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Susan Wicks: The Clever Daughter. London: Faber, £6.99.
Matthew Francis: Blizzard. London: Faber, £6.99.

     Some great stories just up and die: any little boy or girl nowadays pointing out that the Emperor is in the buff would merely reveal himself or herself in need of counselling or therapy or - it’s much the same thing - poetry.  For we’re all naturists now, and every pimple, secretion, haemorrhoid, emission, blemish, slit and scar is a thing of beauty and a joy for verse. Everything is significant, profound, precious; life (and death), once versified, one long epiphany. And so it is unfashionable to enter a plea for embarrassment as a valuable inhibitor of versifying and a meaningful and discriminating term in criticism. And this reader is embarrassed to have to confess that the work of Susan Wicks makes him cringe.

     Such embarrassment itself may be merely embarrassing; it is certainly unfashionable. Faber & Faber clearly think highly of Susan Wicks.  Since 1992 they have published three volumes of poetry, the first promising predictively “many epiphanies”; a short novel, The Key; and a prose memoir, Driving My Father - the last in the tradition of Blake Morrison’s best-selling (and embarrassing) And when did you last see your father?, though Wicks’s version is more “poetic”, fragmented and - that word again - epiphanic. The Clever Daughter is a Poetry Book Society Choice. And all the blurbs record the critics’ appreciative if impressionistic comments - “writing in a special three-dimensional ink”; “her writing has a bloom on it”; “poems which hop across spaces you don’t know you’re missing until it’s too late”. Such evidence suggests that one has mistaken bloom for blush and that any embarrassment should be hopped over.

     Once upon a time children sang robustly of their ‘Grandfather’s Clock’; nowadays children cherish their father’s snot, and read father’s handkerchiefs as religious runes or psychotherapeutic Rorschach tests:

                        Each week
I find them again, wreckage
of crippled beasts and flowers
to flutter or creep or scuttle
into my machine
as I try to name them: butterfly,
tortoise, crane, crab, lily,
cygnet, crane, crane, crane, crane.
                      (‘My Father’s Handkerchiefs’)

So, drawing on our ornithological knowledge, we can infer that father’s “latest creations” - and creativity is ubiquitous and always a good thing - are predominantly long, stretchy ones; and washing his grief-marked linen in public is courageous therapy, better out than in. Everything is a (poetic) blessing. Your ‘Father is Shrinking’? Fear not; there are wonderful opportunities for bonding here -

When he comes to my knees,
I shall pick him up and rock him,
rub my face on the white
stubble of his cheek,
see his silver skull
gleam up at me
through thin combings.
              (‘My Father is Shrinking’)

Even in her wildest dreams, Cordelia never managed as much as that.  And if there is a fantasy of revenge on the patriarch lurking here, then that’s a good thing too. 

     Another poem threatens unfashionably and unfeelingly to celebrate technological progress in an uncharacteristically brilliant opening line:

A microwave has replaced my mother.

But like a child at Christmas, the poem fails to enjoy this gift, and is instead distracted by the wrapping - here bubble-wrap - in order to elevate the fact that mum’s just popped off to poetic heights:

Buried in her things I found a picture
of bubbles, drawn in my childhood,
the bright circles crowding up to heaven
with primitive passion, my own
oh dear one’s popped, trying
to describe departure.
                            (‘Bubbles’)

     Do not take a hotel room next door to a Susan Wicks poem.  It will eavesdrop on - and reverence - your every movement:

                           I hear them,
the hiss of their late-night shower
on the tiled  wall, their urine
running in the bowl, her precise footsteps.
                                (‘Human Geometry’)

     These poems characteristically work by assimilation and analogy - and the habit is catching. Thus Wicks’s verse may remind the reader of the physicality and eroticism of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, of the journeyings and explorations of Adrienne Rich and - in some of its narratives - of Angela Carter’s revisionings of familiar tales. Perhaps, too, in its concerns with daughters in landscapes and with the plastic and visual arts, of Charles Tomlinson’s recreations in words of the “ceremony of the eye”. Certainly a Ted-Hughes-Charles-Tomlinson-and-every-other-contemporary-poet fox obligingly puts in a fleeting epiphanic appearance on the evening mother dies. And while Wicks gets her volume’s title from a poem on ‘The Clever Daughter’, her ‘Midas’ which declares “Your precious daughter/ is starting to resemble you” gets nearer to the mannered, pseudo-intensities of this work. So many of these poems end sonorously, ponderously, wonderingly with a Leonard Cohen-ish “like a...”: “like a solution”, “like damp wings”, “like a split stone”, “like green footprints”, “like kisses”, “like a baby”, “like stitches”, “like September lightning”, “like a lover, a lost child,/ her own heart”. These, together with a couple of terminal “as if”s and further “like a”s and “as if”s scattered through the body of almost every poem, leave one yearning to be free of such unrelenting imaginative assimilation, yearning for distinction or discrimination, for an “utterly different from”, or even one solitary, humble “unlike”.

     But the will to assimilation, often overriding logic and exploiting poetic licence to “justify” such heterogeneous yokings, never lets up. The process is recorded again and again - “resemble”, “fusing”, “become”, “melting”, “almost/ fuse”, “merge”, “melts”.  The full oddity of this appears in the way that the ambiguity of “likeness” becomes, in the context of Wicks’s verse, self-cancelling:

                                     My own face
mouths at me, wrinkled
to the likeness of a stranger.
                                (‘Changeling’)

And a manifesto, insofar as it is intelligible, emerges in ‘Weir’:

                                  In moving water
our world is precious as wreckage,
its sunken carcass rolled and
remade; the impact of a drop
rings us like deep treasure.     (‘Weir’)

“Waste not, want not” elevated to worldly proportions. A minority of critics have lamented what they have described as the domestic insignificance of Wicks’s work - erroneously, for this verse is international in its scope and ubiquitously significant. Feminists, moreover, are rightly irritated by the implication here that the domestic is not a subject for poetry. For anything is a fit subject for verse. But everything, I would insist, is not. And the voracious tyranny of  Wicks’s ostensibly open and wondering writing, ever driven to “redeem and redeem”, assimilates everything, renders the whole world as epiphany, and, like counselling and therapy,  cannot and will not tolerate waste, meaninglessness, loss, triviality or insignificance. It all preciously (and embarrassingly) coheres - like sticky goo.

     Matthew Francis’s Blizzard is concerned not with likeness, but strangeness, most usually figured in spatial metaphors as strange landscapes, hitherto unnoticed inner worlds, “news from outside”, all of which are characteristically evoked in odd ways involving synesthesia or other transformations and inversions. “Today the air/ was full of falling” (describing autumn); “Today is louder than it needs to be”; “The world takes some eating”; “Soon/ the grains of twilight formed in the air,/ fidgeting like gnats.” Blizzard is heavily indebted to the works of  W.S. Graham, a poet Francis clearly admires to the extent that Graham is currently the subject of his doctoral study: from Graham he gets (perhaps too much of) a reflexive concern with language, poetry and punning; invitations to make the poem as it goes along; and the notion of writing as strange night travel (as in Graham’s ‘The Nightfishing’). As a first volume, Blizzard manifests an understandable concern to show off and tries too hard: displays claiming technical virtuosity begin with ‘Beestorm in West Middlesex’, a poem of repeating lines which owes more to the Cut/Copy/Paste of the word-processor than to the muse, and ‘Again’, a villanelle with little reason for being such. At times the verse is overwritten - literally so in the overlong sequence which gives the collection its title - and, lacking restraint, it tends to write away strangeness into the disappointment of the skittish, the twee, the jokey and the not so very clever-clever. Francis “does” an attempt to tune a radio (“wubwubwub. Number wub in the chart.”) before asking “Getting anything?”. There are tweakings of literary tradition: “by the waters of Lapsang/ I lay down and wept”; “Thou wast not born for sleep, insomniac bird”. Martianisms appear as, for example, a clock “roosting on a live record-player,/ shrieked its alarm”, or winter reveals the trees as “black wires/ that held the leaves together”. Jokes are laboured. Of a shabby room:

                                                    Maybe
people had lived harder in this room
and it had room fatigue.
                                         (‘Towards Midnight’)

Most of all, Francis would do well to unlearn the mannerisms of contemporary poetry where syntax is mangled and line and stanza endings are exploited to ensure, in the idiom of the bad Practical Criticism class, that form “enacts meaning” (witness Wicks’s peeing across stanzas above):

                                but my breath
couldn’t quite reach
my brain suddenly. . .
                                (‘After the Bee’)

There’s grass underfoot and the wind is
longer. . .    (‘A Blind Man in the Forest’)
 
and the haunting scent entwines you
of expiring PVC.
   (‘Poem Found in a Box of Indoor Fireworks’)

That was a cirrus day,
frozen and frail
and far away.
   (‘Cirrus Day’)

     But locally in Blizzard there are some good things too: the  awkward self-consciousness of sleeplessness in a strange bed conveyed by “unstowable, twitching,/ too long for my limbs”; melting snow on a wall “thinning to floss”; the first, barely perceptible snow caught as a “forming flake/ locked up a hint of water.”  Moreover, there is evidence here of a largeness of ambition and imagination, most sustainedly present in ‘Towards Midnight’ - where the strangeness of a Mandevillean trip to a sunless world is of itself strange enough to render “poetic” and technical coercion into oddness unnecessary -  to suggest that Francis’s next volume will be worth reading. As yet, his poetry simply is not strange enough.