Dissimilar Comparisons: More Poetry Books Reviewed
Gestaltmacher, Gestaltmacher, Make Me a Gestalt Steve Sneyd (Four Quarters Press, 7 The Towers, Stevenage, SG1 1HE, A5/perfect bound, 80pp/£5.99).
Steve Sneyd's monumental landmark in space-time continues to grow. So far it has swallowed up a vast acreage of the 'North' and some areas of the 'Southwest'. The columns of smoke recently seen hanging over some parts of Britain's ancient landscapes were the lost ships, fallen, not the pyres of sheep. Adam and Eve are adrift in space and they don't know if they come from Earth, Venus or Mars. This gestalt contains about 100 poems, which makes it a major collection in any planet's poetic canon. All the tribes are contained here, you can walk in pastoral, the urban real, domestic containment, cyber-pagan sacred landscapes and star fields. The main thing is that everything is synthesised. Sneyd's poetic realm is a complex image thoroughly integrated. The poems often start with a walk, a conversation in a pub, a familiar image, idea or situation. Notions of the 'alien' or 'other' are then introduced to provoke a meaning defined by contradictory elements of mundane and exotic. The effect is to shift consciousness to a position where concepts such as 'alien' and 'other', mundane and exotic, are undermined. This process is helped by Sneyd's knowledge of his subjects - the myths and rumours of ancient history, the cultural construction of landscape, the self-abnegating irony of 20th century socialism and the specialisms of genre poetries, especially sci-fi. More innovative than many so-called 'innovative poets'; more traditional than Heaney, Sneyd does that making the everyday seem weird thing with a flourish:
greenypurple as winter bramble
deathbedded he-it-they strive
to call back to aching side
all those offshoots driven
out to farflungs of the spiral arm
lucky for their convenience
now newrooted in another clime
the message system long ago
ceased functioning and so remains
all on its ownieownieo
A Call to Mind is a Call to Action
In the shabby Earthworld(s) of contemporary poetries Steve Sneyd walks about like a poet with a mind of its own. Visiting aliens read this; it is available in all good Neolithic bookshops. Comic book characters discuss Sneyd's rhythmic imagery when we are asleep. If you don't read Sneyd yourself, now is the time to start, before your pets start openly laughing at you.
Spidergrams Steve Sneyd & Andy Cocker (Dark Diamonds Publications, PO Box HK31, Leeds, LS11 9XN, A5/saddle stitched,12pp/£1 inc. postage).
A Spidergram, "…sometimes also called the 'meaning web', …is used as a way of collecting ideas about, and responses to, a theme or topic which doesn't set up a hierarchy of importance amongst the points made. The name… comes from the visual resemblance to a spider, with the central theme or word as the body and the points or comments relating to it… as the legs." One might add that the title for each leg is a foot. This little exercise is a good device for thrashing imagery out of a word or theme. The way the visual aspect works to take your mind off what you are doing makes this a handy device for writing workshop facilitators. Each A5 page has a spidergram on it. The one with Fog as the body has a leg like this. Sounds Surprise [the foot]: "is perhaps bellow of bull or car / or onset of low plane human God / someone you could use the pain of." The one with White Horse as the body has a leg like this. Height of Fear: "is to have no apple to feed is / enough to satisfy to have choice / to feed with self or ride to prey." Even better, the pages are graphic extravaganzas by Andy Cocker. Very tempting for a workshop is to photocopy the pages and tippex out Steve's legs and feet and then make copies to hand out to group for them to fill in. Easy prep. Happy group. Don't tell Steve.
Ape into Pleiades Lilith Lorraine (Hilltop Press, 4 Nowell Place, Almondbury, Huddersfield, HD5 8PB, A5/saddle stitched, 18pp/£2.75). A sci-fi blast from the past with this collection from the Mother of all SF poets. These are classics of the genre, having the retro attraction of a Bakelite TV or twin tub. The poems gain from the paradoxical effect of the form (traditional, metered and rhyming) and from the romantic, rather baroque style: these poems about the future have a dated feel. They are like listening to music on a 78. The themes are traditional too - love, loss, death, wonderment - and the futuristic context does not crowd them out. This isn't the genre deconstructing itself, the author feels no need to appear 'knowing'. "And it was hell to know with every breath / that still between us flowed the stream of death." (Dark Science).
Page(s) 56-57
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