Reviews
Slipstream by Jeremy Hilton,
ISBN 88-86819-75-7, A5, 56pp, Edizioni Ripostes, Casella postale 135 - 84100 Salerno (Italy), £7.50
13 poems from Jeremy Hilton’s contribution to the ‘Transferences’ contemporary poets series. They include lengthy poems or sequences, and are almost entirely free form - in only one does he corset himself in a strict form, the seven-syllable line of his ‘Breath sentences’ sequence. He likes to fracture his syntax and lines, so that some pages bear a resemblance to musical notation, for Jeremy has ‘the sense...that the feel of my writing is much closer to contemporary music than contemporary poetry. That, I suppose, depends on your definition of both. Certainly, contemporary poetry would be better for being closer to music, contemporary or otherwise.
The writing is unfashionably free of irony, informed instead by a deep humanity and compassion, the poet’s attention firmly fixed on the external. The force of this enables him to write some astonishing poems and lines, as in the wonderfully sustained and moving ‘song of the lost children of memory’. This begins ‘ we were the children of time / we knew the past / we played in the gardens of Babylon / we slept beneath the Sphinx ‘, and ends ‘ we have been your conscience / your memory / your burden for too long / take back your memory / and let us be ourselves again’, making a considerable and memorable journey in between.
Pushed too far though, our strengths can become weaknesses. In one poem - ‘in the city of lost visions’ - he skates across the thin ice of sentimentality, - ‘he lay against her warm breasts / feeling the emerging man in him / stirring his body but also / plunging into the child again / ... / the baby boy left alone at night’
That aside, this a marvellous collection, with one poem in particular standing out, ‘the cellist’, about the remarkable Sarajevan musician, Vedran Smajlovic - ‘another grave / dug in the moon / here fire escapes end / where the century / refuses the reasoning of burn-out / and a crazed cello / refuses silence’
Page(s) 13
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