Review
Little Bit of Bread And No Cheese, Jeremy Over, Carcanet £6.95
In this wide-ranging, idiosyncratic first collection, Jeremy Over speaks with and to the voices of Lorca, surrealism, Victorian memoirs and verbal games - to gain access, perhaps, to a pageant of feelings in language and their masked mysteries (“Why does the mystery of shadows attract me so?” - ‘Hat in Hand, Hat on Head’) rather than to any seemingly straightforward connection between words and things. Language, here, is a problem, a problem Over bathes and glories in, in what is probably the most overtly playful collection we will read this year.
Playing may emerge from emptiness and absence, however, and jokes from taboo and painful areas, and these poems seem to want to connote what they cannot say, and what perhaps none of us can say. Humpty Dumpty, in Alice in Wonderland, hectored “It’s not a matter of what’s true and what’s false, but of who is the master”, and these are not hegemonic poems (as, say Andrew Motion’s are, or, in their different ways, Kathleen Raine’s and Seamus Heaney’s). Over, I think, wants to come at meaning from underneath, rather than assertively full-on, to be innocent of power and manipulation, rather as Paul Celan wanted to write in German, but to find a German uncontaminated by the Holocaust.
But language is everything, so verse can never be really free and, as Adrienne Rich wrote, ‘no man’s land does not exist’. It’s always worth a try, however, particularly when one is faced with quite alternative uses of language, meaning and power, as in ‘For Instance’, which is a response to Hans Asperger’s paper on autism in childhood:
For the item wood and glass, he answered,
‘Because the glass is more glassy,
and the wood is more woody.’
For cow and calf, he replied,
‘Lammer lammer lammer’
To the question ‘Which is the bigger one?’ he
said
‘The cow I would like to have the pen now.’
Right on. Why, after all, should there be a right answer? Why aren’t the possibilities infinite? In this way Over’s poems are liberating, and offer courage for a wildness of our own.
But sometimes I felt frustration with them, a sense of chasing him round a maze, and a desire to shout ‘Come out, come out, wherever you are’ and have him step into a pool of sunlight and have a good rant. I wanted him to drop his masks and play naked. He may find that the cadaveri excellenti he holds up for our delight have limited uses, and that his own poetic authority will grow when he begins to wear his own costumes.
Page(s) 84
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