Reviews
Kicking Lou's Arse by Alun Rees,
ISBN 0-903212-02-1, A5, 60pp, Bucephalus Press, 67 Hady Crescent, Chesterfield, Derbys, S41 0EB, £3.00 / $6.00
Done properly, reviewing reveals the beam in your own eye in the light from the mote you find in the eye of the poet you are reviewing. You learn about your own poetry, and the craft and practice of poetry in general. Take full rhyme, for example, of which Sam sends me a good deal for review (I think there must still be a deeply conservative cultural survival, held by many poets as well as readers, that if it don’t rhyme it aint poetry). Using it, how difficult it is to stop your lines from breaking out into rollicking, or lapsing into doggerel, or clunking at the end, or contorting into inversions or other syntactical manglings in order to engineer that end rhyme. How often the rhyme leads you up the garden path away from what you really meant to say. And, to cap it all, English is rhyme-poor relative to other languages. Small wonder those of us who try to use rhyme resort to all the variants of pararhyme, often in combination. I would concede that there is nothing wrong with rollicking and / or clunking, when the content and intention call for it. Serendipity lies up the garden path. Doggerel can be great fun (‘The fable and the dirty story / share in the total literary glory’ - Auden). Inversions and manglings can be used for comic effect.
Alun Rees likes rhyme. He rollicks:
‘I’m good at hate, and hated Lou / I yearned to pierce him through and through / with knives and all things stabbiest / for of scabby swine he is the scabbiest’ - Kicking Lou's Arse.
‘Lou’ is leukemia. The poem is a bravura celebration of survival. Note also the (intentional) clunks. There’s no evidence of a garden path, but there are manglings and inversions -
‘The broken leg heals, but the small pain / nags, under the gut, us towards death’ -
The Small Disasters.
‘Now in his heart are many treasures hid’ -
The Captain.
Ouch, and ouch. As for doggerel, how close do you think this gets?
‘The Greeks sent postcards “Weather’s great, / and architects wed curved lines to straight, / so send straight lines and curves anon, / for we must build the Parthenon.” / Then labourers toiled with picks and hods / that poets might commune with gods’ -
Building the Parthenon.
Well, that second line doesn’t scan, for one.
I much preferred his un-rhymed poems, for their directness and emotional charge. They are clustered in the first half: the book drops markedly in quality after that. ‘Underfoot, / something writhes, clamps on the heel / with brute penetration. It is a dream of evil / we have shut behind this glass’ -
The Snake.
Page(s) 14
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