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Voice Mail by Duncan Forbes
(2002, reprinted 2004, ISBN 900564 92 0, Enitharmon Press, 26B Caversham Road, London NW5 2DU, 144pp, £8.95)

Beautiful cover – David Hockney’s painting “The Valley”, with intriguing blues and purples. But the book is one of those Selected collections which is difficult to review, there’s no apparent structure and a lot of poems (103  I counted); with that many, it’s asking a lot of the reader if they’re just randomly arranged – especially when there are no sequences. I guess I’m also saying that none of the poems are quite striking enough to get around this.

   Broadly, Duncan Forbes seems to write three types of poems: exotic / travel; personal  / relationship; attempted humour / satire. The book opens with a prize-winning piece about the California tar-pit “La Brea”, which is tightly written but seems to me marred by personification and anthropomorphism:

     “I am the tarred and feathered stork
     Who flapped its limbs until they stuck…

     I am the grief of a giant sloth
     Who drank the water of black death…
 
     I am the skull of the only human,
     Anonymous La Brea Woman…

     The eagle and the condor drown
     In liquid nightfall underground.”
                                                                             (from La Brea)

Good last line, but the “I” voice doesn’t work, especially not for the “grief of a giant sloth”. And what’s the poet doing with the La Brea pit anyway, other than listing its contents? The poem invites comparison with Heaney’s bog poems, but those avoid awkwardness of voice and work because they establish an interesting resonance with the poet’s times.

   In fact, Forbes seems to consciously invoke other poets in a number of places. A more successful poem is “Shark”, with its obvious debt to Blake’s Tyger: “Off what continental shelf / In the current of itself / Did the shark devise its smirk, / Sudden bite and savage jerk?”.

Or “Ithaka”, which is a nicely shimmering poem, evoking Cavafy’s masterpiece of the same name:

     “The cicadas are making arid rackets with their ratchets
     in the olives and the pine trees
     on the desiccated ground.”

My favourite poem is from Forbes’ personal mode. “Father” is a very effective and moving elegy, which is also extremely interesting to read because of its natural use of details from the dead parent’s life:

     “The Hausa Grammar, foxed
     from his days as the ‘plausible Major’
     with the West Africa Corps
     in Northern Nigeria till
     bilharzias saved the doctor
     from Burma and the war.”

However, Forbes’ attempts at humour / satire seemed truly dreadful; forced and humourless, in the extraordinarily irritating way that only verse which thinks it’s funny can be.

   A good example is the “Downing Street Cat”, a bit of doggerel about the wretched Blair: “I’ve never been a minister or high in public office / But there is nothing sinister in voting for a novice.” Notice how sloppy the use of sinister is, how unearned in the context of the line. Of course, Blair is sinister, but it’s exactly the wrong word here – almost but not quite right, so miles off – used just to get the rhyme with “minister”.

   Even worse is the obligatory rant about George W, using (yawn) an excruciatingly unconvincing Wild West voice:

     “Son of a bitch
     son of a gun
     better decide
     which side you’re on…

     Man with a mandate
     land of the free
     I gotta date
     with destiny…

     Mood of the people’s
     tough and mean.
     Nobody cripples
     our war machine.

     We’ll teach the shitty
     infidel
     to bomb our city
     and burn in hell.”

Playing to the gallery has removed all need for thought: the 9/11 attacks weren’t bombs, nor did they cripple the American war machine; even the most basic details are wrong. Irrespective of one’s views on Afghanistan (which this poem seems to be about) or Iraq, it’s writing which presumes agreement from its audience and so makes no effort at all. It’s lazily self-satisfied and unoriginal, and in portraying Bush as a moron it convincingly casts the writer in that role. How about a poem attacking the numerous crimes of Islamic fanaticism? That would be interesting.