Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Charles Boyle takes you right out of reality by telling inconsequential stories. One of a list of his ‘Privileges’ is - “and may I be continually surprised by what happens next” - a privilege the reader will have. The tales may take off from Stendhal, say, or some memoir involving Lawrence and Frieda, keeping a weather eye open for the humdrum but telling detail; but they’re garbled and told in a deadpan syntax with no expected direction.

     Poems go through intriguing non-sequiturs, like life, and probably don’t add up, again like life, at least not without some thought of your own. In a rage, someone is defenestrating someone else’s belongings, including a copy of La Chartreuse de Parme, open at chapter twenty-one. The persona in the street speculates about the book’s characters, not the parting couple. The point of this is fairly clear. At the end of a business conference, though, when even the chairman has slumped asleep, the persona’s father appears (why? and is he a daydream, or a vision?) in his pinstripe, patting his inside pockets:

He had lost his wallet
or was making the sign of the cross.
I was doodling an infinite system
of interlocking pagodas.

Has the father become a sort of priest, and what does a system of interlocking pagodas signify? Any answer will come from ourselves, called upon to be both therapists and creators of the story thats hinted at. Why, in ‘The Nature Trail’, may the speaker soon need “the rowing boat / stuck fast among the reeds, / the Lady Blue?” And why does the person with sensible shoes and a dog on a lead “turn a blind eye / to the telltale remains / of a fire, the empty / half-bottle of vodka?” This is the kit you build your own story from.

     ‘Follain’s Leeds’ - Follain was an actual poet learning English there - is full of war ghosts. It is 1919 and all the more eerie for the climactic non-climax:

Men killed on the Somme,
their faces chewed by rats,
stroll down Briggate
with all the time in the world.

One enters a barber’s shop and takes his place before a mirror in which, behind him, a boy can be glimpsed sweeping the hairs on the floor. These details, which must be Follain’s, defamiliarise the horrific and seedy twentieth century. Dissociation makes the dingy city-world weird. There are ‘Things to do Indoors’ when its raining and one is often waiting for one’s lover (who may not return one’s love): “Make a clock that runs backwards / with an alarm that is timed to go off / at the moment of your birth and so wake you up / to your before-life.”

     The Age of Cardboard and String is childhood, a time of fantasy, impossible hopes and lies.

                             And no,
it wasn't us (with crumbs on our lips)
who stole the cookies from the cookie jar.
Maybe God.
Maybe God was hungry.

But the adult world continues to be a world of fantasy, impossible hope and lies. Boyle’s not happy with meaninglessness, but that's all there is, except letting your mind play its own games, and to hell with supposed sanity. Even an afterlife might be watching ads for panty-liners and macho cars. Consumerism wins, OK? No, satirical po-faced anecdotal surrealism wins.