A Being Rooted in Being
Recent Poetry Reviewed
Etruscan books, 24a Fore Street, Buckfastleigh, Devon, TQ11 0AA
Etruscan reader 9 Fred Beake, Nicholas Moore & Meg Bateman, 17cm x 25cm approx/perfect bound, 137pp/£9.50
At first glance editor Nicholas Johnson's blurb about Fred Beake seems a little overstated. "Fred Beake is a slow burning master of time. You think its just English you're reading, but his is an ear acquainted with the lyric from Webern back to Sappho." Well, there's nothing like being bold.
The remnant of sword-clash drifts back as the boat
Draws nearer Avalon's sacred isle,
And in it the King lies while the birds murmur
- Close to death, thinking not of the battle
Or the wind in the reeds…from Artorius Dux Bellorum
I like the use of history but the lyric - especially its rhythms - is sometimes overwhelmed by the idea. "But in the older dimmer tradition / dolphin eyes or serpent prow / ended inside some tumulus / with a body, gold, and a legend / and in time trees gathered about them / and they mistook the noise of leaves for the sea / and imagined they were where never again they could be." (The Boat)
Nicholas Moore sings of a love lost. The simplicity of the style is elastic enough to stretch with the themes of loss and longing. His lyrics are an emotional medium and writing them a form of therapy; the poems are plain and subtle and all the better for that. "What does one do with passions, left mad, alone? / There is no way to eke them out in secret." (from A lake for Tantalus) Meg Bateman's poems - presented here in the Gaelic original and the author's (I'd guess) English translations - are intimate and direct. She works on an everyday scale, claiming no special role for poetry. Her work has something of the power of John Clare.
Gossip
They said you were so mean
you wouldn't stop cutting the seaweed to eat,
but left your piece on the wave,
and grabbed a bite when it floated in.
But many's the time you gave me a £5 note
when it really made a difference.
So much for gossips. Who it is that speaks to who is a theme that recurs. "There was the time you got me on the phone / and though I recognised your voice at once / you had grown too deaf to hear me / and put your receiver down. // It was a premonition of your death / to be speaking to you without your knowing…" (from Mac) Meg Bateman achieves high lyrical intensity using everyday themes and subjects. The power of her work is self evident, even in her second language.
Oasis Books, 12 Stevenage Road, London, SW6 6ES
Oasis Broadsheets: Each broadsheet comprises one A4 light sepia card, landscape orientation, folded twice. Each has a line-art illustration on the front. P&P is not included in the price, so add the cost of a second class stamp when ordering.
Broadsheet 1: Three Poems Martin Anderson (30p): "and, in a river / of elided letters / of drowned predicates / there drifted / something like your name, a solitude spelt backwards…" (from Occulta) there's a deal of floating about in these poems - air, where it exists, is typically languid. Although "…he wrote / his name / upon the softened stump / of a rotting aspen / branch, and launched it." (from A Boyhood), his little boat always seems to end up "where there is / dark undergrowth / grown daily / more rank / within extremities / of pain… (from The Resources). The atmosphere is elegiac, a heavy lyric persists, though the poems work to lighten the load. Thus, "there is / joy simply / in the holding of / words on a page…" (from The Resources).
Broadsheet 2: Stations on the Way Ray Seaford (30p): This short story could easily be a pun on the idea of the oral tradition, or a slice of London literary life, or the harsh realities of the poetry publishing world. Delia, who is apparently not too hot as a poet, has a mouth and much of the action takes place there. "Delia takes it in the mouth, unhesitatingly…" At times the puns are a bit Benny Hill. "Delia takes it in her mouth greedily. She adores salami…" Yes Ray, but then she would wouldn't she. There may be something symbolic going on - a kind of mouth politics - for Alan has a stutter. "Alan sucks Delia's left nipple." No punning when Alan gives head, but poor old Delia has to go through a whole series of slightly salty jokes in order to arrive at the "Delia takes it in her mouth. The wrapper is on the floor, her poems are in the waste bin." With more than a hint of misogyny, this grim merry-go-round unfolds. What comes out of Delia's mouth is of no value, but all kinds of fascinating things go in. Clintonesque.
Broadsheet 3: Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes / Sonnets to Orpheus Estill Pollock (50p): Rilke's masterpieces continue to fascinate, and these lyrical reflections show the narrative to be as compelling as ever. The song endures. "Now she was the rain, water's braids unbound. / Now she was harvested, now she could answer / as a sustenance, // a being rooted in being…" If you read it in your garden the trees will dance, apparently.
Broadsheet 4: A Glass mosaic Gordon Wardman (50p): These 'poems from an Arthurian sequence' manage to fit the story into 14 short poems on one sheet of A4, which is an achievement. It works because a lightness of tone is maintained, despite the shadowy imagery. One flits from piece to piece. As with most contemporary tellings of this tale, the impression is of a lachrymose, rather gloomy world, a romantic pagan/Celtic world, rather than a Romanised Christian one. I thought things were supposed to be great for most of Arthur's reign, but narrative time fast-forwards into the disintegration of a reality, or the arrival of a new ism. There's nothing particularly exciting about the poetry, but this selection could have been written/designed for an Oasis Broadsheet - it’s a good fit - and that is no mean feat in itself. "grey flesh poking through worn-out boots, / rib-cage skeletal against the rags, / he looked like he hadn't eaten in days / - this had been their leader" (from body count) "you woke up screaming in the night / and the words were suddenly new" (from nos Romani)
Broadsheet 5: From a High Window Robin Fulton (£1): The qualities of light and air - its weight, its textures - maintain a balance with the straightforward lyricism of these poems. One can almost taste the light as one reads. It is something to do with the ways in which memories flavour the image of light. Light recorded, the techniques of recording light, and light engineered into spaces also feature - this broadsheet, one A4 page - has a massive internal architecture, the space of which has been constructed out of momentary junctions of memory - mine and the author's, and perhaps those referred to in the poems. These poems are not at all spectacular, but they are very effective - the presence of the self is slight, a huge whispering in the roof. "My soul now - that flows / on rock and can't rub / off one molecule." The best of the first five.
The Other Press, 19B Marriott Road, London, N4 3QN
Automatic Cross Stitch Frances Presley, A5/perfect bound, 50pp/£9.95
Automatic Cross Stitch is a collection of poems, a collaboration and a poetic survey of the rag trade. The price may seem expensive, but the book includes seven images by artist and printmaker Irma Irsara. Some of the pictures are in colour and on glossy colour-plate pages. The book has a documentary feel - poetry as a form or category is sometimes entirely abandoned, at others Presley draws an outline in a consciously lyrical style. This is an emphatically feminist work - the terminology of cloth fabrics is interwoven with ideologies of struggle and disapproval. I do like the changes in register - the way poetry comes and goes - and the way in which this is a book, not just a collection of poems. There is almost a nostalgia for a world before automation which sits uneasily against the reports - blankly quoted from a health survey - of sweatshops and long hours. The whole trade comes across as exotic, like a third world in a backroom around the corner, but Presley takes a delight in the baubles of fashion and - in the end - the pleasure of creation. In her case, it is the creation of a book, which is a kind of garment - it includes automation and machining, long hours and low pay (though, perhaps ironically, a higher social status). I'd disagree with Hariet Tarlo's backcover blurb, I don't see how the voices of the fashion industry can be said to speak through the pages of this book. What I hear is Frances Presley and her subject matter is the cut price end of a competitive market, or the rigours of capitalism as we are sometimes prone to wear it.
in the discursive visibility of the seamstress
dawn breaks
indicating that she has worked all night
on her common pink metaphor looking
'as fresh as if it was painted yesterday'from For One Short Hour
Parataxis Editions, c/o Drew Milne, Trinity Hall, Cambridge, CB2 1TJ Pig Cupid - a homage to Mina Loy various/anon, 15 x 17 cm/saddle stitched, 36pp/unpriced
Thirty poets from around the English speaking world were invited to contribute to an anonymous collection of love lyrics, "by way of homage to Mina Loy, responding in some way to her 'Songs to Joannes'." The 'forgotten poems' of Mina Loy (born 1882) were published in 1996 in the collection, The Lost Lunar Baedeker. In 1921 Ezra Pound wrote to Marianne Moore: " [...] is there anyone in America except you, Bill [William Carlos Williams] and Mina Loy who can write anything of interest in verse?" Evidently innovative poetry as a brand didn't exist then and Ezra had nowhere to do his difficult shopping. Since then Mina is on the guest list of any worthwhile literary soiree and in Pig Cupid Drew Milne collects the anonymous chat of his masked guests, silvery tangents and all. It could be that Loy is in the process of becoming the first postmodern poet, which isn't bad going for someone who died in 1966. This collection is fun to read - which can't be said for most poetry that is as abstract and downright awkward as this. Hopefully some kind of prize will be awarded for difficult lyricism, I'm sure it will in due course. It's good to see these poets letting rip anonymously, the pecking order in this array is as ghostly as the enigmatic poet herself. "Fact will hold you spellbound; lust knows a profit / But what do we know of the glow of things?" (anon, from 19th C)
Reality Street Editions, 4 Howard Court, Peckham Rye, London, SE15 3PH
If So, Tell Me Barbara Guest, A5 approx/perfect bound, 47pp/£6.50
Barbara Guest is a major influence on that aspect of mainstream poetry that is now called 'experimental'. Experimental is a provisional term - it suggests an absence of convention, which is misleading as contemporary experimental poetry is as conventional as Georgian poetry was around the time Guest was born in the 1920s. A few years ago her work would have seemed exotic and - to many - indecipherable, but the conventions of experimental writing have rapidly translated into conventions of reading. Eventually the term 'experimental' may be abandoned - perhaps this poetry is just contemporary?
These are poems that almost feel conscious of themselves - they do not rest easily in any category - you could not say their element is language, for it is also ideas, or abstraction, or the material world or culture or the body that reads or the body that writes. In reading them one is reminded that contemporary criticism is inadequate, that it too is conventional and partial to hierarchies of ideas and expediencies. Guest turns her poems before you in the air, they are like magical machines, devices that produce poetic - or the idea that poetic really is strange - that we are strange beasts in this reality-place.
The consciousness of the reader or critic is emphasised by the first poem, Valorous Vine. The poem, complete in itself, is followed over the page by an unexpected part 2 (there is no indication that part 1 is not a complete text, it is not numbered). Part 2 is a gloss or explanation of the poem. It is a block of prose. It brings the readers attention to the effervescent nature of the poem, that it consists of many parts, including the page and the presentation of the poem on the page. It points out that in a poem an absence can be a presence. "She drew from herself a technique that offered life to the flower, but demanded that the flower remain absent. The flower, as a subject, is not allowed to shadow the page." Part 2 of Valorous Vine is both a contextualising tool and an extension of the poem. It exists in more than one form at once on the page and it draws attention to this and - with it's weightless technique - shows how this too is lyrical or poetic.
The conceits of poetry - its cheap tricks and distractions are everywhere - those things that poets do to attempt to get around a reader. The seductions of the image, a neat tonal counterpoint, a rhythmic come-on. All of these are present, but are spotlit by a technique that seems to say, this is what poetry does, this is how poetry lies, but it can still be beautiful. The cheap tricks are rehabilitated within a sub-discourse about what poetry is. At the same time the poems are beautiful things, they still seduce. This poet tells you that belief in poetic is childish as she works a poem that frees and binds you at the same time.
A frame lets in elsewhere, a fairie
flies through Bretagne, or guessed she flew,
Romance let her in. Others walk outside,
plants that wait their copying into the future,
that is.from Outside of This, That Is
New Tonal Language Patricia Farrell, Shelby Matthews, Simon Perril & Keston Sutherland, 20 x 12 cm / perfect bound, 80pp/£5
This is RSE 4pack No. 3 and presents "an intriguing sampling of four poets working at the frontiers of language." (blurb) Notions of literary authenticity are always problematic, these could be 'frontier writers' (how romantic) or radical dilettantes. It could be that a radical dilettante is more likely to produce something genuinely experimental than a gritty frontier stalwart? Whatever, whether by accident or design, these poets mock the ultra-conservative UK poetry world. Shelby Matthews writes like a media studies student who heard about innovative poetry on the bus and then decided to write some. Keston Sutherland might produce some interesting work if he cuts loose from the idea of innovation, or from the self-consciousness that can make his writing spectacular. But maybe I'm just resisting the sales pitch? "He's just doing his thing, outside the narrative of the satisfaction of need. Whatever exceeds, and so on; the general pleasure." (Patricia Farrel, from An Ordinary Demon) "automatic work to live in concrete rushing we do not all / find paedophilia disgusting" (Shelby Matthews, from this which) "certain social mechanisms need winding up / -permost of them being less articulated than / lorries…" (Simon Perril, from Once Mo(o)re(d)) "sex on the beach / and love on the blink, things are hotting / up like the fuse in a fridge plug: / the heart gripped like spam by batter…" (Keston Sutherland, from The Code for Ice) Call me old fashioned, but I think the most interesting writing in this book is the lengthy quote from Frank Zappa. Given that, I'm glad there's someone willing to take the risks that Reality Street Editions are clearly prepared to take.
Selected Poems Denise Riley, 17 x 17 cm/perfect bound, 112pp/£7.50
"SELECTED POEMS contains the bulk of Mop Mop Georgette, together with selections from Riley's previous Street Editions and Virago books, and new, previously uncollected poems." (blurb) As innovative poetries become mainstream, those new to this genre (which is as ill-defined as 'mainstream') may feel they have some catching up to do. The contents of any notional reading list - like those of any anthology - would vary depending who you asked, but Denise Riley's Selected Poems would feature on many. Riley's work confronts the nature of poetry - what might be termed its spectacular artifice - head-on. Her lyricism is knowing, but it also involves play. She spotlights an experience of being or what lyrical is and then reveals the working of the image. Her use of language itself is a challenge to hierarchy as lumpen expression, tripped rhythms and metaphors that don't work are combined with exquisite phrasing to create powerful lyrical poetry. Irony, as an expression or definition of selfhood, is rehabilitated along with the lyrical form. A preference for awkward truthfulness over slick appearances may or may not prevent this poetry from being described as 'top of the range', like a car with extras, but the work here is knowing only in the sense that it indicates a knowledge that it may fail. Riley is a poet who is vigilant in the face of language, she is aware of its tendency to enclose. In the previously uncollected Curmudgeonly, she interrogates the "sociologically neat" term 'partner' - "Using 'my spouse' or even the sugary 'my lover' does publicly mark the tracks of a willed act, it inscribes an emotional history, / Yet neither sound like mundane attributes that anyone socially competent ought to have." The transaction that involves exchanging passion for an arrangement is - in this poem - exposed by the word that usually hides it. 'Partner', a term that seems free of anxiety, is a word in denial - what it denies is "unsettling love". This discursive poem is not a great lyric, but it reveals a sensibility that doesn't value passion, but is passionate. It is no romantic tract, behind the "soured reaction" that picks at blandness, there is a sense of suffering experienced as lovelessness. Humour is always around the corner of any lyrical excess - if too much poetry has left you feeling jaded, read The Castallian Spring out loud to cheer yourself up. Here, the poet, seated beside an ancient and no doubt oracular spring, prepares herself for meaningful lyricism. She is a toad amongst toads, her toad-self balanced on a sense of separateness from, and unity with, the other evening croakers.
Our calls clasped in common, as heavy as love, and convulsively
Thickened by love - until ashamed of such ordinariness, I wailed
In sheer vowels. Aaghoooh, I sloughed off raark, aaarrgh noises,
Deliberately degenerate; exuded ooeehaargh-I-oohyuuuh; then
Randomly honked 'darkling blue of Dimitrios': I had dreamed that.
The vitality of the language - the ideas it provokes, the unsettled imagery and the rhythms (which at times became Anglo-Saxon for me, as in the Battle of Maldon) all combine to create a poem that you can admire but not look up to. "This is a book you would be a twerp not to be reading…" (10th Muse).
Redbeck Press, 24 Aireville Road, Frizinghall, Bradford, BD9 4HH
A Mountain Crowned by a Cemetery Tulio Mora, A5 approx/perfect bound, 101pp/£7.95
Mora is a Peruvian poet and journalist whose work has become a focal point - in Peru and in South America generally - of the bottom-up history associated with the global spread of liberal democracies. This contemporary history is a people's history, which means there are problems, which might be called 'problems of voice'. These histories, which are not written 'by the regime', issue from the mouths of the oppressed, from ordinary people. In practice this doesn't usually mean much. Quotations selected by historians can represent the appearance of democracy rather than the real thing. Such histories are the latest fashion in the global academy, a fashion amongst specialists. This telling of the matter of Peru is interesting in that it is written by a poet, he isn't a specialist historian, thus the dissemination of his work - people voting with their eyes (in that they chose to read him, and the introduction tells me he is widely read in Peru) - authenticates his narrative.
This translation is a selection of 39 of the original 64 poems. Each poem is written in the voice of a person from history, thus the title of the original book, Cemetario General. Each poem, sung from a grave, challenges the official history of Peru. That too is a simplification, as there are 'authorised' unofficial histories, such as might be told by the guerrillas of the Shining Path who committed their own atrocities; their narrative line, their path, being authorised by an ideology. They might claim that 'Marx made us do it'. As a non-Peruvian, and non-South American, I have some difficulty with the book. My difficulty is to do with my ignorance of the official histories of Peru. Without knowledge of how these poems challenge official narratives I miss the significance of the stories and their phrasing. The translators - C. A. de Lomellini and David Tipton - clearly had this in mind when they opted to include a note at the back about each of the 'speakers', but this provides a recognition of the problem for the reader who is ignorant, rather than a solution to it. Having no Spanish, I cannot comment on the success of the translations, though I can say that I found these poems hard work. They are monologues - some of them quite long - with many references to historical events and persons that aren't explained. For a Peruvian this wouldn't be a problem, but for me it makes the act of reading a task rather than a pleasure. This is a very worthy book, but life amongst the corpses is no opera, no matter how sweetly they sing.
History - the poet says - is a great pile
of corpses. And I lie beneath that heap upon heap of the dead
which is the cargo of Peru's great causes.from Néstor Batanero
Néstor Batanero (1868 - 1882) - a 'child hero' of the war with Chile, was killed aged 14 at the Battle of San Pablo (Cajamarca).
St Cuthbert and Bystanders Chris Considine, A5 approx/saddle stitched, 24pp/£3.95.
This attractively produced pamphlet comes from a poet who tells us in the blurb that she has attended a number of Arvon courses. The 18 poems come in sets of two, and the information regarding the Arvon courses did leave me wondering if some minor worthy of the poetry world uses this 'dialectic' approach as a workshop technique. 18 short poems could easily be the product of a residential course. There is something unsatisfactory about this collection - it doesn't feel that the poet has any intimacy with her subject. Her knowledge about St Cuthbert, or the island he withdrew to, or his faith, has no feeling of depth. It might be that my perceptions are too much coloured by my reading of Miriam Scott (see review below, Going to the Island, Spout Publications). If so, that might seem unfair, but the feeling remains. Where Scott has a depth of experience of the island she writes of, Considine comes across - in relation to her subject matter - as a bystander. Not only is there a feeling that she has not lived her poems, but also that she has not lived with them for long enough. It is sometimes hard to see one's own poetic shortcomings. In these poems image, rhythm and narrative often fail. Cuthbert was one of those saints whose suffering and meditation involved immersion in water, in his case the North Sea.
Sometimes the moon frosts his skull
or stars hang over him
like never arriving hailstones.from Cuthbert and the Sea Otters (a Cuthbert)
Like never arriving hailstones? The image does not work visually, the rhythm is awkward and the metaphor - if there is one - is obscured behind untidy writing. The companion poem (b) has the Monk from Coldingham coming across as something of a voyeur. "I tiptoed from pillar to pillar / to rock in my habit of shadow." The excitement of this poem builds, though the imagery is eccentric rather than effective: "I crossed my arms / over my body's turbulence. / Knife blades of cold up my nose / and in my chest. I was a knot of shudders." An immersion fetishist? Given the saint's predispositions, the bathos might be intentional, but I doubt it is.
Shearsman Books, Lark Rise, Fore Street, Kentisbeare, Cullompton, Devon, EX15 2AD
The Telling of Time David Jaffin, 20.5 x 13.5cm/perfect bound, 216pp/£7.50
This is a chunky volume and the first impression is of an awesome commitment to a style. Jaffin writes in short lines, usually of one, two or three words. The language is everyday and the meditations are presented within a continuum of experience, the poet claims no special dispensation. Jaffin - an American living in Germany - is a Lutheran minister and his purity of line could be a metaphor of a theology or the person that is constructed from that. There is little variation of tone - or the variation of tone is subtle - and for all its simplicity this poetry is not accessible in the way that providers of literary grants would mean. The emphasis is as much on the diction as the intention. The integrity of what is said, the absence of compromise - or a horror of compromised speech - is a challenge to expedience, consumerism and ideology. Here we have thoughts becoming conscious of themselves, a world in which objects and language are reconciled.
We came
to a
silencejust, then
the lake
phrased…in
from A Place of Honor
When experimentalism is conventional - an aspiration, a paradigm, the hierarchy of collusion, a form of boredom, what bright people conform to and consume - a poetry in which the diction is the main thing, in which integrity of diction forms the cultural common ground (rather than, say, a policy), such a poetry must shine. It isn't grubby, when so much is.
Spout Publications, The Word Hoard, Kirklees Media Centre, 7 Northumberland Street, Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, HD1 1RL
Going to the Island Miriam Scott, 21 x 20 cm/saddle stitched, 32pp/£3.50.
If you are looking for a book of poems to read for pleasure or to inspire someone, Going to the Island comes highly recommended. It is a beautifully written book - fully finished and assured - and it is a book. One of the reasons for the decline of poetry books as a choice for readers is (I think) that most poets are too idle or too lacking in imagination to actually write a book. This poet shows what can be done with an idea, some skill and a bit of experience. Why not make a poetry collection people might enjoy reading?
Seals stood in the water, watching. Their souls looked out of their eyes.
The old ones hunted seals for their skins. After a seal hunt one
man was marooned.
He would never return. That night seals dead and living surrounded
his rock,
Crying through the storm with human voices. The flayed seals
had the look of men.
That man saw the true face of the island. We don't see things
that way now.
from What the old people saw
The island is Bardsey/Ynys Enlli - a holy island off the coast of Wales - settled in the 6th century and abandoned, now a retreat or place of healing. Not quite an otherworld, it has a proximity that adds to its enigma. The poems maintain a tonal unity throughout, and the forms of the 22 poems are similar. This creates an insularity of style which adds to the wholeness. It makes for a feeling of containment. The book is an island, or a journey through a metaphor of death. "The island had to be there. Near enough to touch, / the great blank sea cliff of the island's mountain floats, its base wrapped in mist / across two miles of shifting vortices, eddies, hidden shelves of rock. // The mountain stares at the land, from its maze of water, making nothing easy." (from The two faces of the mountain)
found objects Mary Males, 21 x 20 cm/perfect bound, 48pp/£6
30 short blocks of prose with what appear to be images of digitally scanned fabrics and/or plastics. The blurb says the texts don't "fall into any category". They read like whimsical performance pieces to me - the sort of thing Roger McGough might deliver when filling in for John Peel on Radio 4. And that, for me, is the problem with these texts. The design of the book suggests the intended audience is adult, but too often the texts seem aimed at an audience of children. Mary Males may think it interesting not to categorise her work, but this collection seems like a mess, it doesn't feel like something that has been thought through. It is irritating. Imagine McGough reading this in that stupid kiddy voice he puts on and then reach for the off switch: "You can learn something from being a canoe. Or a torpedo. Or an ice-berg. Or an astronaut. All these things you can be in water. For example, be a jellyfish. Find some deep water, deep as possible. The sea is ideal for this but a swimming pool will do…" [click]
keep walking robert furze, 21 x 20 cm/perfect bound, 28pp/£3.50
Robert has been obsessing over a water tower, that much we know. His lyric is annoyingly interesting, something of the glamour of the tower rubs off. Take the title of this booklet, keep walking. It suggests an action, perhaps Robert is telling himself to keep walking? Don't turn back and look at that bloody tower again. The tower is up on stilts though, and the title could be addressed to the tower, which is a kind of keep, which exists at the centre of its own castled enclosure of "forbidden land locked inside five foot fences." This castellation - the "afternoon's cool vessel" - might indicate a past, and thus a poetic exploration of the past, a rehashed history in the shadow of the tower? Furze remains stubbornly present tense. He has become trapped - orbiting the tower - in a process of identification. The tower is himself, penned in, immobilised. Beside a busy road, where all else seems to be moving, he reflects it; the "tower's blurred stain, / homeless stack, scar margins, / like the apparition of the stranded walker, / quietly derided, judged." Like the grail castle, the tower holds something that will heal wounds. So, his poem stalls and he orbits the phallic intrusion, the Brutalist occasion, of the tower. At times the poem becomes overstretched - stuck with this tower, Furze's store of metaphor's becomes exhausted, he attempts strokes beyond his reach. He does nature and animals badly, which is a strength of the poem. Between tower fatigue and a distrust of nature, his poem develops surreal extensions, it becomes increasingly spatial in itself. Poetry's evasions fail, or the motivation to use them has been distilled, piped upward into the tower. A cat is a "quadruped spider" - now, how crap is that? Yet the poem insists on working. A dog is "dragged like an anvil behind / his owner…" In describing apocryphal amateur photographers, those who never came to this anonymous industrial architecture, we are told how they tussled with "box cameras, tripods / splayed like foals' legs." Thus the poet creates an image - three legged foals crashing around a summery meadow. It's horrible, I wanted it to stop. Oddly, despite the miss-match - and with the happy thought that really foals have four legs - the image works. The tower looms over the author, there is a Freudian aspect, something paternal. It has structural integrity - is more solid than the poet - which is perhaps why he is stalking it. At times I lost the plot, found myself day-dreaming instead of reading, the poet failing to get his love across. And love it is, Furze is a romantic - no aloof theorist this - he is engrossed in the imagery and rhythms, and in the odd discrepancies of ideas that you can grind off the tower, and it is a persistence that wins. It is a winsome tower, it holds this text together - just, but the struggle for the poem contains all else. Keep walking Robert Furze.
Two Rivers Press, 35-39 London Street, Reading, RG1 4PS
Each Broken Object David Greenslade, 185 x 25mm/perfect bound, 64pp/£6.95
Two Rivers Press specialise in illustrated books. In this case, a catalogue of mostly everyday objects lists their specifications in terms of poems by Greenslade and illustrations by Andy Penaluna. Two Rivers clearly want to produce books as designer objects and the style is as important as the content - Jim Noble makes up the talented trio, his page layouts are dapper and this object - whether broken or not - is an Apple Mac of the poetry book world. The objects examined include a paperclip, a tin opener, key, latch, kerb, bicycle spanner, but also a tumour, a combination eyeglass/eggslicer and kayaks. "It falls into the poetic phenomenological tradition of Heidegger's later writings and Gadamer's exploration of objects, ritual, interpretation and carnival." (Blurb) Well, joking apart, it does have the feel of a post-modern version of a seventies concept album. That is very swish criticism, so much so that it could easily have been designed on a Mac, but my flippant snobbery has already distanced me from the object. It could be that I am being ironic, possibly, but every object in this book is attached firmly to its ideal type. "Dissenting bucket / handle protests - out of habit - / one mendicant shoulder broken." (Bucket) Greenslade's poetry overcomes the enclosure of slick presentation and chimes in like a socialist at a New Labour garden party. Unruly metaphors conduct yobbery in the museum of everyday - not revolutionary, but revisited - life. Writing as lively as this does add value to the mysterious processes of becoming. "Taoist steel, folklore, / smoke-ring, mint, no / needle compass, earlobe for / the made things chiropractor…" (Washer) The design team have engineered words into the edge of the book (the bit opposite the spine) - bend it one way and it says TRIUMPH, bend it the other and it says EXILE. Objects move like assassins or lovers through our lives but we are able to discard them easily. "Stained with grief, they / find a low, illegal route into the world / and plough my horror through, / tunnelling towards me, until every / one of them has found its place." (Objects Return in Triumph from Their Exile) These objects are possessive and possessing. "This consumer gadget is a great way to mechanise your experience of transference, I saw myself in it everywhere…" (10th Muse)
Page(s) 43-54
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- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The