Tag: poetry book review

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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.

Angst/

What I’ve been reading… Kei Miller’s ‘Cartographer’

The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion

At the library I recently picked up Kei Miller’s The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion (Carcanet 2014), and it proved to be one of those books you start reading and can’t put down till you get to the end.

I’ve folded back so many corners of pages, to mark the poems I loved. At the heart of the book is a dialogue between a foreign cartographer intent on making a precise map of Jamaica (‘what I do is science’), and a ‘rastaman’ who explains the impossibility of it and distrusts the reasons for it –

the mapmaker’s work is to make visible
all them things that shoulda never exist in the first place
like the conquests of pirates, like borders,
like the viral spread of governments

(‘ii. in which the rastaman disagrees’)

The voices of the protagonists reveal the clash not just of cultures but of ways of seeing and thinking about our existence. Interwoven throughout are the stories behind place-names, the characters and history that has shaped the island, answers to the map-maker’s questions. A white mistress who ordered the road to her property be ‘laid in its serpentine way’ so that she never had to look at her black neighbour’s property which was bigger than her husband’s. A house given a fancy French name ‘Chateau Vert’ becomes corrupted to Shotover, and how the story now goes that the owner’s job was to shoot at runaway slaves, which shows that ‘when victims live long enough they get their say in history’ (‘Place Name, Shotover’).

The cartographer moves from his position of objectivity to wondering about Zion that the rastaman speaks of, and the question ‘how does one map a place / that is not quite a place?/ How does one draw / towards the heart?’ (xxi.)

So many of the poems are beautifully self-contained and yet part of the whole. I had so many “DAMN! I WISH I’D WRITTEN THAT” moments. Wonderful lyricism and clever, clever use of language, rhythm and rhyme…

…a hymn then
not to birds but to words
which themselves feel
like feather and wing

and light, as if it were
on the delicacy of
such sweet syllables
that flocks take flight.

(‘Hymn to the Birds’)

I can see why this book won the Forward Prize for best first collection in 2014. If you’ve read it, tell me if you agree. If not, you should be able to get it in your local library (at the moment that is, until all the money is pulled entirely from public services, and libraries, museums, art galleries, parks, free healthcare and free anything all become things of the past.) I started writing this post as a way of taking my mind off how sad and angry I’m feeling today, and how ashamed I am of my country, and how sad I am to feel so ashamed. But I couldn’t stop it all welling up at the end. Sorry.

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Andrew McMillan’s ‘Physical’

Physical by Andrew McMillan

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.

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Stephen Bone’s ‘In The Cinema’

 

In the cinema by Stephen Bone

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.