The PBS Review
This review marks the start of a new series, in which one of Magma’s regular reviewers writes about the current Poetry Book Society selections. We hope this will be a useful service to our readers, giving them an independent opinion of the books, and encouraging them to make use of the Society.
The PBS was founded by T S Eliot. Publishers in the UK and Ireland submit new poetry books to the PBS selectors, a panel of well known poets who, four times a year, select seven or eight books including the PBS Choice - the book they judge the best of the quarter - which members receive free. PBS Choices are automatically shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize. The selectors’ other recommendations include new collections, anthologies, a translation and, as a recent innovation, the best poetry pamphlet. These and other books are available to PBS members at a 25% discount.
The Magma reviews will cover the new selections as they are made. The opinions expressed are those of the individual reviewer. The current PBS Selectors are David Harsent and Kathleen Jamie, and Sian Hughes and Mario Petrucci (pamphlets).
All PBS-selected books are available to Magma readers post free (UK only) directly from the PBS. To order with a credit / debit card, and for details of overseas p&p rates, call 020 8870 8403, email info@ poetrybooks.co.uk The Poetry Book Society is at Book House, 45 East Hill, London SW18 2QZ. Website
www.poetrybooks.co.uk
Andrew Neilson reviews the PBS selections for Winter 2003
Being a selector for the Poetry Book Society must be a daunting task and I know of at least one previous incumbent who was wholly unprepared for the abyssal depths to be found in the box of manuscripts delivered to their door. Trying to review this quarter’s
selections – well, seven of the eight - may be child’s play in comparison, but believe me, it can be daunting enough in its own way. Let me begin then with the youngest poet in the selection, a debutant who also happens to be the PBS Choice.
Jacob Polley’s The Brink (Picador) comes with its own modicum of hype, not least because PBS Choices are rarely scooped by a debut collection. But Polley also comes with an Eric Gregory Prize and the prestigious First Verse Award under his belt, and all at the tender age of 28. In fact Polley’s first collection has been eagerly anticipated ever since his first appearance in Faber’s ill-fated series of anthologies, First Pressings. That was back in 1998 and even then Polley’s two contributions stood out for their remarkable assurance and striking imagery.
A shame then that The Brink is not quite the coruscating debut one might expect. While quantity is never prized over quality in the world
of slim volumes, The Brink gives you only 43 pages of actual poetry for your £7.99. This reviewer was left thinking of the Tory Party’s latest formulation on the tax debate - ‘more bang for your buck’. The plain truth is that this poet’s work doesn’t really seem suited to such a minimalist showcase. Polley’s grasp of tone is exemplary and in the opening poems, A Jar of Honey and Declaration, his talent for both close-up observation and the panoramic sweep are in evidence. But if the reader’s appetite is whetted for more, too often the poems that follow are disappointingly slight. Thankfully for every curtailed, somewhat pointless excursion like First Light or from Definitions for the Wife, there is an equally brief lyric which truly reanimates the
familiar and quickens the pulse. Take The Gulls for example:
They’re trying to shake themselves out
of their sleeves
in the air above the bins,
their flight suddenly akin
to dangling on a coat hook
by the back of the coat you’re still in.
There is also a wonderful love poem, The Distance, but a measure of what seems wrong with The Brink is that the final poem, the showstopper, is The Kingdom of Sediment. A showstopper it certainly is, full of the kind of visionary moments which make Polley so promising, but the poem nonetheless dates back almost six years to First Pressings. I was left thinking of Michael Longley’s advice to his students on publishing debut collections: wait until you’re 30. Perhaps if Jacob Polley had held on for a little more then his poetry would truly have taken published flight, rather than hovering as it does on that titular brink.
Polley is from Cumbria and published by Picador, and another Northern male poet from the same publishing house is in the second tier of PBS selections as a Recommendation. Peter Armstrong’s The Capital of Nowhere actually takes its title from a poem by the acknowledged kingpin of Northern male poets published by Picador, Sean O’Brien. Whereas Jacob Polley is in fact refreshingly different from O’Brien or Paul Farley, say, Armstrong’s work is a little closer to the house style, so to speak. The Capital of Nowhere is reminiscent of O’Brien’s last collection, Downriver, from the whimsical takes on grim Northern locales to sequences about football.
Armstrong is a poet of quirky febrile ideas and his poems take each idea and flare briefly around their wick. While O’Brien’s Downriver was an altogether more weighty tome, with long meditations travelling down the deeply worn groove of the master’s aesthetic, Armstrong’s work is lighter fare - and all the better for it. The Capital of Nowhere is thoroughly entertaining in its swiftly delineated lyrics and witty conceits. Highlights include Bellingham, the sequence Gryke Westrock and the distinctly Audenesque Bond or The Man with the Golden Bough:
But cut from Monaco to ice
where let the tundra teach us grace,
as Thanatos comes darkling face
to face with lust, and owns he knows
those features in the screen’s dark glass
which now (of course) he lifts to us.
At times perhaps the igniting idea is a little too neat, and the irony does wear thin in The Dean Surveys the Lingerie Dept where the incongruity of Armstrong’s heightened rhetoric doesn’t quite cover the poem’s slightness. Far better is The Manager as Spiritual Director which, despite having the same tongue in the same cheek, is a genuinely affecting poem on lower league football. The Fall of Byzantium, Stranded West of Blaydon meanwhile is a gorgeous lyric which transcends its own ironic genesis (the poem is dedicated to Arriva Trains) to be worth the price of admission alone.
After the joys of The Capital of Nowhere, it was time to sample the latest collection by C.K. Williams - perhaps the most important American poet writing today. In The Singing (Bloodaxe), a Recommendation, the laureate of the questioning, monologic self sounds as strong as ever. Take The Clause, for example, where Williams is forward enough to address his subject - “this wedge of want my mind calls self” - with blunt directness:
This ramshackle, this unwieldy, this jerry-built
assemblage,
this unfelt always felt disarray: is this the sum
of me,
is this where I’m meant to end, exactly where I
started out?
This question resonates throughout in the book in a variety of guises.
The extraordinarily abstract, image-lite verse with its repetition and assonance, its long sentences and lines; the voice rising it seems from an analyst’s couch with the description of superficially banal, almost teenage, preoccupations or strange, momentary encounters - rising again to a suddenly archaic vocabulary or extemporised adage of lucid simplicity - everything we have come to expect from Williams is present and correct. In the sequence Of Childhood the Dark Williams examines some of the most basic elements of his art with some of his most basic, yet affecting, phrasing yet:
Even then, though surely I was a “child,”
which implied sense and intent, but no power,
I wasn’t what I’d learned a child should be:
I was never naive, never without guile.
Hardly begun, I was no longer new,
already beset with quandaries and cries.
Was I a molten to harden and anneal, the core
of what I was destined to become, or was I
what I seemed, inconsequential, but free?
But if free, why quandaries, why cries?
This kind of poetry can make the reader feel like being they’re being hoodwinked in some way. Is he really being serious? Is this really a joke? Am I really allowed to like something so, well, unalloyed? Yet Williams is as artful as any poet writing today, and his ability to produce, with such unashamed clarity, lyrics entitled First Love
Lost or Sensitive should be treasured.
Events since 11th September 2001 also force Williams to revisit the social and political concerns of his earliest work. But whereas the young novice produced his fair share of gauche observations and
cringeworthy statements, the mature poet focuses on the effect of tremendous global events on the self, the baffled inability of any individual, even our political leaders, to fathom the currents of war
and hatred. This collection may not be the best of Williams, but for one of poetry’s elder statesmen - he is older than Seamus Heaney - The Singing has a wholly remarkable freshness and energy.
A second debut, Catherine Smith’s The Butcher’s Hands (Smith Doorstop), has also received a Recommendation. Comprising a pamphlet shortlisted for the Forward First Collection Prize in 2001, plus some new work, one might expect Smith’s poetry to be more impressive than it actually is. As the title might suggest, this is a collection of everyday, domestic narratives and lyrics with a bloody, often violent undercurrent of imagery. While no one with such a strong grasp of their aesthetic can be dismissed out of hand, I found Smith’s handling of language too casual to be to my taste. The London train “throbs past”, a voice has a “dry rasp” (is there any other kind of rasp?) and a mannequin is described as being “pink
and hairless”. The potential of syntax is readily abused with abrupt sentences - “Listen. A muted,/ whimpering howl. Dislikes us/ banging on the glass, bares her teeth./ Sleeps curled, like a dog.” -
which detune audibly like guitar strings. Smith does have the occasional moment of grim humour, such as Soul, and she is refreshingly willing to fill her poems with the detritus of modern life, from Richard and Judy to Bacardi Breezers, but I’m afraid to say The Butcher’s Hands left me cold.
As, unfortunately, did the fourth and final Recommendation. Night Toad, New and Selected Poems by Susan Wicks (Bloodaxe), is welcome in at least ensuring that the best of her work from three
previous collections is still in print. There is no doubt that Wicks can write, and the new poems of Night Toad contain some moving elegies on her father’s death, including The Art of Half-Sleeping
with its unexpected end. Nonetheless, there is a singular lack of tone to this poetry that can be wearing when read en masse. Wicks often focuses on domestic relationships but her characters are strangely absent of personality, lost in the colour wash of her imagery. Weir, a lyric from her last collection The Clever Daughter, perhaps best
demonstrates what Wicks can achieve when her train of thought momentarily speeds up:
You died long ago and the trees
in the river are thin copper
beaten to sunlight. In moving water
our world is precious as wreckage,
its sunken carcass rolled and
remade; the impact of a drop
rings us like deep treasure.
For my part, though, that impact rang through Wicks’s lyrics all too seldom.
The Special Commendation is The Book of My Enemy, the Collected Poems of Clive James (Picador). James may be better known for his television journalism and satire, but part of his image has always involved some hint of a literary pedigree that The Book of My Enemy does its best to justify. The appended blurb reminds us that Clive James “is the author of more than twenty books” - apparently including several novels, but do you recall any of them? Reading this Collected Poems, with its parodies and light verse satires, one gets the impression of reading one of those poets, commoner in the past, who wrote as they were commissioned.
That particular type-as-poet received its greatest exemplar in John Dryden and has gradually deteriorated over the centuries, despite the efforts of Auden to revive the civilised seriousness of true light verse. Indeed it’s worth pointing out that James has an unoriginal and unnecessary verse exposition of Auden’s career in this collection,
which makes the accusation that “His later manner leaves your neck hair flat” something better applied to great swathes of The Book of My Enemy.
There are some good poems here, in between works such as Bring Me The Sweat of Gabriella Sabatini, a poem whose irony just about makes a success of the title but not the 90 odd lines that follow regurgitating the joke. Where the Sea Meets the Desert is one of the better meldings of James’s wry journalistic tone with his more erudite leanings:
Antony and Cleopatra swam at Mersa Matruh
In the clear blue shallows.
Imagine the clean sand, the absence of litter -
No plastic bottles or scraps of styrofoam packing,
No jetsam at all except the occasional corpse
Of a used slave tossed off a galley.
There are also some witty pastiches of poets from R.S. Thomas to Hugo Williams, although how James could misjudge a writer as fine and moving as Richard Wilbur in Richard Wilbur’s Fabergé Egg
Factory says a lot of his poetic failings. In the end the 437 pages of this book are too stuffed with filler to make this much of a Collected Poems. There are an inordinate number of song lyrics, more and more exercises in pastiche which begin to feel deleteriously bad for the soul and, worst of all, Peregrine Prykke’s Pilgrimage through the London Literary World. This last folly is where James’s indulgence in the overlong and sub-Augustan reaches its nadir with a modern Dunciad as written by Colly Cibber instead of Alexander Pope.
I had much more time for the Quarter’s recommended pamphlet, Julie-ann Rowell’s Convergence (Brodie Press), a promising collection of lyrics set largely in Ireland. Rowell's poems are unassuming, and her tone can seem as non-existent as that of Susan Wicks, but her quiet voice works with real characters and implied
narratives. The result is an engaging mix of the subtle and unadorned, such as Rita's Bar with its portrait of an elderly barmaid:
The bar reeled to an ancient tune on the radio
and suddenly we were clapping,
as Rita turned a slow, slow circle,
and I realised she was dancing.
In lyrics such as Belfast Girl and the title poem, the poet's seemingly neutral eye implicates her in what is being considered to interesting effect. While Convergence is very definitely a pamphlet, with many pieces a little too slight for their own good, the abiding impression is of a poet doing the simple things well. That is a surprisingly difficult quality to find and reason enough for a fair dose of praise.
Page(s) 42-46
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