Close readings – Robin Houghton

Blog/ 28/01/2020

Sin Cycle, a new poetry sequence from Peter Kenny

Epigraphs, we’re told, are risky – they have a habit of upstaging the poem that follows. But the quote from William Blake is an apt start to Peter Kenny’s Sin Cycle, a sequence of twenty-four poems recently published in Issue 29 of E.ratio, an online journal of Postmodern Poetry. There’s a Blake exhibition at Tate Britain at the moment: ‘radical and rebellious’ he’s called in the exhibition notes, and reading Sin Cycle there are moments when you feel you’re inside the madness of a Blake painting. I know Peter is also a writer of horror fiction, and it’s clear he enjoys a strong sense of the macabre.

The work bristles with energy and inventiveness. Right from the first stanza we’re jerked inside the narrator’s head:

…
Then He came. Grinding my bed-wetter’s face into dandelions,
wrecking their stalks, weeping their wart milk.

My skin was a surface he secured without slippage,
till His prick burst the ghost clock of my head.
…

(‘Original’)

We’re taken through a series of good and bad days, self-obsession and tortured thoughts. The world through this person’s eyes is full of squirming creatures, human and otherwise, destined for the slaughterhouse, the dustbin, ‘squelching late-night screenings’, or just dead, fossilised, taken, ‘yawning for air in their anxious hell.’ The narrator saves his harshest criticism for himself, who he sees behaving badly in some scenarios, and victimised in others. Catching the reflection of his face as he tortures a fish out of boredom ‘I hate myself, / loathing whatever thing is watching me.’ (‘Siamese Fighting Fish’). A game of pool is going well, and then: ‘He’s back, that version of me, / the choker who doesn’t deserve it. So I choke again’.

I found myself compelled onward through the sequence and really enjoyed the form – each poem just two stanzas of four lines each – there’s a loose narrative arc driving it and the sheer exuberance and creativity is wonderfully gripping. Not so much a romp as a yomp – there’s no missing the real anguish here, but it’s worked through with such wit and originality. Sin Cycle succeeds in being luscious, gruesome, poignant and hilarious somehow all at once. Peter happens to be a friend and I was fortunate to read versions of Sin Cycle when it was a work in progress. I was sure it would be snapped up by a UK small press, but it took a US publisher to appreciate it. But who knows, *whisper* we may yet see it in print.

You can read Sin Cycle in its entirety here, but for now here’s another taster, one of my favourites in the sequence:

(vii) Commuted

En garde, I whisper, lunging onto the train,
my elbows dexterous in their micro-aggressions.
We’re all on the same line, and I re-read
the same line, until a well-Wellingtoned woman

treads on the tail of my eye. She follows a red setter
carving through cow parsley into an open field.
He sprints, I sprint, into the priceless possibility
of a place with no station and nothing to stab for.

Blog/ 30/07/201831/07/2018

Recent reading: Hugh Dunkerley & Antony Mair

Poetry book covers for Hare by Hugh Dunkerley and Bestiary by Antony Mair

OK, so July wasn’t a prolific blogging month for me but I did an awful lot of gardening (well, watering), singing (in Westminster Abbey, dontcha know) and (drumroll) reading – oh yeah and bit of writing too, but more about that in another post.

I wanted to post up my thoughts on two books I recently bought at readings and have enjoyed a great deal. Hugh Dunkerley teaches creative writing at Chichester University and our paths have crossed a few times, but it was the first opportunity I had to hear him read when he came to Eastbourne Poetry Cafe earlier this month. I really enjoyed his poems and bought Hare, not a new book, but then again poetry books have a long shelflife. As luck would have it, I’d just been to the London launch of Bestiary, and Other Animals, the first full-length collection by Antony Mair. So it was interesting to read these two animal-themed collections back to back. Antony is a good poetry friend, the founder and mainstay of Hastings Stanza which has been so good for my writing, and a super-nice super-talented person. It’s very exciting to see him doing so well (another collection is in the pipeline I believe) – keep an eye out for his name.

Hare (Cinnamon, 2010) by Hugh Dunkerley

When I first picked up this collection, and seeing the cover especially, it brought to mind Ian Duhig’s The Lamas Hireling, its title poem a strange parable rooted in the myth and superstition surrounding hares. We have to wait until the end of Hare for the title poem, in which the narrator makes love to a woman who seems to be transformed during the act of coitus into the mysterious hare seen earlier ‘bounding […]/across the astonished fields.’ Myth and mystery make their play also in poems such as ‘The Guardians of the Water’ with its three strange night visitors, and ‘Discovery’ in which the shipwrecked ‘murmur dry mouthed prayers of thanks’ despite the forest ‘crowding out all thoughts of passage’.

The book is in three sections. ‘In The Darkroom’ begins with a number of poems dealing with lone characters undergoing extreme or extraordinary trials, including an abducted child, an astronaut about to re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere and a woman who believed she could exist on air alone, setting out a number of recurrent themes: individuals facing end of life, returning from a near-death experience, or enduring loneliness in many diverse disguises. Actual death surfaces quite often, but many of the deaths are of animals or birds. Dunkerley seems to have an eye for birds in fact – magpies, bantams, geese and swifts all come under his gaze.

The central sequence of sonnets (‘Under Cover’) deals with a doomed love affair, which at its climax resembles a ‘huge ship’ pulling out of dock as ‘wife, husband, children all slide away’. But before long the narrator is ‘wondering who she is’ and the it’s clear where things are going. Although this sequence strains against a hint of bathos, elsewhere in the collection there are poems of convincing sensuality, the most surprising of which are ‘Weasel’ and ‘Mussels’ (‘In the sink they open slyly,/ the occasional shift as one/nudges against another’). Personally I was more repelled than seduced by the image of a woman shaving her legs in the bath (‘Razor’) but it takes a brave man to write about periods (‘Cycle’) and intra-uterine insemination (‘IUI’).

A lot of lovely wordplay in this collection. Some phrases I particularly enjoyed – ‘at night the stars rustled, tugging / at you with their tiny gravities.’ (‘Fast’) ‘It made a hole in the day/ where the bird had been’ (‘Killing Geese’), the baby ‘starting suddenly / at the zoo of her own voice.’ (‘Giant Steps’), the ‘slippery sacks of nothing/that were once squid.’ (‘In a Japanese Supermarket’).

Bestiary, and Other Animals (Live Canon, 2018) by Antony Mair

Shortlisted for the Live Canon First Collection prize, this book is a smorgasbord of animalia. It’s not nature poetry as such but more a meditation on human nature as reflected in, sometimes personified by, the creatures within its pages.

In two sections, the first is the Bestiary of the title – an A to Z where each creature is identified solely by its first letter. There is a key at the end, but it’s more fun to try and guess. Some are much more obvious than others!

A medieval concoction designed to both entertain and moralise, a bestiary presents all kinds of opportunities for the contemporary poet, and Mair has a great deal of fun with it. Some poems are heartbreaking reminders of man’s cruelty to animals, such as the elephant ‘hating these people that taught us shame’, or a panicked turtle caught in a fishing net. There are animals-as-human-stereotypes (bulldog, cougar) and reflections on loss, ageing and coping with trauma. ‘W’ surprises with its paean to a creature universally disliked, bouncing out its funny ending.

As befits any animal-themed collection there are witty nods to Ted Hughes (for example ‘F’ and ‘P’) and some enjoyable satire, such as the poem-as-bureaucratic-report forming a sly comment on the destruction of natural habitats (‘Y’, for Yellowhammer). Mair is comfortable with form and subtle rhyme schemes, but just as happy to take risks. ‘H’ evokes a hawk in two simple lists of verbs, distilling the freedom, power and simplicity of its existence to a series of crisp actions.

Section two, ‘Other Animals’ takes the reader further into a contemplative world in which animals as portents appear in dreams, and the boundaries between human and non-human life blur and coalesce. Personal testimony (‘Coming Out’, ‘Tom’, ‘Black Dog’, ‘For Ro, in her last days’) rubs along with (usually black-ish) humour. I particularly enjoyed the moving ‘Everything will be fine’ –

[…] the day
stretched ahead like a field of slate.

A longing for somewhere else sneaked under the door –

‘The Pigeon’ begins with the dilemma of what to do with an injured bird, and ends with a burden of guilt, comparing the bird’s destiny to ‘an abandoned child in a Darfur cellar / or others whose plight I turn my back on’.

Antony Mair isn’t afraid of taking a stance and speaking out against injustice. He’s also happy to put the boot in from time to time where he sees fit. But there’s a tenderness and frankness to his work , a richness of language and reference, and attention to craft.

I felt a sense of gratitude running through the book, and of hope, even in the face of death, sadness and the worst kind of human behaviour. The animal world is cruel, but animal intuition is something we can learn from. The last words are a fitting ending (‘For Ro, in her last days’):

[…] Forget
the lingering metallic taste and look up:

as light fades the stars hang out small flags
signalling welcome in silver and indigo. Let
the horse have its head. He knows the way home.

Blog/ 22/04/2016

Andrew McMillan’s ‘Physical’

Even though we have NO bookshelves at the moment and about 40 boxes of books we can’t unpack, I had a bit of a poetry book-buying splurge lately (this – AND even though I’ve just taken out two poetry books from the library, having discovered the poetry section at Eastbourne Library isn’t too shabby). And EVEN though I’ve two other collections on the ‘have read’ list, waiting to be written up, I’m letting this one jump the queue as it’s fresh on my mind.

Physical, Andrew McMillan (Cape, 2015)

This collection has of course won much acclaim– including the Guardian First Book Award, (the only poetry book to do so)–and there are plenty of great reviews to be read. But I can’t help wanting to put down my own thoughts on it. A layman’s review, if you like, along the lines of the ‘Reading List’ project I ran last year.

Straight into the guts of the collection, the first poem ‘Jacob with the Angel’ is a retelling of the Biblical encounter in which an exhausted Jacob is wrestled all night by a character who only reveals itself as an angel the following morning. Although without the title (or knowing the story straight away – I had a vague idea but had to look it up) it sets the scene for what’s to come – ‘grappling with the shifting question of each other’s bodies’ … ‘the tasting of the flesh and blood of someone/ is something out of time’. Trying to make sense of the intense intimacy that can exist between strangers – ‘not giving a name because names would add a history’. And at the end, the page-turner promise: ‘he says writing something down keeps it alive’.

There’s a wonderful frankness to so much in this book – celebratory, pained, questioning, and always rooted in the flesh– ‘sighing out the brittle disappointments of the bones’ (‘Yoga’). ‘Unflinching’ is an overused word and I hesitate to use it here, because it could sound like a euphemism for ‘explicit’ when so many of these poems are about love in a variety of forms, always surprising, sometimes messy, often very moving–

… when he learned the baby
wouldn’t wake there might have been a tray of food
still in the room or a balloon trying to climb the wall (‘I.M.’)

or strung through with irony and humour –

here we are a man holding a boy above him
horizontal like an offering to the artex ceiling
not even a minor Greek would see as fit to sculpt (‘Strongman’)

Growing up, masculinity, sexuality, familial relationships are threads throughout the book – ‘go to the other room computer television/ … laugh harder than you should have or wanted to’ (‘How to be a man’).

I really loved the layout of these poems with their lack of traditional punctuation, the many ellipses and exploded lines which, for me, were utterly in the service of the writing and not for flimsy effect. The use of compound words – strengthofbody, deadheavydrunk, spinebroken, slowpunctured, lonelyhaircut and so forth – suggested to me a poet who takes delight in both exuberance and precision in language, borne out by so much beautiful lyric writing (‘the lighthouse throws its face and catches it / night slicks in over the water’ (‘When loud the storm and furious is the gale’). It worked for me.

Blog/ 13/12/2015

The Reading List, week 11 – Clare Best’s ‘Cell’

It seems my blog posts of ‘micro reviews’ have set some sort of trend – who’d have thought? Anyway, I haven’t posted one for a couple of weeks as other aspects of LIFE have rather taken priority. The original idea to read a book a day was ambitious, but the blogging of the reviews has proven to be the hardest bit, and something I haven’t always managed to find time for. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t been reading.

Rather than waiting until I have the time to write three or more reviews at once, I think I’ll sometimes just get them out singly. So coming up soon – thoughts on Mark Doty’s T S Eliot Prize-nominated Deep Lane (Cape) and Wendy Pratt’s pamphlet Lapstrake (Flarestack). But today I’ll focus on one pamphlet.

Cell – Clare Best & Michaela Ridgway (Frogmore Press 2015)

An unusual pamphlet, both in physical form and concept. Clare Best’s award-winning sequence ‘Cell’ is in the voice of Christine Carpenter, a 14 year old girl who, in 1329, took a vow of ‘solitary devotion’ and became an anchoress. Accompanying the sequence are a number of powerful pen and charcoal sketches of the human (female) form by Michaela Ridgway (herself an accomplished poet).

In the unfolding and re-folding of the single sheet, you create a box-like space which represents the cell in which the girl spent over 1,000 days. From there, following the sequence isn’t easy – each is numbered in Roman numerals, which took me a few moments to work out (come on then – CCCMLXXI? Quick!) Having been at the launch event, I know from Clare’s reading that the numerals represent the number of days since the girl’s incarceration. Otherwise that too would need some work on the part of the reader.

And that’s surely the point – reading ‘Cell’ was like following a set of clues, deciphering a horrible secret – in figuring out the folding and the ordering, observing the contortions of the figures, the smudged-out body parts that seem to overstuff their pages, even before reading we have to do a little work, but not very much in face of what we’re about to witness in the poems. We are primed to ‘solve’ the mystery. And a mystery it is, certainly to present-day readers, why a young girl would go willingly into such a contract.

Just one day, Mother, since you
kissed my brow, my cheeks and chin.
I must not love the window,
must protect my sinful heart. (II)

In reading Christine’s words and thoughts it’s hard not to be moved – not just by the pathos of the situation, but also the girl’s ongoing reflection in terms of her belief (having perhaps no other framework to cling to) even as she passes from excitement and determination to fear, pain and finally resignation.

Dreams like thoughts –
both sense and
nonsense. How shall I
bear the silence
of this place? (CCLXI)

The reader isn’t spared any details of the girl’s physical and mental deterioration ‘scalp alive with lice’, ‘shrunken gums’, and the nightmares (‘Lucifer, again. … he spreads me, enters like a fist’) but for me the story is told with intimate tenderness and without judgement. ‘Cell’ is a challenging read, moving and highly compelling. Both the artwork and Katy Mawhood’s ingenious pamphlet design corroborate the story and heighten the reader’s involvement – which is what genuine ‘multimedia’ should be about. Excellent job.

Blog/ 22/10/2015

The Reading List week 9: Malone, Maitreyabandhu, Man

This week, three books by men, all with names starting with M, all with (pretty much) monochrome cover art and three of the shortest titles ever. Spooky! This is the latest post in my Reading List project begun in July 2015.

Cur, Martin Malone (Shoestring 2015)

To read Cur in one sitting is a rollicking ride. The big themes of love, death, growing up, relationships and the like are all here, filtered through a range of references from pop culture to ancient Greece. This is a book that namechecks (among others) Jackie Pallo, Tuthmosis, Versace and The Smiths.

The first (and title) poem threw me into a Hughes-esque world of animal intensity and raw emotion. It’s the first of a sequence of twelve or so which explore a relationship, sometimes in narrative terms, sometimes reflective. In ‘Life Drawing’ the poet considers his sleeping lover and how he might paint her, the backdrop ‘Some capture of hinterland, an inkling shade of unknown.’ We meet the ‘Inkling’ again at the end of the book, the unborn baby as seen on an ultrasound image.

The changes of register are surprising, and music is everywhere – ‘Then you’re beside me, in a wind-tumbled / fluster of rooks and their cracked peppercorn / of song.’ (Alice) ‘The backbeat is all / – triplet, sinew, farts and porn – / born to it, solid.’ (‘Meet the Band’). Something I quite liked (but I can imagine not everyone would) is a certain knowingness that pervades some of the poems – almost as if to make up for the wonder and openness of others. It feels like a breaking of the fourth wall, as in: ‘Impossible to withhold comment, then, on the ironies of choice made / when a crippled Tawny took to roosting / in the garage of the Gadd’s semi.’ (Gadd’s Owl), or ’What he really handed me was some final flourish / of golden-summer cliche’ (‘Egging’), or ‘Yes, let’s play this game and go there, / leaf through your back pages, trace the stages/ and versions that led you to now and this man.’ (‘Life Drawing’).

I didn’t feel I had the key to all the poems, but that’s inevitable – I still got a jolt of pleasure to see a reference to ‘Alias Smith & Jones’ to which I was addicted – ADDICTED – when I was about 12, the opening script of which I still know by heart. And you can’t help but be joshed along by the satire of ‘Ver: A Modest Proposal’, enjoy the humour of ‘Lords of the Ring’. That’s not to say Malone doesn’t have a subtlety of touch, far from it – evidence, for example, ‘Eclogue’ and the heartbreaking ‘Like I was your girlfriend.’ There’s an underlying seriousness throughout which brings to mind the ‘craughing’ (simultaneously laughing and crying) described in ‘Doing Words’. A rich, full-fat collection. Favourite poem: ‘On an afternoon like this she takes a new lover.’

The Bond, Maitreyabandhu (Smith | Doorstop 2011)

Just before reading this pamphlet I’d been tackling the first of Eliot’s Four Quartets. (I’m reading the heavy duty stuff in stages. Betcha can’t wait for my thimble-full of thoughts on The Waste Land…) As a consequence I started seeing little parallel themes and images which I’m sure are co-incidences, but I wonder if that’s what happens when reading collections back-to-back. Or even reading individual poems back-to-back, as when judging a competition or considering submissions for a magazine. Anyway, I digress.

Maitreyabandhu is a poet I noticed a lot when I was starting to submit to magazines. His name was everywhere, and accompanied by what seemed to me the most perfect and succinct of biogs which I wanted to emulate. Since The Bond he has gone on to have two collections with Bloodaxe, The Crumb Road and Yarn, and he hosts the Poetry East series which I’ve never managed to get to, but all the readings/interviews are on YouTube.

The Bond takes us on a journey through a young boy’s formative years and the tentative beginnings of a first relationship. Some of the poems are in the first person and written with the straightforwardness and voice of a child, ‘I’d follow my mother round the house and watch her/ … She’d tuck the sheets / and blankets in so tight, you had to wriggle / when you got in to make a proper space!’ (‘The Chest of Drawers’). Others are written as the adult looking back, sometimes with a certain wary retrospection, or in the distancing third person ‘He had a landscape in his head… the place the dog jumped in and barked and bit the water; / the lawn of someone’s house.’ (‘A few fields’). Interspersed with these are a number of enigmatic, allegorical poems open to interpretation, such as an apparent moment of enlightenment (‘The Small Boy and the Mouse’).

Throughout the collection is a sense of place, location, and the recurrence of certain details – a set of keys, the dogs, the father’s tools, dust – highlights their significance. From the initial ‘stand-alone place, big enough for one’ (‘The Coat Cupboard’) to the ‘den’ or ‘hidey hole’ we return to in several of the poems, where the boy meets secretly with his friend, to the amount of effort expended in the raising of a signpost that ‘points at something too far away to see’, (‘Signpost’), it feels like the narrator (and we) are on a mission to decode the events of the past and the details that linger in childhood memory. There’s a central sestina upon which the collection seems to turn, expressing the crux of it all ‘The den we found was presence and a gap. / You said nothing. I said nothing back. I had my way / of thinking, touching your ill-remembered face.’ (‘Sestina’). Favourite poem: ‘The Cutting.’

Lift, Harry Man (Tall-Lighthouse, 2012)

A pamphlet that set challenges for the typesetter! Rather like Sarah James, whose book Be[yond] I reviewed a few weeks ago, here’s a poet who likes to play with layout, word order and the convention of line. This collection bristles with electricity and experimentation. Its broad themes are space travel, time travel, human flight, technology and a good deal of ‘what if’. I’d read ‘Lift’ when it first came out and Harry kindly allowed me to reproduce one of my favourite poems from the book, ‘telesue’, which you can read here.

As if mirroring the other-worldliness of their subject matter, the poems delight in technical and sometimes strange vocabulary (‘circumzenithal’, ‘plitter’, ‘flensed’, ‘zoopraxiascopic’), but Man also has a fresh way with phraseology – sheep ‘chewing with the expression of someone who thinks / they can hear the telephone’ (‘Sheep Get Inquisitive after a Meteor Strike, Stanbury Moor’), ‘A Saturn V sheds her heavy feathers / in the smoke, a rising asterisk of light’ (‘The Discovery’). Several of the poems have titles that read like newspaper headlines, and there are plenty of jokes – ‘I have a question for you guys, / how rare are villages?’ (‘Lines Derived from Minecraft Player Queries’). It’s all quite geeky and sometimes a bit confusing, but then I guess that’s the idea – like the ‘Re-entry of the First American in Space’, you don’t always have a clue what’s going on, but hey!

Interesting to note a connection with ‘Cur’ – both collections have poems about ultrasound scans. From Malone we get ‘fishbone, heartbeat, / the opening sequence from Doctor Who’, the unborn child with ‘an extraterrestrial hand’ (‘Inkling’). From Man: ‘The white artery of your spine / hovers beneath a butterfly’s ghost; / wings budding into flight / twice a second, heartbeat by heartbeat.’ (‘Ultrasound’). Favourite poem: ‘Troubleshooting’.

Blog/ 30/08/2015

The Reading List, week 5: McVety, Konig, James

Right now my reading material consists mainly of kitchen brochures, legal house-moving gumph and internet research on macerator toilets and whether you need planning permission to change a window on the rear of a building.

So the antidote is of course a splash of poetry. ‘Splash’ being the right word, I think, consider the amount of water present in this week’s reading list. Nothing to do with all the rain we’ve been having. Or the toilet stuff.

Lighthouses -Allison McVety (Smith Doorstop, 2014)

I heard Allison read at the Swindon Poetry Festival last year which was when I bought this book. I enjoyed re-encountering some of the poems from that reading, including ‘Lido’, in which the narrator is swimming lengths as the rain comes down and she’s caught in ‘the liquid rhythm of cup and crawl’. We meet the lighthouse/sea/water theme in various guises, via beacons of light, starlight, LED light, watery deaths and ‘To the Lighthouse’, the three stanza homage to Virginia Woolf that won the National Poetry Competition in 2011. There’s a beautiful set of poems on separation from a loved one – ‘we sway though ups /and downs, soft footing it, you towing my heel, / me towing your lead’ (‘Tightropes’) yet McVety is just as at home with a conversational voice (eg ‘Levenshulme Semi’). This is the sort of collection I would love to have written. Moving, entertaining, varied and very skilled indeed. Favourite poem: ‘Treasure’.

Advice for an Only Child – Anja Konig (Flipped Eye, 2014)

There are some quite brief poems in this pamphlet. For some poets this may be a problem in that there’s nowhere to hide. But here, for ‘brief’ read ‘intense’: not a syllable is wasted – Konig writes in a pared-down style which somehow embraces both tragedy and humour, and it comes thick and fast. We witness two friends meeting for coffee, one disclosing that ‘…it had spread – / brain, liver, bones,/ a butcher’s plate. / You looked afraid. We talked / of other things, /that we should get out more …’ (Triple Negative). In ‘Six Nineteen’, both the aftermath of a breakup and the whole crux of the relationship itself is expressed in just six lines. I was fortunate enough to meet Anja at the Duffy/Clarke masterclass I went to at Ty Newydd a couple of years ago and she made a big impression on me. Great to see her producing such an excellent pamphlet. Favourite poem: ‘Dump’.

Be[yond] – Sarah James (Knives Forks & Spoons, 2013)

Crazily inventive! Of the book’s three sections my favourite is probably the first, ‘Against Air and Water’, eleven mostly prose poems through which I felt I was tumbling with very few handholds. A relationship is under scrutiny as is the narrator’s sense of self. ‘Some days are all elbows and thumbs. Then air makes me nervous. But also water. All the things that refuse to mix – or rest in stillness.’ (‘Hydrophobic’) The middle section of the book sees the most wordplay and typographical experimentation: part-words picked out from other words in bold or enlarged type, shaped poems, intricate spatial games – I got the impression James was having a bit of fun at the expense of more ‘serious’ wordplay forms such as acrostics or Fibonacci. And yet amidst all the fireworks there are many gentle moments where the language sings quietly, ‘As blue bruises, / he shoulders the horizon, / wears her skin in his branches.’ (‘Childbirth’). Favourite poem: ‘Visiting the Zoo’.

Wild words: a typical double page spread from Sarah James's [Be]yond — Wild words: a typical double page spread from Sarah James’s [Be]yond

Blog/ 05/07/2015

The Reading List, week 1

In the first week of my ‘read a poetry book a day’ quest I actually managed five books rather than seven, but I think that’s a pretty good start. As promised here’s a very brief roundup of my impressions, and a few notes on how the process is going generally.

The books

How to Pour Madness into a Teacup – Abegail Morley (Cinnamon, 2009)

A tense, claustrophobic world with two just principal protagonists (‘she’ and ‘he) and a series of nightmarish scenarios where little is said or sayable – ‘He reads her by her scars. / Does he remember writing them?’ (‘One Last Time’). The many references to limbs, hands, skin, nails and lips – dragging, wiping, scraping swallowing and sewing – of words, or body parts, or tears – is intensely physical and I felt completely pulled in. The poems are uncomfortable, but compelling – like staring at something you’d really rather turn away from. Read as a sequence at one sitting. Favourite poem: ‘Her Turn’.

Otherwhere – Catherine Smith (Smith/Doorstop, 2012)

Like Abegail, Catherine is both a friend and a poet for whom I have enormous respect. It was she who inspired me start the ‘Reading List’ project, as I explained in my last blog post. So who better to pick up and read in my first week. Reading Otherwhere in one go is rather than gorging on one of those huge chocolate Easter Eggs (in the days when they were filled with yet more chocolate.) One more piece? Oh go on then. In an effort to categorise the themes and styles I started trying to group individual poems under headings…Surreal, Satire, Poignant, Erotic charge, Childhood memory, Ironic observation and Powerful but hard to classify, which I admit is a bit of a cop out. A rich and rollicking great read. Favourite poem: ‘Story’.

A Recipe for Water – Gillian Clarke (Carcanet, 2009)

By the time I picked up A Recipe for Water I was starting to realise how much I have actually read of the poetry books I possess. I feel as if I haven’t had time to read them properly, but even having dipped in and out, I’m still finding many poems familiar. This collection is full of the beautiful nature poetry I associate with Gillian Clarke, her affinity with the Welsh language and her Welsh heritage – ”The sea turns its pages, speaking in tongues. / The stories are yours, and you are the story.’ – ‘First Words’. Favourite poem: ‘Kites’.

Brumaire and Later – Alasdair Paterson (Flarestack, 2010)

Ooh! I struggled a little here. A pamphlet, so short in length, but very dense. It’s in two halves and built around the premise of the French revolutionary calendar, ‘ in which not only every month but every day was re-named after familiar flora, fauna and work tools’. In the second half, the poems take on the same theme but extend it into post-revolutionary Russia. Not having any great handle on these undoubtedly historic events, I couldn’t quite crack the code. (I blame my French Revolution phobia on being force-fed A Tale of Two Cities when I was eleven.) But I liked the conceit of it, and it makes for some wonderful titles, from ‘Apple’ and ‘Goose’ to ‘Ear’ and ‘Holes’. Probably very entertaining to hear at a reading, with some background preamble.

Overwintering -Pippa Little (Carcanet, 2012)

I came across a poem by Pippa Little relatively recently and wanted to read more of her work. Pippa has a wide range of styles and registers, and many of the poems here are rooted in the Northumbrian landscape, its history and its characters. You could glance at the copious notes at the back and worry about what you’re getting into, but no need. The poems are perfectly enjoyable even if you don’t know what the odd word means or refers to (always a sign of good writing, in my book). It was easy to read through this collection in one go, and plenty that was memorable, such as ‘Beijing Flight, Thursday Morning’, ‘After Flooding’ and ‘Spending One Day with Patrick Kavanagh’. Favourite poem: ‘Axis’.

On the process:

To begin with it felt wrong to be reading poetry books as I would a novel – no re-reading or going back (or very little), just ploughing on. But there were unexpected benefits. First of all, when I got the end of a book, especially if I had read it through in one sitting, I found I had very good sense of the work, a big picture if you like, more wood than trees.

Secondly, there are sometimes extended or concurrent themes that may not be obvious when cherry picking or dipping in and out. A repeated word here and there, references between poems (intertextuality, I think that’s called?) and other nuances seem to ping out when you consume a whole book at once. You see many subtle and clever things that you might not otherwise.

It wasn’t easy at first, especially fighting my instinct to re-read when something wasn’t clear. I didn’t re-read until I’d got the end of the collection, and it paid off. On returning to individual poems they seemed so much clearer and familiar the second time around, more so than if I had spent half an hour doing a close reading of a single poem.

Blog/ 03/12/2014

Stephen Bone’s ‘In The Cinema’

I wanted to say how much I’ve enjoyed Stephen Bone‘s first collection, In The Cinema, just out from Playdead Press.

Moving images, set pieces and numerous characters play out through the book, as the poems go back and forth between childhood recollections, reflections on relationships (both the long-term kind and fleeting encounters), and the more recent past. Not new territory, perhaps, but many of these poems have a sparseness and simplicity that I found very compelling.

The title poem, although it appears in the middle of the book, is the shortest, but it encapsulates so many of the themes – the recollection (or replaying) of stories with known or unknown endings, glimpses/reminders of another era … disappointment, the passing of time, acceptance.

Your whispered
words silently
replay themselves –

don’t tell me how it ends
don’t spoil it for me.

(‘In The Cinema’)

The poet picks over every detail almost like an archaeologist, with care, precision and wonderment. There’s a strong sense of touch and the physical – Reluctantly, / a child braced for medicine I open up / to be fed a scoop of decay (‘Medlars’) and in ‘Windfall’ – I tidy your bottles, touch your face. Tidy them again. / I pour water, wind your watch.

There are character portraits of people at their work – a pedicurist, a hairdresser tending in silence to an elderly man ‘white hair falling from him like ash’ (‘Ash’), and a series of gentle tableaux where we’re looking in from the outside, often to a soundtrack of off-stage music or something being whispered that we can’t quite make out.

In the final poem (‘Voice-over’) a character from the past talks back from a photo, breaking the ‘fourth wall’, as if creating a kind of release or closure. A suitably cinematic effect?

Inevitably, not every poem in this collection worked for me. But overall I was intrigued and moved; there were many beautiful moments. I found some of the most understated poems the most heart-breaking – ‘Windfall’, ‘Pre-emptive’ and ‘Doreen’s Bath’ in particular come to mind – and the poignancy of the images stayed with me.

In The Cinema by Stephen Bone, £7.99 from Playdead Press.

Books/ 02/11/2014

Isabel Palmer’s ‘Ground Signs’

One of the interesting things about the Poetry Book Fair in September was seeing poetry pamphlets and books from different publishers side by side, and the great variety in jacket designs, colours and fonts. Flarestack was one of the tables that really caught my attention, with its beautifully simple pamphlet covers. Just look at the clean, clear typeface (you can’t really see from this image but the title is in silver):

This was one of the pamphlets that caught my attention – was it the turquoise that did it? (it’s one of my favourite colours) – who knows. But I’m glad I bought it.

At first, from reading the cover blurb, I wasn’t sure. “Haunted by her son’s experience in Afghanistan…” created a sort of unfair knee-jerk reaction in me. There has been such a rash of war poems this year, some sublime but others less appealing. I don’t know what I feared exactly but as I read Isabel’s pamphlet I became increasingly engrossed. The poems are unsentimental yet full of compassion. There’s humour as well as pathos, commentary as well as reflection.

Some of the poems are from the point of view of the mother who goes about normal life at home ‘between / Watchfield and Swindon,/ outside the new police station, Adele on the radio,’ (‘Honour Guard’) but there are reminders everywhere of the war and its consequences. Yet we’re also in Afghanistan, immersed in the soldier’s life there, the characters and situations he encounters. Sometimes the mother’s and the son’s experiences conflate in a kind of fractured reality (‘Battle Shock’) or serve to remind us of the shocking transition from boy-child to man-soldier (‘Blueprint’). The closing poem, ‘Repatriation’, I found particularly wonderful. I won’t say any more about it as it might spoil the experience of encountering it after what’s gone before.

‘Ground Signs’ is a super pamphlet with so many strong poems – definitely recommended.

I contacted Isabel via Flarestack and asked if I could reproduce ‘Worst Case Scenario’ here. I also asked her for a few words about the poem, and her reply is here in its entirety – and anyone who knows me will know how unprecedented it is for me not to do any editing!

Of all the poems in ‘Ground Signs’, written at the rate of one a week while my son was searching for Improvised Explosive Devices in Afghanistan, this one reminds me, uncomfortably, of the words of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: ‘Cowards die many times before their deaths;/the valiant never taste of death but once.’

Coming from a family of soldiers, with a son preparing to do, arguably, the most dangerous job in the British Army, I had never thought of myself as a coward. Nevertheless, at that first family pre-deployment meeting on which the poem is based – and far too many times afterwards, when postmen, charity campaigners or trick-or-treaters called – I was much more fearful than I had ever expected to be.

The first shock was how well-rehearsed the casualty notification procedure had become, with a timescale of ‘within two hours’ and how, for reasons never explained, the Captain, whom we knew and trusted, wouldn’t be personally involved. That job was left to ‘someone’, even though the Captain had, on at least one occasion, attended while bailiffs cleared a young soldier’s home of its valuables.

They say that sailors are the most superstitious people in the military but the families of soldiers at war must come close. The ‘one sorry magpie’ seemed appropriate here, given the widespread tradition of ‘saluting’ a solitary magpie, showing due respect to a creature with a drop of devil’s blood under its tongue. Where superstition leads, prayers follow, ‘like a mantis, praying,/that rocks and ratchets/along a swaying leaf’, in much the same way as I imagined my son would soon be dodging enemy fire and sweeping the ground for IEDs.

Inevitably at a meeting like this, questions about the more arbitrary aspects of military discipline surfaced, such as, ‘Why/ do they have to iron uniforms/ to go out on patrol?’ – especially for frontline infantry, like the Rifles, skirmishers who were the first to swap their red coats for camouflage – although this practice has now been abandoned, due to the cost and danger of supplying so much extra power to remote bases.

However, a soldier and his family are never far away from black humour, the kind of psychic release that has you laughing down taboos, as was the case when a friend’s husband, who lost his legs in Afghanistan, had a fairly minor road traffic accident. He dined out many times on his description of the paramedic’s face when this former soldier emerged from his car and, looking down at his legs, announced, ‘It’s worse than I thought!’

It was that kind of humour that saw me telling the Captain afterwards all the times I would not be available to hear bad news – yoga (Mondays), the weekly shop (Fridays) – so that, when I told him I looked after my granddaughter on Tuesdays, ‘he didn’t write it down’, not knowing, I suppose, whether or not I was still joking.

Worst Case Scenario

The Captain didn’t say why
he would only loiter at the gate
if bad news comes calling.

Someone will come up your garden path –
it won’t be me –
within two hours
and they’ll stay with you.

He didn’t say how long
or why there would be two of them
when one sorry magpie could do the job

or what use they’d be to someone
who knows everywhere you’ve been,
can look at a map of anywhere
and see only the shape of you –
how you can move
like a mantis, praying,
that rocks and ratchets
along a swaying leaf.

But when he asked for questions,
I was thinking, Why
do they have to iron uniforms
to go out on patrol?

As if smoothness could keep you safer
than all the browns and yellows in the world,
or heat could stroke the breath
into a tunic’s body
to keep the bullets out.

So when I said, If they must
come, don’t make it on a Tuesday –
I have Ellie then,

he didn’t write it down.

(from ‘Ground Signs’ by Isabel Palmer, published by Flarestack Poets, £5.50)

Isabel Palmer is a former English teacher, educational adviser and European Championship silver medallist in triathlon. Her poems have appeared in ‘Stand’, ‘The North’ and ‘The Frogmore Papers’. ‘Ground Signs’ is her first published pamphlet collection.

Books/ 12/01/2014

Workshop report – the T S Eliot Prize shortlisted collections

Tonight it’s that lovely annual poets’ jamboree, the T S Eliot Prize readings at the Royal Festival Hall. This year I thought it would increase my enjoyment of the readings if I had an inkling about all of them beforehand, so yesterday I was at the Poetry School in Lambeth getting educated. Ten poets, ten collections – how on earth do you cover them all in a single day? The answer of course is you can’t, but as I found out yesterday it’s certainly possible to get a feel for them, with the right kind of guidance and through interesting group discussion.

Our guide was poet/teacher/blogger Katy Evans-Bush, she of the famous blog Baroque in Hackney (say it with an american accent to get the pun) and we were about 12 poets/readers from various backgrounds. It certainly helped to have at least one classicist and one native speaker of Welsh, not to mention someone who had experienced the 1980s miners’ strike first hand. Chuck in a big donated box of Thornton’s chocolates, and we were all set.

Katy started by explaining some of her overall impressions: that there were definitely some common themes and ‘over-archingness’, both within individual collections and across the lot. While some of the books are single-themed or single-storied, such as the Ramayana, others had diverse threads that played out, poems that called to each other within the collection, and there even seemed to be some word-trends across the board.

We plunged in and did close readings of a poem or a couple of poems from each collection. Katy encouraged us to get the ball rolling on discussions, and it was clear she had chosen the poems carefully. Where relevant, she explained why she had chosen each poem or extract, and how it related to the rest of the collection. What could have been a random collection of poems started to cohere through common themes but very different approaches and styles.

Opinions got stronger throughout the day – which could have been to do with the group feeling more comfortable, or maybe as we went through the books more comparisons were made and our thoughts fell more into place.

I did take notes, but this isn’t intended to be a comprehensive account of the day, more a mosaic of ideas, thoughts and quotes which may or may not make sense. I certainly came away feeling really excited about hearing the poets read this evening. So, who’s going to win??

Hill of Doors by Robin Robertson (Picador)

The poem we read was ‘The Coming God’, which set us straight into the ‘gods’ theme for the morning. This poem is ‘after Nonnus’ who I learned was a Greek poet. It concerns the birth and early life of Dionysus as he grew, his body apparently shifting from animal to human and back again, using his special powers as he

He tamed the wild beasts, just by talking,
and they knelt to be petted, harnessed in

Various things were noted – the free layout with ragged line endings, maybe suggesting the shape-shifting of the god in question, the meanings packed in the first line

Horned child, double-born into risk …

and the many words appearing twice in the poem (doubled): sky, goat, woman’s, kisses, and the name of Dionysus. For me, the poem had lots of technical interest and a mysterious ending. I was glad of the expertise of group members when it came to interpreting and understanding the myth behind the subject matter.

Hill of Doors contains a number of poems after Nonnus, and plenty of blood and guts apparently. A potential winner? ‘Funny about women and addicted to the apocalyptic’ was Katy’s feeling about the book.

Ramayana: A Retelling by Daljit Nagra (Faber)

Big change of register. I only had to see the exclamation mark in the title of the next poem to know it was by Daljit Nagra: ‘Prologue: Get Raaaaaaaaavana!’ (I may have missed out an ‘a’ there, sorry).

There was some talk about how some bookshops had placed this book on the children’s shelf, and the possible reasons. Perhaps because of the tongue-in-cheek chapter headings (eg ‘Sexing Big Bro’)? The seemingly rambling layout and joky language? The sudden bursts of typographic exuberance? The crazy neologisms (eg indestructibilitiness)? The sheer number of exclamation marks?????

Here’s a classic text, or rather a hybrid re-telling of a classic text, in the language of bollywood, anglo-indian, 70s TV sitcom vernacular. As Katy said, it’s all about excess… but look more closely and you can’t deny the poetic technique involved.

Over the top, yes, but that’s the nature of the story – gods, worlds, the clash of the titans. He’s using language in an entirely appropriate manner for the subject matter.

The Water Stealer by Maurice Riordan (Faber)

A lot of poems here set in Maurice’s back garden, which sounds a bit limiting but of course there’s no need for it to be.

We looked at one, ‘Stars and Jasmine’: on the surface a cute tale in which the five key elements are introduced in the first stanza: the cat, the hedgehog, the tortoise, stars and jasmine. We get down to the view point of the three animals, resolving in the final stanza when we’re told what will happen to the ‘interloper’ tortoise once summer’s over. (Nothing horrid!)

There was much discussion about which of the animals was male and which female, the size of a tortoise and whether it was possible to ‘lower her through (a) letterbox’ (sadly, that was my contribution – I got a little bogged down with the ending as I couldn’t picture it) we enjoyed the sly humour of the title – suggesting one thing, delivering another. The different perspectives of the creatures, the minuteness of detail, it was all beautiful. Katy emphasised the gentle humour and warmth of this book.

I liked ‘Stars and Jasmine’ but I think I need to see more to know if this is a collection I’d reach for often.

Parallax by Sinéad Morrissey (Carcanet)

Interesting, coming after the Riordan poem about the different points of view – as that what the word ‘parallax’ is all about. The poem we read was ‘1801’ – a kind of found poem made up (it felt like anyway) short extracts from Dorothy Wordworth’s journal. Her day is composed of domestic tasks – shelling peas, boiling up pears and cloves, walking out ‘for letters’ and making observations on the landscape –

Either moonlight on Grasmere –- like herrings! —
or the new moon holding the old moon in its arms.

William appears just twice, ‘exhausted’ from his work. It’s a seductive viewpoint from a feminist point of view- the irony of Dorothy coming up with such lovely writing whilst still doing all the chores, while William gets some kind of ‘man flu’ from poring over a pesky adjective.

Katy tells us the book contains a number of such poems, giving voices to characters who are usually sidelined.

Speak, Old Parrot by Dannie Abse (Hutchinson)

There was a big warm hug of a feeling in the room when Dannie Abse came up. We read Dafydd’s Oath, number 4 in a sequence entitled ‘The Summer Frustrations of Dafydd ap Geilym’. Dafydd was apparently a 14^th century Welsh bard and notorious womaniser, partly explained by the fact that the love of his life, Morfudd, had gone into a convent. Alongside this we also looked at ‘Perspectives’. (Again, cleverly chosen by Katy and a good follow-on from the last two poems.)

‘Perspectives’ is set in L’Artista, the ‘local italian restaurant’ which features in many of the poems in Speak Old Parrot. Subtitled ‘Five paragraphs for Frank O’Hara’, the poem naturally called up comparisons with O’Hara’s lunchtime poems. With its precise time checks – ‘At 1.50pm I ordere Fusilli all’Ortolana’, ‘At 2.23pm I drink my cappuccino’ – someone pointed out that this was a very quick lunch, as we talked about the perception of time passing both quickly and slowly in old age. At one point, the poem addresses ‘Frank’ directly. Katy reminded us that if Frank O’Hara hadn’t died young, he and Abse would be contemporaries. Interesting!

We talked a lot more about this collection. But I’m already realising how long this blog post is getting and I don’t have much long to get through the next 5 books… aaagh!

At the Time of Partition by Moniza Alvi (Bloodaxe)

This is a very slim volume – Katy admitted she’d read it on the bus between the Geffrye Museum and Clerkenwell. It’s the story of Moniza Alvi’s family and how they had to flee to Pakistan when India was partitioned, one of the principal characters being her grandmother, another the uncle she never knew, lost in the upheaval. It’s in effect one long sequence and we read section 12: Seeking.

We noted the spaciousness of the line layout, the short lines, a sparseness. The figure of Amma (the grandmother) is larger than life, a kind of colossus, and she’s looking for her son, doing everything she can

Her mind’s eye was a torch
to beam through

the intricate darkness of a tailor’s workshop

While the writer is left helpless after the event, unable to look ‘as long and hard’ and certainly not ‘with any muscle of the imagination.’

Katy said she had found the book surprisingly easy to read but nonetheless very moving and full of the ‘horrible flux of human weight’.

Red Doc> by Anne Carson (Jonathan Cape)

Here’s something different – one long sequence, presented in ‘newspaper’ columns – a few centimetres wide and justified text – broken up occasionally but without obvious breaks or chapter headings. I say ‘chapter’ because it read like a story.

This book sees two characters from Carson’s Autobiography of Red transformed and now known as G and Sad, as they go on what the literature describes as “a bizarre road trip through terrain that one critic has called ‘rural Canada meets Ring of Fire meets the Mediterranean circa 600BC’ …” Tee hee!

I surprised myself by really liking this work. Cinematic, dreamlike, dystopian, deadpan and yet I was touched by it, and the humour of it. Pretty much bonkers. Very hard to describe or quote from. But I want to read the whole thing.

Division Street by Helen Mort (Chatto & Windus)

Ooh! Some divisions here all right … we read the first and final parts of a five-part sequence, ‘Scab’. It’s the miners’ strike, and the scene is set:

A stone is lobbed in ’84,
hangs like a star over Orgreave.
Welcome to Sheffield.

At the end of the sequence, we meet the stone again, as we’re told ‘it crashes through your windowpane’ and ‘you’re left to guess which picket line you crossed’. Powerful? Well, yes, but the feeling in the room was that the sequence lacked authenticity. Unlike Alvi’s tale of her family coping with Partition, Mort’s miners’ strike felt one step removed from her lived experience – if there had been some kind of reference to her family, some kind of particular/specific point of view, rather than the big picture, maybe it would feel more powerful. People weren’t keen on the ‘you’ at the end. Is this the narrator? Or an inclusive ‘you’, implicating the reader?

I sensed a bit of ageism in the discussion – can a young poet who hasn’t done anything but been a poet really tell us anything new about our own lived existence? Well I get the argument, but Keats did OK. Plus, there’s still (for me) an energy, a dynamic, an excitement in the work of many of today’s young ‘professional poets’ such as Sam Riviere, Jack Underwood, Emily Berry etc. Should they stick to their own experience, like young actors not taking on King Lear until they’re mature enough? And the converse – should those of us in middle age and older not write about contemporary themes or things we don’t really know about or haven’t actually experienced?

Bad Machine by George Szirtes (Bloodaxe)

George Szirtes is another one for the popular vote. His amazing output, his seemingly indefatigable work ethic, the stream of pithy tweets, erudite blog posts, big personality – just put it all aside, people! The jury cannot take personal charm into consideration at this time!

We looked at ‘Snapshots from a Riot’ – interesting choice after Mort’s ‘Scab’. These snapshots are indeed images many of us will remember from the TV or news at the time of the London riots a couple of years ago. Some are neat rhyming quatrains, eg

Sheneka Leigh, aged twenty-two,
was simply trying on a shoe,
footwear her besetting sin:
this is the box they threw her in.

Others ironic commentary on the commentary (meta commentary? Oh dear I’m getting a bit tired now) and the ending is enigmatic, unresolved:

A boy holds up a pair of jeans appraisingly.
It goes with the hood and the mask.
It is an aesthetic matter.

Three one-line statements, sparse, even cold. Szirtes somehow manages to judge and yet not judge, which puts the reader in an awkward position. Just the same as watching all this on the TV, I was made to feel a bit of a voyeur. It’s yet another take on perspective – you can’t say for sure where you’re looking at this from, or what to make of it.

Drysalter by Michael Symmons Roberts (Jonathan Cape)

The last book we looked at, and while not the biggest (that must go to the Ramayana) it must be classed as some kind of ‘tour de force’ – 150 poems, each 15 lines long. Drysalter has already won the Forward and the Whitbread Poetry Prizes, so as Katy said ‘whether or not he wins, I think the drinks should be on him!’

We read three poems, ‘Something and Nothing’, ‘Elegy for John Milton’ and ‘On Grace’.

‘Drysalter’ we learn is an old word for a trader in powders, salts, paints, dyes, chemicals and cures. The collection has a vast sweep; there is a play on the word ‘psalter’, there are a number of poems of the type ‘Portrait of the Psalmist as …’ and invocations start with ‘O …’

The three poems we looked at all contained themes of ripening, over-ripening, decay but also carrying on, not re-birth as such but transformation. In ‘Something and Nothing’ we have the earth as a ‘bruised fruit’ which is then hidden in a bowl of fruit but ‘this orb just ripens, softens, stays’ while the fruit rots.

In the ‘Elegy to John Milton’ there’s a strange list of things he hears ‘in his last hour’, ranging from sellers and beggars to car alarms, bomb scares and marching troops, as if all the world present and future is passing through. This is a transformational world that’s ‘evolving’ and, as ‘On Grace’ ends,

There are worlds out here to long for.
And we are not lost yet.

Drysalter is probably the book I feel most like going out and buying right now. That and Red Doc>. Of course I might change my mind after tonight’s readings. Who knows!

There ends the whistle-stop tour. It was an informative and inspirational day. The sun shone. And we had some lovely cups of tea. We are not lost yet, indeed.

Category: Close readings

The books

On the process: