Reviews:
John Lindley; Colin Robinson; Vuyelwa Carlin and Amanda Dalton
SCARECROW CRIMES – John Lindley
New Hope International, 20 Werneth Avenue, Gee Cross, Hyde,
Cheshire SK14 5NL £4.50
QUIGGINS AT THE CONFERENCE - Colin Robinson
New Hope International, 20 Werneth Avenue, Gee Cross, Hyde,
Cheshire SK14 5NL £4.50
MARBLE SKY - Vuyelwa Carlin
Seren, 38-40 Nolton Street, Bridgend CF31 3BN £6.95
NOTTINGHAM POETRY SOCIETY SIXTY - selected by Amanda Dalton
Poetry Nottingham Publications, PO Box 6740, Nottingham NG5 1QG £3.50
John Lindley’s poems exist in the twilight zone between the merely
fanciful and the genuinely disturbing. There is humour and cleverness and whimsy. Heartfelt feeling is generally side-stepped, though a poem about a mother’s last illness achieves a wry, dry wistfulness. The best pieces are the spookiest. The poet finds a doll’s arm and a plastic comb while raking leaves and comments: Somewhere I dread a doll treads/ handless through a crowded toy chest;/ no instrument left/ to tame her knotted blonde tresses. This is a nice, creepy image, though ‘dread’ overstates the response to such an unlikely object of horror. Lindley is a good writer, with a nice command of extravagant imagery, and would be a better one if he dug deeper. The Elmer McCurdy sequence takes us through the posthumous adventures of a Western bad man and will be of interest to all fans of The Mummy Roadshow.
Colin Robinson is at best tiptoeing round the awfulness of the corporate world. The protagonist of The Simulacrum is a man who has slipped through the net and is on the payroll of a firm without actually having a job. Every day he turns up at the office, pretends to be busy, and hides out in vacant meeting rooms or on the roof. Robinson’s ineffectual, male protagonists rebel feebly against the system. They are attendant Lords, not Prince Hamlet. Quiggins in the title poem subverts his conference 54 by arriving late for a lecture and then leaves before the end. As he passes through the formal garden on his way home the flowers whose names he doesn’t know rebuke him with their stares. In the hinterland beyond the world of the disgusting job lurk creatures of myth and magic. Robinson’s characters have few dealings with them, but know that they are out there, and are tormented by their promises or threats of release. In The Wanderer a husband, betrayed by the wife for whom he doubleglazed half Hertfordshire, wanders pointlessly around Europe, like an anti-Odysseus, shifting and drifting and awaiting the whirlpool. If it is terrible to be in bondage, it is just as terrible to be set free. In the lovely and atypical A Witch Dancing a young girl flies magically through the air, twirling a skipping rope, with free-flowing hair and slow-trailing feet. Robinson uses traditional rhyme and metre, the better to point a joke, but don’t write him off for being neat and funny. This collection is also serious, subtle, and terribly sad. I love it.
Vuyelwa Carlin’s marble sky looks down upon the world of hard facts - no softness, no dreaming - that is all of reality that exists for the autistic child. Is the child to be pitied for seeing only Straights, simplicities./‘one entire and perfect chrysolite’ ? Perhaps - and then again, perhaps not. Saints have longed for such a pure and incorruptible vision. In the final sequence the autistic child has mutated into an anchorite, alone on the hard mountain, indulging in a thankless, medieval wrestling match with God. The poems, too, aspire after hardness. They are collections of shards or splinters, imagistic - purged of the softness and redundancy of everyday speech. I like and admire them enormously, but am reminded of
a little poem by Auden in which the poet bounding down the mountain side salutes the pilgrims straining up at it with their staffs and big hats. Like Auden, I want softness, sexiness, jokes. I greet Carlin in passing, then shiver slightly, glad to be headed elsewhere.
Congratulations to Nottingham Poetry Society on the occasion of its sixtieth birthday (two years ago). This collection, selected by Amanda Dalton, contains work by all those current members who wished to be represented. The principle that ‘everybody has won and all must have prizes’ means that the standard is considerably lower than one would expect, say, from the society’s excellent magazine Poetry Nottingham International. As Dalton herself says in her ‘introduction’, the project has left her with the sneaking suspicion that there are still too many people who write poetry without reading it - or at least without reading contemporary writers. Criticism is disarmed by such editorial frankness. This is a collection which friends and relatives of the poets will enjoy without reserve. The best single poem, by several laps of the caucus race, is Bernice Read's angry and chilling Family History.
New Hope International, 20 Werneth Avenue, Gee Cross, Hyde,
Cheshire SK14 5NL £4.50
QUIGGINS AT THE CONFERENCE - Colin Robinson
New Hope International, 20 Werneth Avenue, Gee Cross, Hyde,
Cheshire SK14 5NL £4.50
MARBLE SKY - Vuyelwa Carlin
Seren, 38-40 Nolton Street, Bridgend CF31 3BN £6.95
NOTTINGHAM POETRY SOCIETY SIXTY - selected by Amanda Dalton
Poetry Nottingham Publications, PO Box 6740, Nottingham NG5 1QG £3.50
John Lindley’s poems exist in the twilight zone between the merely
fanciful and the genuinely disturbing. There is humour and cleverness and whimsy. Heartfelt feeling is generally side-stepped, though a poem about a mother’s last illness achieves a wry, dry wistfulness. The best pieces are the spookiest. The poet finds a doll’s arm and a plastic comb while raking leaves and comments: Somewhere I dread a doll treads/ handless through a crowded toy chest;/ no instrument left/ to tame her knotted blonde tresses. This is a nice, creepy image, though ‘dread’ overstates the response to such an unlikely object of horror. Lindley is a good writer, with a nice command of extravagant imagery, and would be a better one if he dug deeper. The Elmer McCurdy sequence takes us through the posthumous adventures of a Western bad man and will be of interest to all fans of The Mummy Roadshow.
Colin Robinson is at best tiptoeing round the awfulness of the corporate world. The protagonist of The Simulacrum is a man who has slipped through the net and is on the payroll of a firm without actually having a job. Every day he turns up at the office, pretends to be busy, and hides out in vacant meeting rooms or on the roof. Robinson’s ineffectual, male protagonists rebel feebly against the system. They are attendant Lords, not Prince Hamlet. Quiggins in the title poem subverts his conference 54 by arriving late for a lecture and then leaves before the end. As he passes through the formal garden on his way home the flowers whose names he doesn’t know rebuke him with their stares. In the hinterland beyond the world of the disgusting job lurk creatures of myth and magic. Robinson’s characters have few dealings with them, but know that they are out there, and are tormented by their promises or threats of release. In The Wanderer a husband, betrayed by the wife for whom he doubleglazed half Hertfordshire, wanders pointlessly around Europe, like an anti-Odysseus, shifting and drifting and awaiting the whirlpool. If it is terrible to be in bondage, it is just as terrible to be set free. In the lovely and atypical A Witch Dancing a young girl flies magically through the air, twirling a skipping rope, with free-flowing hair and slow-trailing feet. Robinson uses traditional rhyme and metre, the better to point a joke, but don’t write him off for being neat and funny. This collection is also serious, subtle, and terribly sad. I love it.
Vuyelwa Carlin’s marble sky looks down upon the world of hard facts - no softness, no dreaming - that is all of reality that exists for the autistic child. Is the child to be pitied for seeing only Straights, simplicities./‘one entire and perfect chrysolite’ ? Perhaps - and then again, perhaps not. Saints have longed for such a pure and incorruptible vision. In the final sequence the autistic child has mutated into an anchorite, alone on the hard mountain, indulging in a thankless, medieval wrestling match with God. The poems, too, aspire after hardness. They are collections of shards or splinters, imagistic - purged of the softness and redundancy of everyday speech. I like and admire them enormously, but am reminded of
a little poem by Auden in which the poet bounding down the mountain side salutes the pilgrims straining up at it with their staffs and big hats. Like Auden, I want softness, sexiness, jokes. I greet Carlin in passing, then shiver slightly, glad to be headed elsewhere.
Congratulations to Nottingham Poetry Society on the occasion of its sixtieth birthday (two years ago). This collection, selected by Amanda Dalton, contains work by all those current members who wished to be represented. The principle that ‘everybody has won and all must have prizes’ means that the standard is considerably lower than one would expect, say, from the society’s excellent magazine Poetry Nottingham International. As Dalton herself says in her ‘introduction’, the project has left her with the sneaking suspicion that there are still too many people who write poetry without reading it - or at least without reading contemporary writers. Criticism is disarmed by such editorial frankness. This is a collection which friends and relatives of the poets will enjoy without reserve. The best single poem, by several laps of the caucus race, is Bernice Read's angry and chilling Family History.
Page(s) 53-55
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The