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A Voids Officer Achieves The Tree Pose by Annie Freud
(Donut Press, £5) 17pp.
Available from www.donutpress.co.uk 


Annie Freud is a poet with an engagingly odd vision of the world. The peculiar title of this slim collection evidently refers to a council employee responsible for filling empty properties and a difficult posture accomplished at a yoga class, and that blend of mundane bureaucracy and physical exertion certainly sums up much of the energy driving these poems. The titles are often vivid in themselves, whether ‘The Inventor Of The Individual Fruit Pie’, ‘The Love Song Of The Nocturnal Swamp-Dweller’ or ‘A Scotch Egg Bought From A Stall In Borough Market’. ‘1973’ evokes an era of headscarves, French cinemas and “snail gathering at the edges of the fields” while the title poem recalls a woman using the ‘delaying tactic’ of an affair with a Frenchman to defer deciding what she wants to do with her life: “This is a life lived in a lunch break,/ when all your desires have been pushed away/ and the corporation’s discourse is about/ as interesting to you as the microbiology of the  ant./ It’s in this instant that some new word or thought/ suggests a whole new set of possibilities,/ and standing on one leg, in prayer, she knows/ her real deficiencies have yet to flower”. There’s a ‘kinky’ edge to proceedings at times, with poems that touch on spanking, masks and a green vibrator, and there’s more than a little of Frank O’Hara’s feel for the comic potential and peculiar erotic charge of urban life here too. As though in recognition of the finely tuned honesty within Annie Freud’s deceptive confessionals, no less a fellow practitioner of the fictive confession than Hugo Williams provides a short introduction to this promising collection.