street Fighter Sumo wrestler of the same name. It’s a short poem that captures the essence of the moment it describes: the ‘peace before battle’, the calm before the storm, and creates a sentimental poignancy with an internal haiku before leaving the reader with the image of the fighter heading out alone to face his opponent and the crowds.

Let’s get ready to rumble!

Although both of Dr Fulminare’s micro-anthologies are nimble little things with cute footwork, Coin Opera is a fairly hit-and-miss affair – a good technical fighter, but lacking the weight and consistency of Pocket Spellbook. On a good day, Coin Opera could take Pocket Spellbook (maybe with a special move or two), but seven times out of ten the champion’s belt is going to go to Pocket Spellbook.

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Polarity Magazine #1 ‘Death vs. Taxes’

In Magazine on June 29, 2010 at 4:29 pm

Polarity is a rare audacity in the midst of budget cuts: a beautifully produced glossy-papered magazine. At a time when magazines tend to keep themselves to the less pricey realm of internet, this is a bold move funded by editor George Ttouli and his parents. The magazine aims to fill a gap in the market by promoting new surrealist works in themed issues organized around two falsely polarized concepts, hence the name.

This first issue, ‘Death vs Taxes’ comes with a bonus supplement ‘A System of Taxation Upon the Internal Mind’ – a playful booklet giving tax codes for different types of thoughts and leaving the ‘punishment’ box blank for your own suggestions. These thoughts include Batailling: Thinking of the physiognomy of officials (prelates, magistrates, admirals); Squelching: Thinking about eating fruit; and  Bunnyboiling: Thinking about whether the bath water will be too  hot for your partner. It is beautifully illustrated by the multi-talented Peter Blegvad.

At nearly one hundred pages including prose, poetry, art and interviews, Polarity Magazine is a substantial work, so I will content myself with pointing out what were, to me, its highlights, and leave you to discover the rest by purchasing a copy here.

In the poet’s camp, I was particularly taken with Kirsten Irving’s ‘Death 500’ that ran in parallel the killing of human targets and steampunk self-dismemberment. Irving’s precise, skeletal descriptions and her deliberately detached tone only make the subject matter more grisly:

‘Objectives merge after a while.

It’s just a DNA signature

And a satnav dot each time,

A clean strike

And automode for the cleanup’

Martin Green is a hoarder poet, a non-amphibious little mermaid who takes junk and makes it unusual. When Green read at the launch of the magazine (reviewed here) he showed us the cut credit cards he collects. In this issue he provides both poetry and the  artwork to accompany it: reconstructed baseball caps that mimic faces. Particularly striking is the image on p. 46 of the skeleton of a cap, with the stitching preserved but the rest of the fabric hollowed out.

One of his poems, called ‘Found’, which he read at the launch, is a list of these objects. There is something solitary and melancholic about these half broken finds that half-attempt to go beyond their original form. The poem ends with a reference to the accompanying cap:

‘Baseball cap folded in on its self,

Sleeping like a grey cygnet’

Neither quite prose or poem, Siavash Pournouri’s deadpan contributions were also delightful, in particular his study of the etymology and definition of death. I particularly liked his word-play surrounding the appropriate use of punctuation. Where do you stand on the issue? Should death be followed by a period or a double comma?

Over to the flash fiction camp, there is the Shawn of the Dead-esque ‘On Corpses’ by Mike Bradley. Just long enough to beffudle and intrigue, it is a humorous and bizarre concoction that allies the lingering of ghosts with haunting insomnia.

Polarity also features an illustrated dossier on John Yeadon including an interview with Neeral Bhatt, his further thoughts and suggested further reading. I wasn’t previously familiar with Yeadon and his food-inspired art work so this was an intriguing introduction. Yeadon covers diverse subject matter including truth, a nation’s sense of identity through food, globalization, and his work process. He scored brownie points from me for mentioning Bakhtin’s notion of Carnival (a non-hierarchical second-world).

This is of course just the tip of the junkyard heap, and I mean that as a compliment. Art Editor Neeral Bhatt has selected some beautifully creepy art such as Hazel Atashroo’s cocoon-like ‘Man Assimilated’, or her childishly painful ‘Heroine (Pulls Herself Together)’. The staircases of Freud’s Vienna and London homes have been captured by Sharon Kivland. There is also a thought-provoking report on the Byam Shaw occupation. Amongst the writers, Polarity has attracted some big or up-and-coming names including Carol Watts, Frank Key, Peter Davidson and Simon Barraclough, but also some more obscure scribblers (for now).

Whether this is the start of a renewed interest in the surreal remains to be seen, but for now Polarity is a magazine that rewards those that explore it.

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