Tag: harry man

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’.

The Reading List, week 7 – Jack Underwood ‘Happiness’

 

Only one book to report on in this episode of The Reading List  – there seem to be endless admin jobs involved in moving house, as well as getting out and about exploring my new town when the weather’s been so glorious. Plus I have a cold. Boo! Anyway, excuses be damned. The upshot is that I’m devoting a whole post to this one.

Happiness, Jack Underwood (Faber, 2015)

A few years ago I was in a Poetry School class about ‘putting a pamphlet together’, taught by Jack Underwood. I’m not sure I got as much out of it as I could have, partly because the classes always seemed to start late and I always had to leave promptly to get my train. Attendance was patchy, so I didn’t get much of a sense of the other attendees. I was probably also not really ready for a pamphlet.

There was lots to enjoy though. I have a fond memory of Harry Man‘s work and his sense of humour. And although Jack’s teaching style seemed chaotic he had a real presence and was generous, sparky and funny. I’ve always enjoyed his poems when I’ve come across them in magazines, so I was really looking forward to Happiness, his first full collection just out from Faber.

First, the title: you can read as much irony into it as you wish. Inside are poems of love, anxiety, death, depression and most of all (it felt to me) wonder. In the opening poem, an onion is cut in half, and despite the ‘hung cloud of acid’ it’s a thing of beauty.

as the knife bisected

like a maker of names passing
between twins, calling one half Perfect
and the other half also Perfect. (‘Certain’)

The idea of twins and speculation about ‘otherness’, the nature of the relationship of the narrator to the living world round him/her: people, nature, animals, things – there are eggs, toads, and questions without question marks. It’s a world of conundrums and riddles, where the traditional answers to the burning questions of life are found wanting (‘…suppose there was no panther.’ ‘Theology’).

There are poems of sheer joy – ‘She loves you like your hair smells proteinous; she loves you like pausing to move a snail somewhere safer in the rain; she loves you like milk is not like water…’ (‘She Loves You Like’). ‘… the goofy ten gallon/ hats of happiness that children plant on us everytime/ they impersonate knowledge.’ (‘Happiness’)

In ‘Inventory of Friends’, with more than a nod to Shakespeare’s sonnet 130, we get a list of ‘grass-topped lives’ (what a wonderful phrase – suggesting not only the icing on a cake, the pretty surface, but also ‘pushing up daisies’, ie dead below) in which the narrator compares himself to them…

… But with a predictability
that would be cuteness if it weren’t honest first,
my thoughts turn to you…

what it might be like to be you, coming home
in four hours’ time with no inkling of the way
my insides grown and click like a tired, old
galleon when you take off your coat like that.

More often than not we’re on a knife edge between happiness and sadness – ‘like an anvil dropped from heaven’ (‘Sometimes your sadness is a yacht’). There’s something terrible and poignant about ‘Your horse’, ‘bending himself into the room… we are crunching on polo mints together / and remembering the way your body used to move.’

In ‘Second’, the narrator offers advice –

…I would tell you to let yourself
be sad, if being sad is what happens when a person,
awkward in a universe as a plum on a plate,
drops their day to the inaccessibility of other days,
and loosens their tie on the sofa to let some life out.

It’s beautiful, unexpected, vibrant stuff and I felt I’d been kicked up the backside. This is a book I see myself back to again and again. Do read it.

Harry Man’s ‘telesue’ from Lift

Harry Man Lift

Just as I was umming and ahhing about doing a video blog post in which I would read something from Harry Man’s pamphlet ‘Lift’ (tall-lighthouse), I learn that it’s been awarded the Bridges of Struga Prize – part of the award being translation into Macedonian – golly!

I’ve really enjoyed ‘Lift’ – not least of all for the sci-fi element – I’m not sure if that adequately describes it – futuristic? Intriguing? Fresh? Witty? Anyway, it’s just one of those collections I read and think ‘blimey, I wish I’d written that’. ‘Lift’ is Harry’s first pamphlet and I’m so pleased for him that it’s done so well.

Anyway, video is off today, so audio will have to do it. Here’s my reading of one of the quieter poems in ‘Lift’, the poignant ‘telesue’.

New poem by Harry Man

Earlier this year I was on a Poetry School course in Lambeth and met Harry Man. I really liked his work and I think he and I were two of only four participants who completed the course (out of about 15).

I came across Harry’s name again recently and had a snoop around the internet, discovering all sorts of things that he’s far too modest to shout about, for example he won 3rd prize in this year’s Cardiff International Poetry Competition. Wowza!

Harry’s agreed to be an open mic buddy when I take my first tentative steps onto the London poetry scene next year. Can’t wait! Plus, I asked him for a poem and he very kindly sent me this…enjoy!

 

Hiromi Miyake
Japanese 56kg International Women’s Weightlifting Silver Medalist

The audience at the front; dark white bread in an oven,
each of them had expressions uncompressed as lakes.
Snatch, and nostrils of Mingjuan, trembled, flaring
pleased and quiet like a mirror, a muscle, a whistle string.
Arrow root lifting-powder poltergeisting about the place.
Wang Mingjuan was a slow motion cat leap into red towels –
happy to be here, happy to compete, happening,
Hiromi Miyake, Hiromi Miyake – not City, Red Army,
The just so so beautiful tonight ArcelorMittal Orbit,
“but works in a bank part time to fund her appetite
for lifting weights…”
the bar is seven reds, retinas, clean, high over heads
of state.