Review
Don Marcellino’s Daughter, Tim Cunningham, Peterloo Poets £7.95
Tim Cunningham is at his best rewriting myths and parables, suggesting a civilisation at the end of its creative archetypes. The phoenix is about to take off for Heliopolis but realises his way is barred and “settles on the ashtray, begs the chairman for a light”. A woman seeing winos in the tube says “Son, They have no water”. “On the evening of the seventh day / Some ass sat on the button and annihilated/ Man”. Various consequences follow, leading to earth again becoming a formless void and darkness. Like the Purple Emperor butterfly perhaps, with its “three-inch brilliance of wing span”, we’re “tempted to sip the juice from excrement”.
He’s also at his best when his quirky imagination takes off from the documentation of actuality, where his strength is less obvious. “Suppose St Francis got it wrong”, he asks, and, as a once good Irish Catholic in the New Age, visualises him reborn as an Assisi cat. He worries as he cracks an egg open in case someone might crack his house open (like Hiroshima perhaps in another poem) and eat him. Someone who could go anywhere in a car surprises his friends by taking off at midnight, announcing that the stars were “celestial cats’ eyes”. A bedroom window is broken and “an angel in football gear / Asked politely for his moon”.
I liked these, often shorter poems, and the book adds up to a good sense of the coexistence of past and present. The title poem contrasts the little girl discovering the “graffiti” in Altamira and “vagrants chalking their memory of stallions” on railway cement.
Page(s) 87
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