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Two from the School of Sinister, one from the heart

Todd Swift reviews Learning How To Fall by Lynne Rees (Parthian £7.99), Quicksand Beach by Kate Bingham (Seren £7.99) and Coastal by Jane Duran (Enitharmon £8.95)

It sometimes seems as if every new collection of poetry in the UK promises to be more ‘edgy’ or ‘sinister’ than the next. It might even be the case that, in years to come, this emerging generation’s work will fall under the genre of Sinister much as Stoker ‘did’ Gothic. Lynne Rees, also a fiction-writer, has brought out a debut poetry collection, Learning How To Fall, which is the latest example of this sort of contemporary uncanny sublime.

It seems difficult to imagine how one poetry book could be more packed with black comedy and weird events. Reading Rees is often like watching a whole season of The Twilight Zone on DVD in one night. Indeed, the book’s strength is that it is endlessly inventive; the weakness is that the reader, exasperated, might well ask, but to what end? As if being locked in to a film-industry boardroom, the poet launches pitch after pitch, premise after increasingly bizarre premise, determined to push the strategy of asking ‘what if?’ as far as a brainstorm will allow.

Consider the inciting incidents and subjects of several key poems in the book: there is a poem called 'One Day The Wind Began To Blow And Didn’t Stop' – which is exactly what the poem’s about; 'Shower Scenes' which cleverly replaces the perspective of Perkins in Psycho with the perky heroine-victims in any number of slasher films; 'Late' where a girl is late – literally – for her own funeral (in this instance a cremation she narrowly misses); 'Spontaneous' where the commercial benefits of marketing spontaneous combustion are mooted; and the title poem, where every possible permutation of falling is run through and then essayed.

There’s never a dull moment. However, as with the aforementioned slasher film aesthetic, there is the law of diminishing returns; just as there can only be so many false alarms brought about by errant cats, so too, each succeeding shocker poem reduces the overall impression of brilliance. No one can consume a lifetime supply of ultra-clever poetry in one gulp.

There’s the suspicion that each poem here, so well designed by itself, was devised to kick-start the sort of thrum that a prize-winning poem like Colette Bryce’s 'The Full Indian Rope Trick' does; and nothing wrong with such ambition to combine a high order of play with feeling and music, every time. Sometimes, though, Rees forgets the feeling, and the music, and just lets the play rip.

How else to explain the lines, from 'How We Cry' – “These days when I cry / I think of rain, how the sky falls down and blankets these hills”? More often, Rees is able to deliver a poem with plain, deliberate poise – a little ice-cold maybe, but at least not dull to the touch – and can write well. These opening lines do set the scene:

A noise you think you hear
under the pulse of water, then dismiss
then think you hear again. You turn off
the flow, finger the certainty of the tap
and hold your breath, your heart
a steady thump. There’s a choice now –

('Shower Scenes')

Quicksand Beach is Kate Bingham’s second collection and it also seems to fall into the School of Sinister – the title is a dead giveaway that this way lie perils and sly observations. Bingham, who doubles as a film-maker, writes a bit like Rees, except now there’s an extra hit in the cappuccino, conspicuous deployment of ‘forms’ and funny anecdotes often recalled from childhood or marriage.

Bingham can write poems (often about relationships) that seem flat, even prosaic, as in 'Diamonds': “Let’s not have an argument this year / about my birthday. You know what I want”. Here are a few of the slightly facile openings scattered throughout the book: “There was a craze for fountain pens”, “It got so bad only the bankers could afford / to live in Central London”, “Insomniacs know better than to lie in bed” and the dire “I had always wanted to shoot myself”. This last is from the poem 'In the Birchwood' which represents the epitome of Sinister School work that strives to be sensational, providing off-the-rack intensities that are never balanced by poetry at its truest. Here is the opening stanza in full:

I had always wanted to shoot myself
and so perhaps it was inevitable
that one day I would find a gun in the birchwood,
flick back what I took to be the safety catch
and launch my brain

This promises some grappling with suicide and despair; instead it ends on a note of whimsy grasping at the brim of a trite image – “although it was odd to be inside out / in such cold weather / a hat would not have made much difference then”. Poetry needs to be engaged with the full seriousness of the words it conjures with, and the forces it conjures up. Consider Robert Frost’s 'Out, Out'; one can get a chill just recalling how that death among trees can still bring us all more fully to life.

A clutch of poems in Bingham’s book are good and seriously engaging, including: the five-sonnet sequence 'Roads', the sequence 'The Mouths of Babes', 'Gale Force Ten', 'Divorce', 'March' and 'Wishes'. 'Roads' finally suggests that Bingham knows where to locate her real poetic gift, when it terminates in the last eight lines that converge in feeling and style that genuinely arrest the breath and grip the heart:

Not turning back, even then, it seemed as though
you forgot the numb hillside, risking our lives
to please some irresistible whim or dare,
but if I ask you now I know you’ll say
it wasn’t the dangerous, we’d come so far,
we were so nearly there. Scare me again,
I never loved you more than when our car
span quietly across fresh snow in the fast lane.

There is an opposite danger from spinning too quickly across the surface slip of things, and that is engaging too sincerely with the demands (the pain, the joy) that each life places upon the feeling subject. The award-winning Jane Duran’s third collection, Coastal, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, seems to pivot on just such dangerous terrain, where sea meets land and heart meets head. Divided into two sections, neither escapes the risk of becoming charged with an excess of sentiment that might flood the proper flow of words best channeled with precision and emotion in measured equipoise.

The first section, ‘Coastal’, could hardly be more personal, or fraught, if it tried, given that its theme is the progression of debilitating memory loss in her rapidly aging mother. The book’s second section, ‘Zagharit’, named after the ‘elemental’ cry of women, centres around the poet’s son, Ramy, in Algeria. Both, then, consider motherhood.

At its best, the poems in Coastal are humane, thoroughly-crafted, and marked by striking detail. Stroke opens with just the right balance of form and feeling, and ends its first stanza with a charming image of innocence verging on the greater world:

Sometimes you will say it to me –
sweetdreams, and the glass houses
of New York City rear up,
my comic books piled high in the closet,
what-ifs again, the white radio
I sleep with my arms around,
my window with 81st Street in it.

The best poems in the collection are those which directly consider Americana – no doubt a timely concern – in a light both nostalgic but aesthetically adept. These are 'In The Paintings of Edward Hopper', 'National Geographic' and 'Elvis'. This is slight, but the music of it is infectious:

climbing the slopes on their horses,
dead ringers for Heathcliff,
the boys from The Grange, Elvis.
Anyplace. Anyplace is. (Elvis)

Unfortunately, some of the poems read as too-slight, like some small craft setting out upon the tide, overwhelmed by the very power of the surge they attempt to coast upon. This sense of scale might be enhanced by the choice of titles (and subjects) which cannot always live up to their better-known precursors. Duran’s 'Fish-houses' does not compare to Elizabeth Bishop’s masterpiece 'At the Fishhouses', nor does her 'Blueberry picking' manage to weigh up against Seamus Heaney’s 'Blackberry Picking'.

Sometimes, too, poems that start out singing slip into a spoken version. For instance, the poem 'To My Mother and Father' begins wonderfully with the line “I miss you as if you were fiction” (reminding us how good a poet Duran can be), but soon descends to the following: “You become inextricable from Manhattan, / New Hampshire, Martha’s Vineyard, / the last reflective windows, uptown din, // the Henry Hudson Parkway”. It is hard to see where this is going as poetry.

So, in places, the sense of wanting to tell a story is too much with the poetry. The poem 'Petit Pain' is more travelogue than anything. Hear how it begins: “Early mornings I go out to buy the petit pain – / light pastry bread with melted chocolate”. This poem’s natural, friendly urge to share so much of the world with the reader is admirable; the resulting lines are not. Coastal, then, is an uneven, but valuable, collection, full of much that is rich and moving.