Market influences?: review
Rearranging the Sky by Frances Wilson, 72pp, £7.95,
Rockingham Press, 11 Musley Lane, Ware, Herts SG12 7EN.
The Dog Who Thinks He’s a Fish by Chris Beckett, 64pp, £6.95, Smith/Doorstop Books, The Studio, Byram Arcade, Westgate, Huddersfield HD1 1ND.
Frances Wilson’s Rearranging the Sky is descriptive prose arranged on the page as if it were poetry. For example:
Years after he’d moved out,
moved in with his girl friend,
she still couldn’t face up
to repainting his bedroom.
[from ‘Touching up the Bloodstains’]
One reviewer says that the texts are written ‘in language that is vivid, precise and natural’. But poetry does not operate through denotation but connotation, to suggest a multiplicity of meanings. Here is another example from ‘Living Next Door to a Topiarist’:
She saw him from her kitchen window,
shears slack in his grip, eyeing the bushes
as he gulped coffee, unstacked last night’s dishes,
programmed the washing.
That Wilson is capable of poetic writing is evident from ‘The Colour of the Man’:
Think earths: burnt umber, terra rosa, brown madder alizarin.
Think peat water, fires, torn letters curling;
And the final stanza:
True gentlemen who kissed her
once only, the night their house burnt down,
on her forehead, like a mother
This strikes the correct balance between the particular and the general. Wilson is too influenced by the ‘creative writing workshop syndrome’, which demands poetry to be prose like, visually precise and linguistically conservative.
In Chris Beckett’s The Dog Who Thinks He’s a Fish, there is superficiality beneath the references to Ezra Pound, Frank O’Hara, Elisabeth Bishop and Greek mythology. One gets the impression there is a Francis Wilson struggling to emerge from beneath the influence of Paul Muldoon.
Many poems are banal, such as ‘On Hearing Joshua Bell Play Schubert’s Fantasy in C Major While My Left Leg is in Cramp’. Here the poet gets a cramped leg while listening to music:
surely Joshua Bell has been injected
into my leg and is treating every muscle
as a string to bow or pluck,
so that I feel myself an instrument
in the making of his melody
This is whole point of the poem: to apply defamiliarization to the sensation of leg cramp and to combine it with a Donne like comparison.
Like Wilson, Beckett is prose like:
Next door’s couple who were once
so sweet together that we winced,
are shouting at each other now
[from ‘Coffin Cake’]
And:
The woman in the next bed
has a daughter and two diseases:
malaria, like me, and elephantiasis.
[from ‘A Daughter and Two Diseases’]
But Beckett is capable of writing poetry as can be seen from the following:
The tree is so much smaller
than my dream. but it is an aberration
which makes the dream seam more realistic,
[from ‘Willow’]
It still amazes me that many poets now writing descriptive prose can also write poetry, yet seem to choose not to. Again, perhaps this is due to market influences.
Rockingham Press, 11 Musley Lane, Ware, Herts SG12 7EN.
The Dog Who Thinks He’s a Fish by Chris Beckett, 64pp, £6.95, Smith/Doorstop Books, The Studio, Byram Arcade, Westgate, Huddersfield HD1 1ND.
Frances Wilson’s Rearranging the Sky is descriptive prose arranged on the page as if it were poetry. For example:
Years after he’d moved out,
moved in with his girl friend,
she still couldn’t face up
to repainting his bedroom.
[from ‘Touching up the Bloodstains’]
One reviewer says that the texts are written ‘in language that is vivid, precise and natural’. But poetry does not operate through denotation but connotation, to suggest a multiplicity of meanings. Here is another example from ‘Living Next Door to a Topiarist’:
She saw him from her kitchen window,
shears slack in his grip, eyeing the bushes
as he gulped coffee, unstacked last night’s dishes,
programmed the washing.
That Wilson is capable of poetic writing is evident from ‘The Colour of the Man’:
Think earths: burnt umber, terra rosa, brown madder alizarin.
Think peat water, fires, torn letters curling;
And the final stanza:
True gentlemen who kissed her
once only, the night their house burnt down,
on her forehead, like a mother
This strikes the correct balance between the particular and the general. Wilson is too influenced by the ‘creative writing workshop syndrome’, which demands poetry to be prose like, visually precise and linguistically conservative.
In Chris Beckett’s The Dog Who Thinks He’s a Fish, there is superficiality beneath the references to Ezra Pound, Frank O’Hara, Elisabeth Bishop and Greek mythology. One gets the impression there is a Francis Wilson struggling to emerge from beneath the influence of Paul Muldoon.
Many poems are banal, such as ‘On Hearing Joshua Bell Play Schubert’s Fantasy in C Major While My Left Leg is in Cramp’. Here the poet gets a cramped leg while listening to music:
surely Joshua Bell has been injected
into my leg and is treating every muscle
as a string to bow or pluck,
so that I feel myself an instrument
in the making of his melody
This is whole point of the poem: to apply defamiliarization to the sensation of leg cramp and to combine it with a Donne like comparison.
Like Wilson, Beckett is prose like:
Next door’s couple who were once
so sweet together that we winced,
are shouting at each other now
[from ‘Coffin Cake’]
And:
The woman in the next bed
has a daughter and two diseases:
malaria, like me, and elephantiasis.
[from ‘A Daughter and Two Diseases’]
But Beckett is capable of writing poetry as can be seen from the following:
The tree is so much smaller
than my dream. but it is an aberration
which makes the dream seam more realistic,
[from ‘Willow’]
It still amazes me that many poets now writing descriptive prose can also write poetry, yet seem to choose not to. Again, perhaps this is due to market influences.
Page(s) 47-49
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