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Nathan Hamilton introduces three highly praised first collections

Simon Barraclough
Los Alamos Mon Amour
Salt £12.99

Isobel Dixon
A Fold In The Map
Salt £12.99

Adam Foulds
The Broken Word
Jonathan Cape £9.00

Simon Barraclough’s Los Alamos Mon Amour is a likeable first collection – likeable in the way a wry-humoured film-buff bar-mate might be. The amusingly overstated atomic first meeting described in the collection’s title poem, where poet and reader also meet, sets the tone for the collection. It displays dark humour and accessibility as strengths yet, with its more ludic trajectory, falls short of something. Barraclough is at his strongest and most comfortable when dryly recounting a relationship gone wrong, describing a faux pas or foible, or riffing around pop culture, particularly the cinematic, as he does in ‘Psycho’, ‘Pike’ and many others. Witty one-liners such as ‘Philandering was your one and only optimism’ entertain and sustain this collection a good distance. The unpretentious, direct tone is genuine and invites engagement, and yet the poems are sometimes a little too much at pains to seem demotic, pub-dwelling, and blokeish. There may be just a few too many ‘my palm around my pint’ moments – the odd slightly forced epiphany in the gritty everyday.

   ‘Pike’ is a good example of the book’s highs and slight lows. An encounter with a steaming sake and a deep-fried fish sparks a memory of:

The summer of Jaws and tucked-up legs,

invented verrucas, sliding Sunday nights
down the gullet of the weekend bath:

feeling like Quint kicking at teeth, puking blood.

English pikes are as fearful as Spielberg’s Great White in the over-excited imaginings of the poet’s younger mind. We recall how the afterimages of a film can inform playful fears – and yet these are only ever half-believed; one is complicit in one’s own self-deception. We imagine it for the fun of the game, much as we do in poetry, the poem here suggests. This is of the English romantic tradition, where a remembered time mixes in the imagination to infuse and even liberate the present. And then the inevitable return to the adult everyday, with the questionable last line: “I take it apart with chopsticks.”

   As a climax, this doesn’t quite work; through reaching for a poetic significance the moment doesn’t have, the poem misfires. It says: I am a man now, and have no time for such childish imaginings. I am picking them apart and eating them up and really they are dead and soon gone, like this poor fish. As a line, however, it doesn’t move enough for the weight placed on it. Similarly, in ‘Psycho’, where again the cinematic references abound, the last line – ‘the still silent face by my side’ – is too predictable; for all its hoped-for resonance – chilling, or touching, ambiguous – it doesn’t resonate.

   But there are traits to admire also. Barraclough is often visually strong. A fine example is a section of the poem ‘Modern & Obsolete’ in which we see:

a Victorian dissection of a watch, each tiny cog and spring

sewn into place like the bones of a shrew or an exploded
map of the engine room of the human ear.

He is playful around the more political. ‘The Dream Song of Saddam Hussein’ is a good example, with a decent nod at Berryman. The arrangement of the poems is also often shrewd – with one preparing the ground for the next. There is filler, like the ‘Corrie Sonnet’ and ‘Paper Not Loaded’ and, in the witty borrowings from cinema, there is sometimes not enough that’s poetry. A strong visual or cinematic reference doesn’t always translate to an impact on the reader beyond amused recognition. But the bottom line is that Barraclough has a good ear, and normally employs it well, with enjoyably jazzy rhythms, rarely lapsing into a chatty, chopped-up-prose mode. His sound is a good one and there’s plenty here to indicate that, with a little more editing, the diagnosis is indeed ‘Outlook Good’, as the title of the collection’s last poem suggests.

The title of Isobel Dixon’s collection, A Fold in the Map, is, as Dixon mentions in the acknowledgements, a nod to Jan Morris’s Trieste And The Meaning Of Nowhere. It deals, among other things, with the divided state of the traveller, an ‘in between’ quality which prevails throughout this accessible collection. One feels that the mentioned fold is an imagined emotional fault-line running through the poet; a split between, in the book’s first half, the present ‘here’ of England and the past ‘there’ of Africa.

In the first section, ‘Plenty’, we are introduced to a remembered childhood, a full house, and the landscapes and sounds of South Africa. Dixon has a good nerve for speech rhythms and can construct, or intuit, pleasing cadences. Her voice is largely unpretentious, intimate also – well suited to her lyric mode. She is good when conjuring a sense of place, as she does well with ‘Weather Eye’, and, when speaking of the tensions and heartache of distance – in the exile from homeland and childhood, or between halves within the self – she can be moving:

the journey’s cost,
the richness gained
at what expense. The rift between the past
and this. How speech
evades us, how our longing hearts dry up.

And there is a compelling sense of unease with the world that weaves among these poems, such as at the end of ‘Shaken From Her Sleep’:

she’s not sure what she fears the most: what’s outside
all she knows; or that their love,
her silence, and this little, peaceful
town, are neat, efficient levers
in some terrible machine.”

   This collection highlights many splits and separations – in geography, time, emotion – and attempts to traverse or reconcile the distances between them. Tellingly, in the perhaps slightly over-long ‘Gemini’, the poet hesitates between two selves. She is unsure which to trust, which to abandon, or even how she will feel if she does make a decision:

But when it’s well
and truly done, how will I know? Will I feel
relief, release, how the balance shifts
and settles; then walk straight, unpuzzled,
sure – or limp and stumble, still
obscurely troubled, phantom-limbed?

   This duality also provides a useful way of talking about the difficulties with this collection. There are two sides to Dixon’s poetry. It can be carefully controlled, technically aware and adept (using line-breaks well, judicious word selection) but there are also less proficient, awkward slips in tone. At times, the poetic voice can lapse into sentimentality, as it does with the ‘Father Christmas face’ and ‘rabbi daddies’ of the poem ‘Crossing’. There are other misjudgments too, like the somewhat awkward first line of ‘The Root of It’, which reads: ‘Morning glories’ extraordinary purple’s’. Further, the last line of ‘(I Want) Something to Show for It’ (‘I am the sea come to swallow the pier.’) feels a little heavyhanded – not as much of a surprise as it wants to be.

   Dixon demonstrates a darker side, with poems like ‘Back in the Benighted Kingdom’ which ends with the fine, if tautological phrase, ‘its quieter, subtler ways / of drawing blood’ describing England’s more exhausting traits. It is these moodier, darker moments – the unease and disquiet that Dixon manages on occasion – that one would like to see more of. The second half of the collection deals with loss, grief, and coming to terms. Here the split or fold exists between the ‘here’ of the living and the ‘there’ of the dead – the crossing, experiencing, or consideration of that dividing line. It contains many of the collection’s more arresting moments. Interestingly, its first poem, the titular ‘Meet My Father’ could have been folded in half too, starting instead halfway down with ‘here he is, trailing his fork / through food’. This is where the poem really begins. It culminates with the boldly bleak ‘spooning dust and ashes down his throat’ – again that interesting, darker side. Yet this second section also sometimes falters in moments of reached-for wisdom. For example, the first line of the last poem, ‘my mother’s sudden pride in flowers’, jars with the concluding ‘my mother’s newfound flowers’, missing the air of wise acceptance it appears to hope for.

   There are missteps with both these collections but, overall, the tread is largely skilful, the ear well-tuned. A brief word, though, about the covers’ testimonials from Clive James: ‘Isobel Dixon was born with the gift of lyricism as natural speech’ and ‘Simon Barraclough stands out: poems with the unmistakable stamps of a vision asserting itself through vocabulary’ – what on earth do they actually mean? His is a good name to be able to quote, but perhaps better to make sure he’s saying something coherent, or less generalizing, before placing him on the front cover.

Finally, Adam Foulds’ impressive first collection, The Broken Word, is a fine poetic sequence from a promising young poet. Concerned with the coming of age of a main protagonist, Tom, amid the furies of the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya in the 1950s, it is, largely, well-turned. The voice is assured and striking – a sort of frank, almost wounded, brusque impressionism – and relays events confidently as Tom is propelled, half-dazed, through a dark period of British post-war history. The vigorous narrative drive makes it an easy read and clarity in description gives a strong sense of place and a persuasive, transportive effect – important for a work concerned with events that are distant geographically as well as temporally. In places it reads a little too much like chopped-up prose:

Tom had had a nightmare the previous night

And here one wonders if the author might be a little happier in novel form. But such distinctions are being blurred and, with Foulds, enjoyably so; overall he remains largely in command of an impressive facility for description and a fine sense for when to turn a line.

   Foulds is particularly good when capturing a sort of twisted, gargoyle Englishness, as in the conflation of a torture and execution with aspects of a poker game and cricket match. This sense of a world-gone-wrong is well sustained by such devices and, when combined with the flair for the grimly descriptive – ‘the chit chit of panga blades / into Frank’s back…’ – the result is an often commanding voice, well equipped for capturing the horror of a vicious conflict.

   What the poem perhaps lacks is a proper engagement with a Mau Mau perspective. It is implied in places through a critical tone, but the voices are silent. In the first section, Tom, on his return home from university, is invited into a different carriage by an elder who says ‘you should not be in there / talking with them.’ In this scene, the poet is effectively acknowledging a skewed heritage; Tom, and we as readers, remain in that carriage, so to speak, for the rest of the poem.

   In this way the Mau Mau remain either a decidedly terrifying other, or, otherwise, victims. This is Tom’s story, but the fact that the narration breaks orbit from Tom to relay other scenes – the rape of a young Mau Mau girl by a British colonial, for example – makes the missed perspective more noticeable. For all the authority and unflinching clarity with which the poet deals with the horrors of violence, there is perhaps a squeamishness about dealing with events from another side, an insecurity about the subject, a feeling that inexperience – as a new, young poet – puts this voice out of range, for now.

   The poem’s resolution is a little predictably romantic. Tom is shown having a period of difficulty re-adjusting to ‘normal’ life while coming to terms with the brutish legacy of a violent conflict. He wrestles with the impossibility of communicating what he has seen. Then these difficulties are resolved by the innocent love of a good woman. Tom, we imagine, gets to live happily ever after. But then again it is set in the fifties and the criticisms raised here are not meant to detract too much from what is an ambitious and successful poetic sequence. Fresh and serious, with an enjoyable turn of line, Foulds is a talented young poet who, among others, rises above the current glut of vapidly imagistic, boringly relationship-obsessed, or banal ‘magic in the everyday’ puff and posture poetics. He takes a risk with something better – something more intelligent, and broader in scope, that often manages, in small, compelling, moving ways, to help us recognize something about ourselves.