Interesting body of work: review
Corpus by Michael Symmons Roberts, 72pp, £8.00, Cape
The Tree House by Kathleen Jamie , 49pp, £8.99, Picador
The body is central to Michael Symmons Roberts’ fourth collection, whether as a risen, physical thing, a collection of organs, an athletic machine or simply an abandoned ‘pelt’, found in a cheap hotel. The body is also the world, a metaphor for possession and colonisation (in a witty riposte to Donne) and the focus of various appetites, not
least carnal epicures.
These are startling, wide-awake poems, sometimes reminiscent of Redgrove’s alchemical chains of symbol and focus, sometimes suddenly setting off in unusual metaphysical directions. ‘The Hands’, for example, comprises two short pieces, one an account of a raiding-party going about their bloody business, the other an exploration of openness using unfurling plant-images and the symbolism of hand-gestures. To quote it partially would evaporate some of the powerful suggestivity of quite a short piece, but it recalls the imagists in making us see this particular part of the body anew
- frighteningly and mysteriously anew, even.
Biblical tales provide another staring-point; Jacob wrestling the angel is a familiar trope for inspiration, but here also is a poem entitled ‘Jairus’ :
You hope that if she eats enough
the light and dust and love
which weave the matrix of her body
will not fray, nor wear so thin
that morning sun breaks through her…
The daughter brought back from death is transfigured into a strange, new being, ravenously devouring ‘roast lamb, egg, unleavened bread’.
Ultimately such a theme leads to poems entitled ‘Post-Mortem’ and ‘Pathologist’ and though they are probably not to be read over breakfast, they each have a genuinely new impulse behind them. Symmons Roberts is a resurrection man, keen to explore reversals of the decaying process.
The processes at work in Kathleen Jamie’s Forward Prize-winning fifth collection, The Tree House, are fleshed out in the dirty colours of the natural world. I have disliked Jamie’s earlier collections, and still see nothing in the Scots dialect poems, ‘versions’ of Holderlin mostly, but one or two poems here seem strong and impressive. The first three in the book, ‘The Wishing Tree’, ‘Frogs’ and ‘Alder’, certainly signal impressive work to come. Thereafter, however, things become minimal and inconsistent: several pieces seem like sketches of images, rather than finished poems, and a poem like ‘Hoard’, describing a ‘gut wound / packed with sphagnum’ on a bog body is too, too Heaney. I begin to see why Jamie has been so lauded, but the unflinching commitment in Symmons Roberts’ collection still seems more substantial.
The Tree House by Kathleen Jamie , 49pp, £8.99, Picador
The body is central to Michael Symmons Roberts’ fourth collection, whether as a risen, physical thing, a collection of organs, an athletic machine or simply an abandoned ‘pelt’, found in a cheap hotel. The body is also the world, a metaphor for possession and colonisation (in a witty riposte to Donne) and the focus of various appetites, not
least carnal epicures.
These are startling, wide-awake poems, sometimes reminiscent of Redgrove’s alchemical chains of symbol and focus, sometimes suddenly setting off in unusual metaphysical directions. ‘The Hands’, for example, comprises two short pieces, one an account of a raiding-party going about their bloody business, the other an exploration of openness using unfurling plant-images and the symbolism of hand-gestures. To quote it partially would evaporate some of the powerful suggestivity of quite a short piece, but it recalls the imagists in making us see this particular part of the body anew
- frighteningly and mysteriously anew, even.
Biblical tales provide another staring-point; Jacob wrestling the angel is a familiar trope for inspiration, but here also is a poem entitled ‘Jairus’ :
You hope that if she eats enough
the light and dust and love
which weave the matrix of her body
will not fray, nor wear so thin
that morning sun breaks through her…
The daughter brought back from death is transfigured into a strange, new being, ravenously devouring ‘roast lamb, egg, unleavened bread’.
Ultimately such a theme leads to poems entitled ‘Post-Mortem’ and ‘Pathologist’ and though they are probably not to be read over breakfast, they each have a genuinely new impulse behind them. Symmons Roberts is a resurrection man, keen to explore reversals of the decaying process.
The processes at work in Kathleen Jamie’s Forward Prize-winning fifth collection, The Tree House, are fleshed out in the dirty colours of the natural world. I have disliked Jamie’s earlier collections, and still see nothing in the Scots dialect poems, ‘versions’ of Holderlin mostly, but one or two poems here seem strong and impressive. The first three in the book, ‘The Wishing Tree’, ‘Frogs’ and ‘Alder’, certainly signal impressive work to come. Thereafter, however, things become minimal and inconsistent: several pieces seem like sketches of images, rather than finished poems, and a poem like ‘Hoard’, describing a ‘gut wound / packed with sphagnum’ on a bog body is too, too Heaney. I begin to see why Jamie has been so lauded, but the unflinching commitment in Symmons Roberts’ collection still seems more substantial.
Page(s) 45-46
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