Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Drives by Leontia Flynn
(Cape Poetry, 2008) 
Not in These Shoes by Samantha Wynn-Rhydderch
(Picador Poetry, 2008)

Drives is Leontia Flynn’s second collection. It consists of a mini odyssey which takes us from Belfast, to Berlin, to New York and LA among other places in the course of over fifty “whistle-stop” poems. In many respects, one feels that too much has been expected of these (largely very short) poems. There has been an attempt to create an intertextual weave through the use of quotations from poetry and song etc, and many of the poems are actually titled with the names of poets such as Bishop and Lowell, as well as other figures such as Hitchcock.

What Flynn does well is to take really strong imagery and couple it to a relaxed diction and a keen sense of humour, and she does this very well in this collection. ‘Belfast’ is very sharply observed and ‘Paris’ has a lovely wry wit:

we’ll feast upon them in the cemetery –
Jim Morrison and Wilde – look! – oeuvre to oeuvre.

Some of the most successful poems in the collection are the ones which are expansive enough to bear the intertextual strategy without being overburdened by it, such as ‘Drive’ and ‘Robert Lowell’.

The milky light of a lobster town in Maine
is light thrown by water. Bleak light. Robert Lowell
in middle age is frizzled stale and sane
he feels his ill-spirit sob in each blood cell

Occasionally though, the poems just prove too slight or throwaway.

though I may ‘drive like Annie Hall’
– as you say – there are those other
days – on which I still
drive like Annie Hall’s brother…

Sometimes they collapse under the weight of the attempted intertextual weave as in ‘Elisabeth Bishop’:

lost parents, houses: she’ll lose exceptionally well,
lover by lover. She even loses her breath.

While in ‘Washington’ the intertextuality strays just too close to a pastiche of ‘Ozymandias’.

I met a traveller, walking in the mall
in Washington, in April, from an antique land,

Over all, the collection is diffuse and disparate and perhaps a little over eager to leap onto the intertextual bandwagon, but there are some fine poems in the book.

By way of contrast, Samantha Wynn-Rhydderch’s Not in These Shoes, is a much more tightly focused collection. This also is a second collection, but this book is driven by a sustained exploration of the opposition between the Heimlich and the Unheimlich. The blurb for the book asserts that it is “an act of uncanny ventriloquism”. It is “uncanny” certainly, but “ventriloquism” undersells it somewhat.

What delighted me about this book was Wynne-Rhydderch’s unerring ability to step inside her characters, to walk around in their shoes. She was definitely not just “working them from the back”.The reader was left with a strong sense of empathy between the poet and her speaking subject.

Wynne-Rhydderch’s imagery is strong and apt for its purpose.The opening poem for instance, uses images of stencilling, sewing and cutting while the speaker thinks about her friend’s autopsy. It is beautifully done. The homely imagery hides the uncanny truth beneath.This is one of the collection’s real successes and what marks Wynne-Rhydderch out as an exceptionally able poet. She develops and plays off that opposition masterfully, using images and motifs related to the domestic and the glamorous and weaving through them the motifs of disaster, death, shipwreck, drowning and loss.

The following examples will serve to illustrate how these pervade the book: In ‘Abandonata’ she describes the domesticity of Scott’s camp but, of course, underlying that, is the fact that this is the site of a doomed expedition. She makes that wonderfully present by coupling the uncanny to the homely where

a visitor has tried a slice
of a hundred year old ham.

Similarly,‘In the Bath’ has the image of an old woman discovered

……….the same colour as
the Radox Aqua bath foam next to her head,
as if ready for burial on the seabed.

Again, the use of the homely Radox Aqua to vividly describe the uncanny nature of what we are being shown is striking.

There is a nod to Plath as she signs off in ‘Snowstorm’:

They’re both drowning in this bell jar.
If I shake it again, their glittery
still encounter whirls submerged.

One feels that she is very cleverly hinting at the unspoken absences in the book, something submerged in the text. The sense this book leaves one with is not unlike what we sense from the close of Villette, and it operates in a similar fashion in the way in which it ramifies back through the book.

One always feels pedantic by spoiling a positive review with quibbles, but I think it is worth pointing out that several times I found line-breaks which occurred after the indefinite article. There seems no compelling reason why they should end so oddly and in a collection with this level of control, including normally very well-controlled lineation, they just seemed sloppy. Perhaps they’ll be sorted when the book is reprinted.