Poetry Chronicle
Review
Adam Thorpe, Nine Lessons from the Dark, £8.00, Jonathan Cape, ISBN 0224063855
Adam Schwartzman, The Book of Stones, £7.95, Carcanet,
ISBN 1857546407
Jean Sprackland, Hard Water, £8.00, Jonathan Cape,
ISBN 0224069594
Chrissie Gittins, Armature, £8.95, Arc, ISBN 190007270X,
Greg Delanty, The Ship of Birth, £7.95, Carcanet, ISBN 1903039630
The poet and novelist Adam Thorpe’s fourth collection, Nine Lessons from the Dark, is a triumph of craftsmanship – in the fullest sense of the term.While some poets rely on an arid formalism to disguise their lack of anything to say, Thorpe writes like a man in love with language, with the sheer possibilities of words. His work is musical, brimming with slant rhyme and assonance (“the same dammed and secret pond / dinted by drowned trees”), and also subtle in its effects, with rhymes coming in mid-line or a few lines apart. In “The Hummingbirds”, Thorpe generates a dazzling flow of images of the eponymous creatures – “tiny bright vowels on the edge / of becoming // words murmured in sleep that amaze or something never / said // revived just once like a peacock’s shiver of too many eyes that / first time // in sunlight in a cage”.
More representative, though, is the calmly measured “Cairn”, in which a group of hikers encounter dangerous weather on their way up a mountain. When they finally reach the top, they discover a prehistoric cairn: “a huddle of granite as near / as bereavement, like a small tomb, like fear // that had dragged us to face it from where / we were safe in the glen; unnerved and blinking here”. With his feel for metre and line, Thorpe occasionally suggests Larkin (“The Blitz in Ealing”, “Limbo”) or Geoffrey Hill; multi-part poems about Saxon Britain and West Kennet Long Barrow recall the latter poet’s Mercian Hymns. But Thorpe, despite some longueurs, possesses his own imaginative voice, capable of both colloquial and arcane diction (haulm, blebbed, crucks, frass and isopleth, for example) and pushing in places towards a riskier, less restrained utterance.
The autobiographical sequence “Scratchings” jumps from a Burger King in America to Nîmes via Essex and Warsaw, its style changing from section to section. This nonlinear structure produces some of Thorpe’s most inspired writing, such as in the fifth section, a syntax-stretching, headlong rush into adolescence: “So mad I might be, in the dim / twilight of woods, your deadleaf-coloured stroke of fortune // falling into sunlight or far-off clash of trolleys like wind-stroked wheat / where once wheat was – and before that the madness of pure trees”. He juxtaposes that frenzy with an exquisitely controlled elegy for his wife’s uncle Dante, a ceramics maker who painted “pots the colour of pools and trees and moments one remembers / as moments, his swift brush-strokes strokes of memory one waits for / for hours”.
Another poet adept at sequences, the 30-year-old South African writer Adam Schwartzman brings a modernist flair to his expansive, Whitmanesque meditations in The Book of Stones, piling up vivid images through repetition and list making. In the opening poem – a kind of incantation beckoning the author (or “A”) back to his homeland – Schwartzman uses the refrain “Come A” as a starting point for multiple riffs on the idea of Africa.“Come A, the stars have dripped into the upturned jars, / and the coals blush / and the fires sting like cuts”, or “Come A, as soon as you can, / before the cool earth enters the soles of our feet, / before we melt through the ears of corn”. Yet Schwartzman knows when to rein in his mystical tendencies; later on in the piece, his language takes on a harder edge: “So come A, / be a brilliant child racing towards a calamity, / be a whore to the right touch, / be reckless and breakable, / . . . but come”. Though Schwartzman’s poetry is lyrical and associative, loaded with similes (the word like probably occurs a hundred times in this volume), it’s rarely overloaded – a core of plain speech (“He fucks all the women in this town”, “I’m tired of this pretty love”) keeps it grounded. He’s good, too, at small flashes of perception, such as the five-line poem that ends “The soft fruit throbs under my thumbs, // its muscular chambers lie open, / each an aorta packed with glistening seeds”.
His visionary impulse is at its most focused and bewitching in “Me, I Will Be With You”, a sequence in which he adopts the persona of an animal spirit, or god, who appears “at the gates of your city”: “I am inclusive of all the protagonists. / I wear feathers like a conquistador . . . . / I have come to steal your souls in a box.” After he threatens various mischief in three brief sections, the fourth comes as a dramatically sprawling list of all the places he plans to infiltrate, from the city’s quays to its power plant to its libraries, and so on: “it will be me, // me in the shipping-ways, / me in the oceans pitted like pincushions, / me in the veins of sap scraped in the jet-streams, // me in the water of your skin – ”. In what is only his second collection, Schwartzman displays a style and assurance that belie his youth, and amply reward the reader.
Jean Sprackland’s second collection, on the other hand, is a disappointment: Hard Water strains mightily after effect, and often misses. Pieces like “Synchronized Drowning” and “Love-Song to a Parking Meter” do what they say on the tin (or in the title): opening with a quirky conceit, Sprackland elaborates upon it in predictable, laboured detail. “You give me exactly what I pay for: / two pounds sixty for one hour”, she lauds the eponymous meter.“No debts run up, . . . / no strings attached”. Driving home her point, she adds, “We deal together / cleanly and without coercion”.While the concept of inanimate object as ideal relationship partner may be novel, the writing simply fails to live up to it, with needless line breaks and little sense of prosody. Similarly, in “The Mission”, a group of "dissidents" steal into a cryonics centre to liberate some corpses, animal-activist style. But the poem draws only an obvious conclusion, that waking up in a future world might be lonely and alienating. “[T]hink of it: everyone you know is gone, / . . . your neighbourhood erased, / every detail unimaginably different.”
Sprackland is best when she eschews cheap surrealism and sticks to
reality. The snappy title poem is an ode to the bracing harshness of the hard water she grew up drinking (and, by extension, to the place she grew up in) – “Flat. Straight. Like the vowels, / like the straight talk: hey up me duck”. In another childhood episode, she remembers playing with “next-door Julie”, successfully evoking a pre-teen milieu of best friends and bike rides with a few taut stanzas. The poem closes with the pair sneaking out to an empty paddock:
She always made the first move,
casual and bold by the electric fence.
She bet me anything it wasn’t on.
Touch it. I dare you. I said it first.
. . . I thought I could hear the current
singing in the cable. I reached out.
One of the more striking debuts of 2003 was Armature, by Chrissie
Gittins, a longish collection (incorporating two previously published
pamphlets) with enough surprises to keep me reading to the end. The contents range from the autobiographical – facing a loved one’s Alzheimer’s (“Your hand, curled like a sepal, / waves from side to side through the blank window”), or travelling through Southeast Asia – to bizarre excursions into other characters’ voices. An archangel: “I am an elderly lady with a stammer, / . . . I live in a chewing gum ball, / I live in a jacket”. Gittins’s deadpan tone and skewed perspective mark her out as a true original.
In “Gutted”, a child confides, “Telly’s rubbish in the day. The adverts are alright. / I want to spear a dummy with a bayonet”. Elsewhere, an ambiguous protagonist (nanny? jealous sibling?) admits, with unsettling candour, to abusing a baby: “My job is to make our baby smile. / . . . If Mummy is gone a long time / I get her skin between my fingernails and squeeze. / . . . I’m definitely more interesting than her toys”. And in “The Withdrawing Room”, Gittins plays the part of a disenchanted mother conducting a tour of her National Trust-listed home. Between judgments on its architectural features (“Limed staircase, carved here with boring hearts and diamonds”) the owner lets slip gnomic facts about her life (“I went to university the same year as my daughter. / She was a bit put out when I got a first, / we phoned each other every day”). Gittins characterises her speakers through disjunctive, seemingly random pronouncements that manage to betray their vulnerability, longing and frustration – she has a genuine gift.
Speaking of gifts, a new or expectant father is perhaps the only person who’d enjoy receiving The Ship of Birth, Greg Delanty’s collection of poems to his unborn son (or, in Delanty’s coy address, “our little lambkin”, “our first miteling”,“our sprout”,“our snowdrop”,“our sulking mouse”, etc.). Despite the incessant use of our and we, the experience of pregnancy is seen solely through the author’s eyes, thus affording him endless opportunity for making metaphors of his wife’s body, particularly her uterus (“the spacecraft of your ma”, “your small room”, “your igloo”, “dirigible, hot air, gas bag and rocketoon”, “the pelvic butterfly of your ma”), culminating in the baby’s glorious arrival: “shot from the dilatory, dilative distaff / opening of your ma, the human cannon herself, / lit . . . nine months ago by your father”. The little lambkin will surely love reading that one day.
Page(s) 98-102
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