Identity Parade, Part 3

Andy Brown

I’ve only briefly read Andy Brown before, but he’s supervising one of my closest friend’s PhD, and he raves about him, so I went into this selection of his poetry with a sense of expectation. The first piece, ‘The Last Geese’, is beautifully descriptive, pleasingly rigid in its form, a sense of clarity and successful mimesis (well, as successful as mimesis can be). It is chopped down and honed, impressive and unflashy, entirely succinct. As such, on the odd occasion his imagery gets a bit more whimsical (“geese the size of the wind”) it doesn’t quite work. Nor does the conclusion: it stretches for an enigmatic, imagistic ending: “the unseen echoing back”. In a poem all about the seen. The problem with it is the contrast, the sense of change the poem seems to be trying to convey, both underestimates and overestimates what came before. The seen is documented meticulously, mimetically, as if it needs to be clung to, to keep; the geese leave “through the pink keyhole of the horizon”. I guess in dropping in “the unseen” it draws too much attention to what the poem wants to achieve, not letting it simply convey what it arguably already has. Or maybe it’s just that ‘the unseen’ is such a prevalent force in American philosophically-tinged poetry at the moment, sometimes for the better, sometimes for worse. Nonetheless, it’s very good. Probably, for me, the best-written poem I’ve read in here so far. And of course, one could read plenty into this subversively ‘surface-based’ poem.

‘A Poem of Gifts’ is very, very good. Although no-one has managed to write this sort of thing better than Tim Lilburn, for me at least. Most poets probably won’t. In fact, this is why I probably won’t go on commenting on Brown: he’s just not Lilburn, but is similar enough in style and content to be immediately associable with him. Most assured poet in here thus far, though, I think, and definitely worth reading. I’m not sure why I so infrequently hear about his work? Same as with Burnside, I guess, with whom Brown has collaborated in the past.


Judy Brown


Judy Brown’s lyrics are compelling, their narratives asserting their originality completely naturally and without showmanship in their apt and striking descriptions (skin “smooth as Greek cheese”, “power chords/of police helicopters”, both from ‘Peckham Poem(s)’) and the personality of her poetic voice. None of the pieces are exceptional in their subject matter, but the quality of her phrasing, which renders familiar themes new, and the power of her observation:

‘Are you a local girl, the man asks.
Yes, I am, I say, hoping to prove it
With my pound coin, which he palms,
His eyes already travelling on.'

make her a writer worth reading.


Collette Bryce


Yawn. More of it! Bryce’s ‘The Smoke’ is a faultless piece of writing, a lovely, neatly and sparsely constructed lyric. But so what? What is it doing to stand out? I’ve read hundreds of British lovely neat sparse lyrics and I’m sick of them. I want something big, something that stands out, something that can match the innovation of the American poetry of the last 20 or so years. We have Pyrnne and Denise Riley, but they’re barely ever mentioned. And of course Muldoon. There seems to be a collective lack, or a collective provinciality in ambition in a lot of the contemporary UK poets I read. Either that or just polite rip off of Yank post-Language poetry.

Okay, back to Collette. Or not. I have nothing to say, really. Finely crafted, has the potential for mainstream appeal. Entirely bland. (I apologise to Collette Bryce for ranting and not actually commenting on the poetry properly. I’m sure it’s not really as uninteresting as I’m making out to be.)


Matthew Caley


Looks alarmingly like Johnny Rotten. First poem ‘Acupuncture’ is good, very funny, reminiscent of the stuff everyone seemed to want to write after ‘The Harbour Beyond the Movie’ came out (but not boring and derivative) and the New York stuff we all like to try not to write too much of. I’d like it more if it didn’t remind me so much of Hughes’s ‘Bride and Groom Lay Hidden for Three Days’. The problem I have with his poetry, actually, having read over it quite a few times, is simply that its absurdism is so standard and predictable and the writing is full of dropped names. The former is fine, in that at least it’s nice to read; the latter is the killer: it spoils the musicality of his poetry, bogging it down with obscure and arguably self-indulgent textual referencing and postmodern trickery.


Siobhan Campbell


While perfectly adequate, her first poem, ‘Almost in Sight’, doesn’t transcend its being another straight lyric about the speaker being a child, despite its political under/overtones. Yep. That’s really all I have to say.


Vahni Capildeo

I saw Capildeo read once and it was an uncomfortable experience. She didn’t seem to keen to be on stage, and I could barely catch a word of what was being said. Her first poem is called ‘Lilies’. Great, I thought. A female poet writing about flowers. And how pleasantly happily presumptuously wrong I was. Capildeo is pretty fucking good. Her opening piece is riddled with scent, concepts and ideas conveyed in smell, in “Vaginal cyprine”, the poem a “claw-shape of undersea diction”. The rest of her poems don’t fare so well, for me, but they are at least inventive in their language, and bold in their vague narratives of time, place and senses, the three intermingling into cogent lyric.


Melanie Challenger


Mmmm. Challenger is good. She seems keen to capture things – a whale, a photograph – with an impressively reshaping phenomenological vigour, transforming the act of viewing an inanimate, once animate thing into an act of descriptive, philosophic meditation. “O that I might love my unbeautying.” Occasionally her desire to depict it new leads to overwritten or overwrought phrasing, but this is, for me, entirely justified by the stretching of her images towards something newly represented, even if they sometimes don’t hit their mark.

“Why can’t flesh give the lie/To immunity?”

Identity Parade, Part Two

Simon Barraclough

I’ve never been especially keen on Barraclough’s poetry. I don’t know, it just doesn’t move me at all. But it does have mainstream appeal without being especially typical of the kind of poetry that generally sells well, and I can respect that. The selection of poems here aren’t doing anything to change my mind. His rhyme works sometimes, annoys at others. ‘Fridgidaire’ is a nicely nasty lyric, with Northern-feeling scenery, a pleasing sense of time and place, and ‘Los Alamos Mon Amour’ is a lovely love poem. He’s simply not for me.


Paul Batchelor

Paul Batchelor’s poetry is engagingly, frustratingly difficult. I’m still not sure quite what I make of it. ‘Secret Papers’, the most immediately accessible and linear piece, is an odd one: both pompous and lovely. Its first half is the old ‘if a tree falls in a forest’ thing. Only the scenario is, to me at least, overwrought. The trunk of an oak has been “Splayed...into a dozen knotted tongues.” No, scrap that, I like that line a lot. It’s this one (and this one only, on reflection) that makes me wince:

‘[...]would its song,

pure fire and air,
have split the ear?’

It may just be me, but I only vaguely ‘get it’ at the end. Nonetheless, there’s a muscularity crossed with a softness, tenderness, in its imagery.

‘Triage’ is the one I keep coming back to, though I honestly don’t understand it. Not in the way when I read, say, Jorie Graham – when I first read Never I was instantly connected to it, in awe of it, even if it took multiple readings, all a pleasure, to work out what the hell she was talking about. With Batchelor, so far, I feel a little bit pushed out by his density. A little bit put off. Yet still engaged, still curious.

I could spend a lot longer on his poetry, but I’d like to continue reading the rest of the book. But Batchelor is definitely one to come back to. The more one enters his work, goes along with it, the more welcoming it becomes. Though I’ll reserve judgment on whether I actually like it or not.


Kate Bingham


Bingham’s poetry, for the most part, does nothing for me. ‘The Island-designing competition’ is a perfectly lovely and perfectly bland poem about childhood, with emptily signifying vague references to politics (or maybe I’m stretching, to justify bothering to comment on a poem like this – yawn): “They stand in public squares, demanding a recount/as the President mouths his acceptance speech”. ‘The Mouths of Babes’ is more interesting, but still does nothing for me. It is a three poem sequence about the mouths of children at various stages. I’m not really the target market for this kind of thing, but I like to think that a good poem will be a good poem to anyone if it is a good poem. There are some nice lines: “your mouth is the shape/of a single, perfectly accomplished gulp”; and some awkwardly twee ones: “where bi-planes have the high blue hemisphere to themselves/and postmen crunch on broken emeralds”. Simply, weak writing.

There’s another bland lyric (I should just dismiss the bog standard bland lyrics I keep encountering as ABLs from now on. I probably won’t.) before the only of her poems worth reading: ‘De Beers’. Named after the diamond manufacturers, it is a complex poem, multi-faceted, with writing that is strong and striking. It is shocking that this was written by the same poet as the rest, and I advise anyone erring on agreeing with my bitching to read this one before dismissing her outright.


Julia Bird

I’m starting to feel bad about disliking so many of the poets in here. Bird is, for me, boring. Her ‘funny’ poem isn’t funny, and the other two are bland enough to have been written by xyz whoever else.


Patrick Brandon

I like Patrick Brandon’s face. It’s both welcoming and scowling. I can imagine a pleasing tone of haughty annoyance in his voice. As for his poetry, Roddy Lumsden probably describes it best: “strangely confident and confidently strange”. I like them a lot. They are rife with brilliant imagery: “the faded denim of a lung”, a lab coming to “with a flutter of strip lights. A room dreaming of itself”, and, in my favourite of his poems, a glitterball “scattering its hoard of coins”, a canal “lying like a pulled ribbon”, hangover a “muffled aftershock”. His writes slightly off-kilter lyric narratives, imbues the commonplace with an idiosyncratic, imagistic aura, one that surprises the reader and perfectly defamiliarises the normal. I’m not entirely sold by the poems here, but I’m pretty sure I’ll pick up one of his collections soon, and I look forward to getting to know his work better. Definitely one to look in to.


David Briggs

Briggs’ poetry is overtly masculine. It is full of Original Description (“sidle crabwise the sag-sad doorframe”) and lots of hard, terse syllabics, a tad reminiscent of Ted Hughes at times. He writes about leeches “bristling on his bell-end” (not Briggs’ bell-end, I must add) and of “slit-ooze/between toes”. It’s all very solid, very strong, very readable, if a bit sharp. He’s good; he has a controlled voice, one that may not break the mould but is definitely very refined. Again, though, they’re not doing anything exceptional. They’re doing masculine lyrics, doing them well, with some engaging descriptive imagery. I recommend you give him a read. But I wouldn’t rave about his work.

Identity Parade, Part One

In this series of features I plan on writing a little bit about each of the poets on show in Roddy Lumsden's Bloodaxe anthology, Identity Parade, which proclaims in its introduction to be representative of the "pluralism of contemporary British and Irish poetry": plural in "its register", its "regional and ethnic diversity", and plural in "its subject-matter" as well as "in its form and style".


Patience Agbabi

Agbabi’s poetry, while initially interesting, quickly reveals itself to be weak and lacking in depth. Her first piece, ‘The Wife of Bafa’, is a character monologue based on Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, in which a Nigerian woman recounts to us from a market stall fragments of her life. It is funny, implicitly political and entirely believable. It gave me a warm feeling upon finishing, but I’ve no desire to read it again.

‘Postmod:’ is a snappy but bland lyric. ‘The London Eye’ would probably like to be a witty, light skewering of consumerist London, and is refreshingly playful, any criticism left, as with the politics, implicit. There are some lovely lines: a man “writing/squat words like black cabs in rush hour”; “The South Bank buzzes with a rising treble”. But ultimately it fails to transgress tired metonymy, another London poem in which the city is conveyed simply by listing things that are in it, and I find its chatty, buzzy tone irritatingly, self-consciously ‘contemporary’.

‘Josephine Baker Find Herself’ is the most interesting of the lot, a specular poem in the vein of Julia Copus. So of course, it is impressively structured. It is the voice that bothers me, the persona on show, as well of course as the way Agbabi renders the voice. It yearns to be ‘contemporary’, to be ‘relevant’, and features embarrassing lines like

‘She samples my heartbeat and mixes it with
techno so hardcore it’s spewing out Audis
on acid for fuel.’

I get the impression that hers is the kind of stuff that’d likely help kids at school get into poetry, away from the tedium of Carol Ann Duffy on repeat. Which is an undoubtably good thing. But for me, it does nothing.

Jonathan Asser

I’d not heard of Asser before reading him here. I’m a bit dismayed, prematurely I hope, by the fact this is the second poet in a row, the second poet in the anthology to be writing about London. His first poem, though, is pretty good: there’s an unexpected lightness of touch, a darkness of humour. It is a snapshot of some people in London, ripe with (more) London metonyms which inform the safe epiphany at the end.

‘Something To Do’ is much better – the same sort of thing, this time a list of observations of a microcosm of London in which the speaker aims to “lick each cobble in the mews, to feel/the individual curve against his tongue”. There are some wonderful descriptions and, thankfully, no real conclusion. It perfectly conveys what it wants to convey, but at the end I’m not particularly eager to read again. It’s not Asser’s fault, of course, but I’m sick to death of poems content to be little more than mini-scale representations of London. Tom Chivers in How to Build a City did it brilliantly – the city was the backdrop on which the quality and original composition and thought could commence. Anyway, I digress...

The next poem is the same as above. Observation after observation, some quality imagery, no epiphany. It almost reads like it is observing all the things it needs, the raw materials, to write an exceptional poem, like it is eloquent notes. Am I wrong to be so curtly dismissive of this kind of thing? It’s not that it’s bad, it’s just that I find it dull. Yes, there are lots of nice-sounding images one can derive from a big city, yes the humour is engaging, but I want something more probing, something bigger, from the poetry I read.

Tiffany Atkinson

Now this is more like it – Atkinson’s poetry is richly imaginative, perhaps even too richly imaginative.


‘Portrait of the Husband as a Farmer’s Market’ is just that, and a striking, entertaining introduction to her poetry. It is basically just a list of metaphors, and despite their quality, their intensity (or perhaps because of the latter), it doesn’t quite work. Or, more accurately, it is, as I said, just that.

I enjoyed the rest of the poems a lot more. Atkinson is in tune with the recent, ‘innovative’ poetry I like so much (largely American, for some reason), comfortable with its theoretical concerns, appreciative of the artificiality of linguistic reconstruction – almost all of her poems comment on what they are doing. ‘Autobiography Without Pronouns’, for example, does a lot more than its title implies. It portrays the idea of capturing something autobiographically as untrustworthy, not only in its refusal of pronouns but in its filmic imagery: “the sea/for miles on the passenger side/like the hiss of Super-8”. It implies that there is no set self one can truly capture and truly represent linguistically, and that trying to do so in a poem, in this poem, is like trying to record something that is not recordable in the first place. Which is why its end (“And love insists, like gravity”) is such a letdown – it comes from nowhere, seems tacked on and contradictory.

The main fault I have with these poems, the only fault, is that they feel a tiny bit undeveloped. They bombard the reader spectacularly with metaphor, dazzle and impress, but often seem to wear themselves out by their conclusions, like an awkward silence after a big display. As if later work, in which she is more controlled or refined as a writer, is what these pieces are aiming for. Which is why ‘In this one’ stands out. It does the same things as the rest, but the imagery and metaphor never swallow the poem’s intentions. It is beautiful in its tactility and restraint, compared to the others: “His/skin has sun in its unconscious”, “my tongue’s a husband in a dress-/shop”, light hitting earrings “quips back”.

I look forward to her forthcoming Bloodaxe collection in 2011.