A Figure Painted With Signs
recent poetry reviewed
Enitharmon Press, 26B Caversham Road, London, NW5 2DU
Adamah Jeremy Hooker, 14cm x 21.5cm/perfect bound, 109pp/£8.95
In terms of etymology, Adamah means 'red earth'. Thus the use of Adamah rather than Adam connects man more closely with the earth he is said to be made from. This could be taken to imply that women are not so close to God. Hooker's cosmology deals with this by sometimes making 'ground' synonymous with 'mother' - man being born from both - thus putting women first in the order of creation. The whole rib thing is left out, it's an osteo-creationist dead-end. The female is also split between the matter of the mother and - a development in Hooker's poetic topography - groundlessness. In some senses he experiences groundlessness via female personas.
The use of Adamah rather than Adam suggests a blurring of the edges possibly involving the disintegration of the self and/or liberation from the self. The border between the self and environment is not just porous but, rather, the self is a part of the environment. It is the discrete part from which the whole can be observed. It is God's work become conscious of itself. So, Judeo-Christian sexual cosmology meets eco-consciousness; that and much else. It is the complexity of trying to wed an idea like that with even half an hour of everyday life that gives Hooker's poetry its drive. Not so much the Chemical Wedding as a psycho-organic one. The first poem puts the poet in a field (literally and metaphorically) and it focuses on the work.
Where do we begin?
Just here, say, at the point
in the fields where you see
the pinnacles of Salle church rise,
and Cawston, the naked stub
of the tower,
and the roofs of Moor Farm.
from Workpoints
These are the landmarks - the work takes place within a geometry. Join the dots between what you can see - two churches and a farm - and link them to where you are, which is just outside the workshop of sculptor Lee Grandjean. The work and the observance of the divine - in the natural world and in the world we make up in our heads - are two aspects of the same thing. Love, marriage, procreation and all that goes with those - mums and dads, wives and children, the whole reunion - have meaning in relation to the work of the poet, which is a ground level analogue of the creative work of God. To quote from Workpoints again: "What I want to argue / is that poetry and sculpture / are life sciences. // It is not that we express / some finished / or constructed self. // The point is to step out, / into the space between".
Adamah is divided into three parts (1) Groundwork (2) Landscape of Childhood (3) Dedications. Dedications contains poems to his partner Mieke and other family members, friends, other poets, etc. Landscape of Childhood, a poem for radio, was broadcast on BBC radio 3 in 1991. It calls up a sense of the world from the point of view of one living near Southampton during the 1939-45 war.
The fuselage of a plane on the shore.
Shrapnel on the garden path,
a dud incendiary nose down
among potato haulms.
But the main work is Groundwork and that is concerned with acts of making and unmaking. This has significance in relation to the long term effects of the processes (mechanisation, the development of new technologies, etc.) that gave rise to modernism. The speeding up of change, the blur of 'choices' we are now confronted by, is felt as a context that makes and unmakes being. We are all increasingly fictional and there are freedoms as well as threats to freedoms to be explored. Adamah examines the world from a particular human perspective - the book is a culturally inscribed body, a figure painted with signs - it shows Hooker to be shifting his ground and seeing new views over known and historical worlds, which he seeks to unify.
The Figures, 5 Castle Hill Avenue, Great Barrington, MA 01230, USA
Mars Disarmed Drew Milne, 13.5cm x 18cm/perfect bound, 68pp/$10
As it says on The Figures web site, "Milne has an agreeably heavy touch with contemporary and anachronistic pop English…" And so he has. This little book brings together a couple of previous booklets with new poems. It's good to get a prompt to reread The Gates of Gaza (Equipage, 2000), which opens this collection. It reworks information as much as it reworks language. There is an odd quality to it - the abstraction creates a sense of a surface, such as you encounter when reading a gravestone or other inscribed or monumental edifice. It will not allow you into its substance, but then you slide in any way. It asserts containment and breaks it down. There is a sense of warfare going on behind a language that is simultaneously stressed and relaxed - given new jobs and a day off - this 'sense of warfare' has intensified since the first Gates of Gaza chapbook was published, and then more so since Mars Disarmed was published in 2002.
Milne's poetry is a kind of exploration into the autonomy of language. Language exists in the world as a discrete entity and it responds to the world (to read gates of Gaza before and after the latest Iraq war is to experience revision), as if the poem has been amended whilst the book was on your shelf. So, Milne returns from his romp with previously lost artefacts of language. He is the Crocodile Dundee of elaborate poetry. He spent some time in the desert - a place of theory and contrast - and uncovered evidence of a previous civilisation, busts of Marx, post-language poetry inscribed on crumbling slabs. It's beautiful - if that's not a bourgeois response - but all around it soldiers, "yet more perky conscripts", shunt berms and dispose themselves for the necessary work of peace and stability. The quote is from the Trojan light which could be a war poem, or a poem about the systems war nestles within. Information and the stuff of the media; history and geological or mineral time; language and poetry or narrative - so many kinds of system around an ugliness that is a powerful - and highly romanticised - behaviour. The words of the poem run over this, making a surface on a known but unprovable structure; language is like a shiver on your skin, or at least it is on mine.
the city circled by troops
pillowed softly to digest
called wings from thence
and as it were a capstone
from the Trojan light vi
Copies of Mars Disarmed are available in the UK for £7.50, including postage and packing, from Drew Milne, Trinity Hall, Cambridge CB2 ITJ. Cheques payable to 'Drew Milne'. The Figures web site can be found at www.geoffreyyoung.com/thefigures
Invisible Books, B.M. Invisible, London, WC1N 3XX
Selected Poems Veronica Forrest-Thomson, 16.5cm x 24.5cm/perfect bound, 156pp/£10.95
"I believe that at the present time poetry must progress by deliberately trying to defeat the expectations of its reader or hearers, especially the expectation that they will be able to extract meaning from a poem." (from a commentary by Forrest-Thomson on her poem, Richard II). Veronica Forrest-Thomson's anti-poetry (to steal a phrase from Michael Hamburger's The Truth of Poetry) defines her own, peripheral, poetic ground. She didn't so much chose it as stumble into it. What can poetry be, now? She neither founded nor predicted a poetic, but her experiments influenced the development of a sensibility that is increasingly central to the construction of possible poetries in English. Like the Trevor Joyce book reviewed earlier, this book has a significance beyond itself.
Forrest-Thomson died in 1975 at the age of 27. Since then the kind of poetry she helped to create - a late 20th century western faux avant-garde - has slowly escaped from HMP Cambridge into the landscape beyond. For the unschooled, her work is not easy to read - at least to begin with - but that is a recommendation rather than a criticism and difficulty has not handicapped her growing international reputation. Having died so young, and having studied at Cambridge, she wrote much of her oeuvre whilst a student and her poems annotate her reading and her wider intellectual interests as well as her search for a subject matter beyond that of the difficulty of writing poetry. She saw beauty as obsolete (poetically speaking) and had little time for mythical constructs such as meaning.
This Selected Poems includes the whole of two collections, Language-Games (1971) and On The Periphery (1976), plus some uncollected poems from the late sixties and a set of poems called 'Further Poems', the latter including work the author may have wished to have included in her posthumous 1976 collection. These include poems found in 'fugitive journals' since the publication of her Collected Poems and Translations in 1990 by Allardyce Barnett. Invisible Books includes a page of corrections to the 1990 Collected Poems which shows a scholarly dedication to the work.
If references to the theoretical underpinning of innovative poetry leave you blinking into apparently obscure and unlit spaces you can at least grope forward - or have the illusion of doing that - with this tome. It comes with a fair bit of prose at the back, by Forrest-Thomson and by Alison Mark (a Forrest-Thomson specialist). Forrest-Thomson’s intellectual influences include William Empsom and Wittgenstein - both of which indicate her interest in language and/or poetry as a puzzle (or game) - with Barthes, Lacan and other structuralists and post-structuralists rolling in their devilish linguistic siege engines close behind. The theory is of course very important, but you don't need to do any more than the average student. Skim read it and then promptly forget it. The poetry is complex but its thematics aren't. To quote Alison Mark, "there are three main themes in Forrest-Thomson’s poems: identity, experience, and the representation of both in language." What could be more straight-forward than that?
Well, hyphens. You need to know about those. Hyphens have an important symbolic role in Forrest-Thomson’s poetry. Alison Mark refers to the hyphen in her work as "that pre-eminent device of connection…" Wittgenstein may have started it, but Forrest-Thomson adopted it in the title of her first book and - after just being called Thomson - in her name. It connects, but it also divides. It defines the edges between things. The hyphen retains a sense of difference. In Forrest-Thomson’s work the poem - with it's particular language games - and other language, and the world beyond, are separate entities. Decodings of poems in terms of the world - the looting of a poetic text for autobiographical meaning - was something she sought to discourage. Decoding is necessary, but more in terms of the phrases and ideas imported from other, often earlier, writers and how those were changed by their incorporation in the poem; or in terms of poetry as a quest for a subject (the elusive world); or the language game as it relates to poetic traditions and precursors in terms of prosody and other technicalities of verse.
What of the future is in the past
Channels towards us now.
Present and future perfect past
Makes no tracks in the snow.
from The Lady of Shallot: Ode
When I who was anxious and sad came to you
Out of the rain. Out of the sound of the cold
Wind that blows time before and time after
Even Provence knows.
And as for this line I stole it from T.S. Eliot
And Ezra Pound and A.C. Swinburne. All very good
Poets to steal from since they are all three dead.
from ‘Cordelia or “A poem should not mean but be”’
The phrase “A poem should not mean but be” is from Archibald MacLeish. It is taken from his Ars Poetica: " For all the history of grief / An empty doorway and a maple leaf // For love / The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea - // A poem should not mean / But be".
As Forrest-Thomson puts it in her Preface to On the Periphery when discussing "the head-on collision with non-poetic languages" in her previous work and the difficulties of the "stylistic situation on the periphery of traditional poetry", there is… "A difficulty which must confront any poet at this time who can take and make the art a new and serious opponent - perhaps even a successful alternative - to the awfulness of the modern world. I have argued… that this awfulness cannot be overcome with entire reference to the non-verbal world for the non-verbal world, like other deities, helps only those who help themselves. And what poetry gains from that world is gained through language, through the very languages that give us the world. For poetry, as always, has special access to aspects of language distinct from the aspect of communication."
Redbeck Press, 24 Aireville Road, Frizinghall, Bradford, BD9 4HH
Floating World Gavin Bantock, 21.5 x 14 cm/perfect bound, 60pp/£6.95
Subtitled 'a Japanese Collection', Floating World attempts to bridge a cultural gap between modern Japan, its 20th century and ancient predecessors and the rest of that section of the world economy that likes to call itself 'the west'. Gavin Bantock's life decisions are his affair, but the cultural synthesis he attempts embodies tensions. I like the prosiness of much of his poetry - it suggests a messiness in the world, a world in which nothing is pure. The contradictions come out in Hiroshima - a long poem that attempts to rehabilitate the notion of nuclear war along the lines of 'local difficulty' rather than global holocaust. He wrote it in the sixties, but he reasserts its 'truth' in this 2002 collection.
Nor was the Flood a universal purge.
Nor was the whip in Zion a universal purge.
Nor was the Black Death.
I know there will never be a universal purge
until the galaxies collapse on themselves…
In comparing the Black Death to 'universal purge' Bantock misses out the bit in the middle (the Earth). A nuclear war is not an epidemic, nor is it a physical event on a universal scale. His comparison suggests an unease or disgust at that messy world. It seems odd that he thought that "a nuclear cataclysm would be as natural and as purifying as previous world scourges were; and that therefore we should accept its coming as an event beneficial to Mankind" in 1964. That he still believes this rubbish is scary. "And Christ shall lead this wonderful destruction." Yeah, right. Poets like this most probably work for MOSSAD.
A Different Kind of Smoke Keith Chandler, 21.5 x 14 cm/perfect bound, 44pp/£5.95
Keith Chandler is a competition winner - there are thirteen acknowledgements to competitions he's won or nearly won - OU Poets (95), Peterloo Open (95), etc.. His poems are mostly ironic and 40 lines long or less. Everything is so normal, he is like a poet built out of the unused spare parts in the Bloodaxe mortuary/workshop. But, as in all such tales, this creature has turned out wrong. In Washing my Wife's Nightdress he delights amidst clichés of masculinity. "Taking a turn at playing house for once, / I find it in a corner…" Playing up to feminist stereotypes may be tedious, but to win a competition poems need to be this 'washed out' and 'worn thin'. His closing line - "I think of women's lives, their work-shaped hands" is a nonsense that fails to win him a pat on the head.
Serotonin Days Michael Curtis, 21.5 x 14 cm/perfect bound, 83pp/£7.95
These poems explore the odd moments of reflection that are an aspect of everyday life. When Curtis encounters the exotic he keeps his cool and places himself within the context of whatever stories are accessible. The approach is the same, whether at home or on holiday.
We stop at an oasis panorama.
Date palms lock sand and soil, cover
olives and bananas,
small children perfect the drama
of pleading, ammonites and Coca Cola
…
from Place Most Abundant In Water
Sometimes these poems seem a little vague, as if Curtis cannot wake from a dream of a commentary about himself, where he is and the history of one or the other. It's that beat poet wordiness thing. He seems to look for an emotional authenticity in himself, as if to find that and display it in a poem would be, in itself, meaningful. That could get tedious but it doesn't as his absence of interest in transcendence keeps it and him real, if sometimes a little bewildered. When a subject comes along that does throw up an emotional landmark he writes well of it. The title poem doesn't offer up poetry as therapy, but it does explore depression and the facing up to that:
Depression is due to a chemical imbalance in your brain.
It lives in warm just-abandoned cushions
finds out hollows and slumps in winter landscapes
Subdued anxiety and sadness in the face of ageing or the knowledge of death are things Curtis feels at home with and he 'does these' well. "Sometimes sleepers wake to find themselves / living in a former residence." That surrealism - also quoted from the title poem, low key as it is - is also a feature of his writing.
The Golden Hinde Pat Earnshaw, 21.5 x 14 cm/saddle stitched, 32pp/£3.95
This long poem in sixteen parts tells the tale of Drake's circumnavigation of the world.
Seeing afresh the natural courtesy
of Indian hearts, how cruel tortures by
the conquerors - whipping their flesh with cords,
pouring fat from boiling bacon over
their skins - changed them to fiends, Drake's hatred of
the Spanish was intensified.
from Looting the Spanish (part 11)
The plodding verse would send most people to sleep. This isn't so much a poem as a re-enactment of a poem.
Life as it Comes Anthony Edkins, 21.5 x 14 cm/perfect bound, 67pp/£6.95
Edkins divides his time between translating Spanish poetry and his own writing. This substantial collection - effectively a Selected Poems - includes work written over an eighteen year period. The book is divided into three sections, each including a selection of poems from a six year period. These poems reflect a witty, intellectual mind, wide reading and a sense of the autonomous life - and a humorous one at that - of languages and the cultures they give rise to.
When I was an old man
in a distant province
someone I scarcely knew
sent me a long poem
the gist of which was this:
an old man on his own
in a distant province
can quickly succumb to
the excuse of custom
cause of complacency
and inactivity.
An old poet (also
from a far off land) wrote:
old men should
be explorers...
from An Essay on Reading (A Poem in Five Parts & Places)
The quote is from part one, China: the Former Governor Remembers an Important Letter. The poem is lightly written - and with a subtle wit - and it embodies themes that recur throughout this book - the gifts and traps of a solitary life; the importance of reading and of writing; the headlong lunge into something; the power of distant cultures to tempt us into activity; the spiritual significance of myth or learning, the importance of humour in the face of all this.
The Old Campaigners George Jowett, 21.5 x 14 cm/saddle stitched, 28pp/£3.95
The poems in this collection examine the beauty and pathos of boxers, their seconds and the crowd. The beauty of the crowd is, by slight of hand, the beauty of the solid, verb driven verse of Jowett and how he sees things. These poems are lively on the page, no punch drunk swagger, nor muttered doggerel here. No sense of being dulled by cliché either. To punch straight, boxing isn't something I have taken much interest in but I think I'd enjoy hearing these poems read aloud. The booklet opens with a selection of six poems that cover various aspects of boxing, or recollect odd moments seen in the ring or in the bar afterwards. In Gilbody we are left in no doubt as to the scary splendour of the bantamweight boxers who "both seemed giants, men of iron". The victor, Gilbody, is in the bar later:
He seemed an inoffensive, little man
And stood, I'll swear, no more than five foot four.
Instinctively I made a space for him
But some chap, unaware that he deserved
As champion our praise and reverence,
Pushed in front of him and took his turn.
And then I realised even champions
Must sometimes stand and wait before they're served.
That last line shows the subtlety of this verse, echoing as it does the last line of Milton's sonnet On His Blindness, "They also serve who only stand and wait." I suspect there are other such references that I missed. The collection ends with a long poem in verse about the rise and ill-luck of Middlesbrough boxer Brian Graham. He could have been a contender. This is a proper old fashioned praise poem, such as have been sung to heroes since people found themselves with a hero to praise. Good, strong muscular verse - but subtle with it - no plodding metronome. I think even Ezra Pound would have liked this, it's manly stuff too, verse with an iron physique.
Saltaire Andrew Mitchell, 21.5 x 14 cm/saddle stitched, 28pp/£4.95
Andrew Mitchell went to Primary School in Saltaire, "a purpose built 'model' Victorian industrial village… built in the 19th century by the philanthpist Sir Titus Salt." It is a World Heritage Site and the mill is now a gallery housing a Hockney collection. I found these things out at www.saltaire.yorks.com. Without this information this sequence of poems does not make sense. The photographs by Mike Bentley help, but they provide only a partial context. Anyone who doesn't know this part of Yorkshire is left with a lot of abstractions and vague personas. It feels as if the poem's development was interrupted after the first draft, which was finished perhaps in the sense of being smoothed down, rather than worked. This poem needs milling. The artificiality that results could be the defining feature of the writing - which could be very interesting - but it feels accidental, bashed out.
With dreadful roars the firebox
of Salt's ambition breathed on Bradford
where Ruskin taunts in imagination
with a frieze of pendant purses
for a wool exchange more suited
to their taste than mock gothic piety.
from Saltaire, Part One, 10
Whilst I am being told how much the poet knows about the place, and whilst various references are indicated and unanchored personas included, the place itself remains a near total mystery. Too many types and not enough particulars.
Figure 2: In a meritocracy
you get what you deserve
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