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Adventures in articulation

Clare Pollard reviews Philip Gross’ The Egg of Zero (Bloodaxe £7.95), Caitriona O’Reilly’s The Sea Cabinet (Bloodaxe £7.95) and Annie Freud’s A Voids Officer Achieves the Tree Pose (Donut Press £5)

In this society of rampant individualism, it is unsurprising that for many critics a good poet is one who has found their own, unique voice. There are sound reasons for this preference – consistency of style creates a sense of intimacy and conversation, and it is always lovely to buy, say, the new Paul Farley, and know that certain pleasures can be safely expected. However, the cultivation of a clearly identifi able voice does bring its dangers. Rather like the vocals of Bjork, it may divide readers into the delighted and the irritated. It also means, more worryingly, that style can become detached from subject. There are some remarkable poets out there who, let’s face it, could probably write about putting out the bin and make it sound romantic. And the trouble is that some of them (basically) do. The poet with the unique voice is at risk of their flimsiest anecdote being applauded with ‘More, more!’ And along the way, form and tone can become the knee-jerk reaction of the persona, rather than the very best way of communicating a particular thought, or bearing witness to a necessary truth.

In their own ways, each of these collections wrestles with the question of voice. It is perhaps telling that it is the most experienced of these writers, Philip Gross, whose voice is least defined. Whilst the blurb’s reference to “Philip Gross’s distinctively wide range of tones” tries to make a claim for this inconsistency as particularly Gross-like – the very essence of Gross – the truth is that even after reading his new collection The Egg of Zero twice, I would be hard put to recognise one of his poems in a poetry line-up. Is this good? Bad? Frustrating? Refreshing? Well, like this book, probably a bit of everything.

I loved the ‘found’ poetry of 'Well You May Ask', subtitled ‘14 everyday koans’, with a koan explained as a question for meditation in Zen Buddhism to which no logical answer is possible. It begins:

Do you do it on purpose, the hairs in the bath,
crumbs and smears in the butter, do you lie awake
planning the next day’s irritations, just for me? /
Was there nothing in his behaviour all those years
that gave cause for concern? / Doctor, say
something. Doctor?

This is a brilliant, witty poem, packed with minidramas – whole narratives of love, loss and horror behind each line. I also enjoyed the unsettling examination of consumer culture in 'The Age We Are', where in a world that is “all snacks between meals” a person who upsets a mall’s circulation by sitting down finds

                                 condensing out of the air
of vague vigilance, personnel in tactful uniforms,
the pastel police.

Elsewhere, the horror-movie of 'Out of Town' is a treat. After a man drives a woman into a forest and stops, the persona asks us to

                                  Pull back
to see now, as an owl’s glide
would see: behind its spilled light,

the Fiesta and him in it, hands
tight on the wheel.

We become voyeuristic and predatorial, like the man himself: “marooned / in the tale, in the night, like the Man / or the Hare In The Moon.”

And so the “distinctly wide range of tones” continues. 'Laundry Night' is a pared down fable of ethnic cleansing. Other poems, such as 'A Poppy in Black' flirt with more experimental forms (to me, less successfully):

seed pods spilling their cup
of knowledge charcoal and
re-squandered light and

us     the work of our hands

The only clear thread running through the collection is that of the idea of zero, “that not-quite-defi nable O.” And this, unfortunately, isn’t a subject which brings out the best in Gross, leading as it does to hints at profundity that lead nowhere. Poem after poem ends with mosquitoes itching “some inward crease or fold / they can’t quite reach”, or walkers “seen / then not seen”, or a lion “maybe sleeping, maybe not.” Concluding with the indefinable becomes some kind of shorthand for depth, and it can get a bit wearing. Philip Gross’ finest book was The Wasting Game, about his teenage daughter’s anorexia, because in that he found an urgent, essential subject. In this collection, though his determination to match form to content is admirable, he too often fails to find a subject worth his skill. When he stops writing about nothing, and finds another something, I feel sure Gross will again write greater books than this.

The two newer writers, Caitriona O’Reilly and Annie Freud, have both, in contrast, extremely distinctive voices. O’Reilly’s The Sea Cabinet is full of what Selina Guinness calls “witch-like details” – a medieval iconography of whalebone, unicorns, mermaids, cathedrals, “snaggle-tooth sea-beasts” and birds of prey. One speaker is “Pale with the shit / of nightingales”; another’s x-rayed spine is a “tree of life”; a falcon is a “little angel in her hangman’s hood.” This is intelligent poetry, steeped with love of knowledge – full of fascinating historical detail and a sense of the poet’s literary ancestors. There is also, in O’Reilly’s best work, self-knowledge at work. The book contains a cluster of stunning poems about depression. 'Gravitations' asks

is it the principle
of gravity in me –

that waking
is falling, lying still

is falling?

'Persona' tells us “If dreams are rooms in which my self accretes, / They also breathe their black into my day,” whilst 'The Maze' conjures an awful, claustrophobic sense of the self’s “wincing walls.”

The modern world intrudes into these pages only as ugliness. In 'Floater', the shape swimming before her eye makes her demand “what vandal took a house key / to the windscreen?” A deserted swimming pool sprouts grass “like hairs from a pensioner’s nose.” 'To the Muse' – the most powerful poem in the collection – ends with

                                    the hung-over

driver glowering on the school bus
whose indecent advances the evening before

brought the masonry of my childhood definitely
                                                             tumbling,
confirming even my worst imaginings.

Next to this modern monster (who is, in some horrible way, O’Reilly’s muse himself), her sea-beasts seem merely parchment, and almost a comfort, an escape.

There are flaws here. Her image bank is narrow, and so metaphors often seem automatic rather than new-coined for each poem (does 'A Deserted House' really need to contain another whale skeleton?). Such is O’Reilly’s talent for atmosphere that some poems also become merely that – 'Six Landscapes' are described in lovely detail, but seem like exercises looking for a point. However, when she enters into emotional landscapes, Caitriona O’Reilly’s is a beautiful and arresting voice – as in the poem about absent love, 'Electrical Storm', where “The voice of the storm became your voice, / its lightning, your eyes’ most delicate veins.”

To say Annie Freud’s voice is distinct is like saying J. K. Rowling is well-off. She is, I am certain, one of those phenomena that will divide people, like black olives. I love black olives, but am still pleased that Freud has released her small, beautifully-made booklet A Voids Officer Achieves The Tree Pose with Donut, ahead of her full collection with Picador next year. It gives one a chance to acquire a taste for her very odd, grownup flavour, before being faced with a whole Freudian feast. Every poem is a teeming multiplicity of obscure cultural reference-points, unusual words (streptocarpus, anyone?) and casual surrealism, and I’m still not entirely sure what most of them are saying. But it is almost churlish to gripe about this when faced with a true original, who can produce lines like “As a delaying tactic, she bangs another Frenchman”, or write movingly of 'The Inventor of The Individual Fruit Pie', or tell us in the strangely sad yet sexy 'The Green Vibrator'

I’d have done better
with a robot
in a morning suit.
He’d have set fire to the place
with his amiable short circuits,
turned my whites blue,
and flooded the bathroom nightly.

As to the question of style and content, Freud’s subject seems to me mainly the Strange World of Annie Freud, and thus style and content are almost the same thing. Her verse disorientates, like putting on a pair of glasses that aren’t yours. And as I refuse to be one of those critics who litter history condemning Modernism etc, and assuming that things are nonsense just because they don’t understand them, I will instead take a gamble on the opposite. For all my puzzlement, I was left wondering if, just maybe, this booklet might be the first publication of an important voice.

O’Reilly and Freud would both be easy to mimic, and the danger of their slipping into self-parody is great. Having staked out such particular territories early in their writing careers, they both risk their stylistic quirks acting like O’Reilly’s 'Floater' with its “crayon-scrawl” – vandalising our view of each individual poem’s subject. However, the “snake-tongue darts” of their corrupted vision can be a lot more fascinating than a clear view of nothing, and ultimately, whether the reader prefers Gross’s wide range to Freud’s inescapable Freudiness is just a matter of taste. I personally shall look forward to reading more from all three of these poets in future, as they continue in their adventures in articulation.