Tag: bloodaxe

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Recent reading: ‘Home Front’, new poetry from Bloodaxe

Home Front, Bloodaxe

An interesting book came my way from Bloodaxe recently – a book of books, you might call it, or perhaps an anthology of collections. Home Front features four collections (each by a different poet, three of whom were unfamiliar to me) on the theme of war, specifically the experience of wives, lovers and mothers when their loved ones in the military are sent away to war.

Isabel Palmer‘s contribution is Atmospherics, which includes a number of the poems from her excellent Flarestack pamphlet Ground Signs which I read and enjoyed a while back. The poems here are grouped into three, the central section focusing on the period of time her son spent in Afghanistan, sandwiched between two ‘Home’ sections, before and after. As a result, Atmospherics expands on Ground Signs through the inclusion of not just more material but also more experimental forms, as in for example the lists and glossaries that make up the six-part ‘Symbols’ sequence at the start of the final section. 

Isabel Palmer is from a military family, whereas Bryony Doran is not. When her son joined the army it was a surprise to learn ‘…that I’d become part of the army, another dazed parent / eating plastic packed sandwiches thrown casually on tables’ (‘Joining up’). Bulletproof is Doran’s first collection, in which she charts her own feelings of helplessness and fear for her son while he serves in Afghanistan, from wondering what her pacifist father would have made of it (‘Wormwood Scrubs’) to dealing with enquiries from well-meaning friends and trying not to be panicked by every Afghanistan-related media story. The poet ponders aspects of her son’s personality and childhood episodes, observes others who are also touched by the war and seems to be trying to make sense of her son’s choices and motivations.

On his last day he says when he gets back
he’s putting in for his motorbike test.
He sees the look on my face and laughs,
asks why I’m scared of life.  (‘Rest & Relaxation’)

We later learn that ‘more soldiers have died in motorbike accidents since coming back than have died in Afghanistan’ (footnote to ‘Avoiding Traffic Accidents’).  Although the poet’s son returns safely, clearly the mother isn’t undamaged by the experience. There is an edge of bitterness to ‘Tips for Parents of Returning Soldiers’ that goes beyond the ‘wtf’ irony of some of the earlier ‘found’ poems based on army-issued instructions or advice. Despite some slightly (for me) heavy-handed moments, this collection was an intriguing read next to Palmer’s.

I’m sorry not to have discovered Jehanne Dubrow before now. Stateside, her collection in Home Front, is written from the perspective of the wife of a US naval officer who’s deployed to various postings overseas. It’s also an exploration of wives-left-behind with reference particularly to Penelope in the Odyssey. Both the officer and the wife at home have their own journeys, and of course there’s the one they take together. The reader fears for the relationship even from the opening poem  ‘It means the moveable stays tied’ (‘Secure for Sea’) and even on a balmy seaside evening eating chocolate – ‘ we’re kids again’ – the mood darkens –

I would like to call it death, this thing that sticks

like marshmallows inside my mouth, gritty
with a thousand sharp particulates of sea. (‘Virginia Beach’)

Through all the collections in Home Front, fear of the loved one dying is naturally a common theme. It seems to inhabit so many of Dubrow’s poems: the irony of soldiers having to play dead in an exercise (‘Swim Test’), death in dreams (‘Sea Change’) and in the sheer waiting (‘Situational Awareness’). It permeates the eroticism of poems such as ‘Instructions for Other Penelopes’ and ‘Bowl, in the Shape of a Bristol Boat’. In ‘Against War Movies’ the list of famous war films builds black comedic effect till being brought up sharp at the end –

Each movie is a training exercise
a scenario for how my husband dies.

Dubrow favours form (there are many sonnets in the collection, and a three-stanza triolet – is there a name for that?) and I loved her clever use of rhyme. So many of the poems I wanted to read out loud to really enjoy the musicality and the many subtly layered effects.  The work feels like a sophisticated examination of a relationship slowly dying under the strain of separation;

… I can’t say when I reached for you
if we rustled like tissue paper, delicate

as shards, or if we slid our razored edges
back and forth, until we split apart. (‘Moving’)

The final collection in the book is Elyse Fenton‘s Clamor, first published in the US in 2010 when it (intriguingly) won the Dylan Thomas Prize, despite not having published in the UK. We learn in the biog that Fenton is the wife of a US army medic posted to Iraq.

It’s fascinating to plunge right on into another poet’s world, another poet’s take on the now familiar theme. I couldn’t help but feel a bit strung out at this point. What new? What more? But in the words of the time-honoured cliche (itself a time-honoured cliche)… I wasn’t disappointed.

Fenton’s poems are both gutsy and delicate, alive with wordplay and creative leaps. The human body features frequently in all its messy physicality, whether describing life – ‘Radha, let us touch your face, / thaw our fingers on your kindled skull, / trace the kerf of your open mouth’ (‘For Radha, Two Days Old’) – ‘your mouth and its live wetness, your tongue / & its intimate knowledge of flesh’ (‘Love in Wartime 1’) or death – As if this were not the work of shrapnel – / not the body’s wet rending, flesh/ reduced to matter – (‘Notes on Atrocity (Baghdad Aid Station)’)

All the themes we’ve encountered before are here: dreams. Waiting. Fears of the unknown. Homecomings. Same, yet different. Here’s an extract from Fenton’s ‘Your Plane Arrives from Iraq’, heavy and elegiac in the face of what should be a joyful moment, which for some reason brought to my mind Wilfred Owen’s ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ and its ‘each slow dusk the drawing down of blinds’ –

… And once more
the sky’s feathered jet-stream, and once
more, the dirge and caesura of rotors

and once more the slow Morse of the plane’s
body descending. And at the end
of the longest sentence I’ve ever known

your face in the window’s fogged aperture:
stranded noun, Rorschach of stars. Beautiful thing.

‘Home front’ is published by Bloodaxe, price £12.

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The Reading List week 9: Malone, Maitreyabandhu, Man

Cur, The Bond, Lift

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’.