One Review - Iain Morrison

What’s it called?

Like by Colin Herd - The Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2011

I’ve thought that the word ‘like’, which is the title of Colin Herd’s chapbook with The Knives Forks and Spoons Press, is and has been a problematic one for a poet of any era. Historically likely to appear more frequently than most other words in an artform much taken with likening, have poets not worried about the overuse of it’s ugly diphthong, it’s harsh plosive, the scarcity of useable alternatives? They surely have, and for a contemporary poet, in this postmodern game where the act of making metaphor has had its bluff called, the appearance of the word ‘like’ in a poem can point to an unfashionable, an unsophisticated, an un-metonymic mind.

All the more provocative then of this shape-shifting poet, to lead us into his poems on such a wrong-foot.

So, the three words on his chapbook’s cover read ‘Like Colin Herd’, but it is a question for the reader just how much ‘like’ Colin Herd this group of eleven poems is. To put it another way, how much would the poet align his voice with the aggregate of those presented in the poems? ‘Those’, for there is no clear overarching voice here. Through the poems, if we try to, we chase a wavering hologram of self-portrait, though probably not of Colin Herd’s self, any more than the perfume-hawking Eva Longoria of the poem ‘Eva Longoria’ is likely to be coterminous, or even concerned to appear so, with the woman who suffers from scent-related allergies – if we can trust the poem on the matter, that is.

In these poems, the concerns of a poet, or at least the causes of this poetry that must exist for real within the poems’ hall of mirrors, are glimpsed as his withdrawals, his tuckings away in our peripheral vision. I thought of Christopher Isherwood’s attestation, ‘I am a camera’ and the lie given to this by the glaring omission of the juicy bits in his Berlin novels. In fact, that seems more right than what I started out saying in the last paragraph – if a self-portrait is present, it is only there as much as in the television programme Through the Keyhole where the audience is invited to guess ‘What sort of a person would live in a house like this?’. This poetry seems more and more to me to set about collecting voices in a miscellany that throws up an impossibility of cohesion or of straight-forwardness.

Incidentally the poem ‘Denise Levertov’ felt like it allowed this reader closer to the poet than some of the others. It reminded me of the 1958 quarrel between poets Helen Adam and Denise Levertov in one camp and Jack Spicer in the other. Following a perceived insult by Spicer to the two women at a party held to celebrate their writing, the camps became defined along woman poet v. male poet lines, or perhaps woman v. man, or perhaps, as Levertov seemed to indicate in a letter to Lewis Ellingham (as quoted in his and Kevin Killian’s Spicer biography Poet Be Like God) in which she says ‘I find homosexual males & lesbians uncongenial in groups’, straight v. gay. Spicer’s ‘insult’ took the shape of a poem he read out at the occasion which included the phrase ‘The female genital organ is hideous’ and then later ‘Men ought to love men/ (And do)/ As the man said/ It’s/ Rosemary for remembrance.’. Afterwards Helen Adam had a dream in which she delivered letters (another image from Spicer’s rather good poem), apologising as she did so for being a woman. The presence here of dreaming and hating and of Denise Levertov made me wonder if somewhere in Colin Herd’s poem, there is an act of reparation, or perhaps of revenge?

denise levertov

dreamed the thong of her sandal

broke

that’s a bad dream

i dreamed i was able

to mend

her dream-sandal, and did

so, very carefully.

she hated me for it, i think,

in the dream.

To return to the chapbook’s title, omission, redundancy and unsureness are all also present in that word ‘like’ when it is used, like it probably is conversationally at least half the time in Scotland, as merely a space-filler, as a cover-up for not knowing what to say. Of a certain attractive ignorance.

Why are these poems made of such stuff? Which motives is Colin Herd not fessing up to? There are clues, like, because his poems go further than Isherwood’s novels in allowing their voices the act of liking. ‘Franz Kline’ begins ‘i really like the famous/black and white paintings/of franz kline.’, while ‘Read My Lips’ begins, ‘i’m such a fan’. We begin to sense what the poet is getting at in this opener about a ‘favourite wax-sculptor’ from the team at Madame Tussauds. The speaker of the poem has, with a connoisseur’s relish, detected one particular hand in work designed only to be appreciated for its seamless replication of reality. And yet, the voice’s appreciation is only fuelled further by the inside knowledge he has gained. He speaks like a master forger admiring his hero, like the wannabe of Morrissey’s song ‘The Last of the Famous International Playboys’ who is admiring not his tabloid monster mentor but the exquisite art in his self-construction. There is something murderous about each.

In ‘Cumbernauld’ this exploration of the ‘artificially’ constructed is extended into 1950’s town-planning. Colin Herd spent some time growing up in the Scottish new town this poem centres on, or rather tracks, as it is variously manifested in a series of video clips. The last phrase in the poem, which I took at first to be throwaway if not fully sarcastic, began to seem more generous and somewhere between confident and optimistic when I considered it from the perspective of someone who knew their home town to have come fresh from an architect’s drawing board. Here, and in the rest of these poems, there might be an endorsement of DIY culture, or more simply, acts of making (or of making up in at least two senses); their endless possibilities. The Bryce Family of ‘Cumbernauld’ even provide a sort of creation myth for the town and for the Modern age.

The chorus of Like’s voices fetishises an occlusion of the self. It leads us towards a point where the self might forget that it was ever something wild and untameable, or maybe it never was – maybe the poet doesn’t buy in to that notion. Think celebrity culture: there is a neutering, an abnegation of responsibility in these voices with every visceral experience frozen behind a glossy marketing product which allows us to lean in to the dead lips of George Bush Senior or to coolly view the end of a teacher’s career wrought by vindictive pupils. We are in the viewing chamber and are entreated to behave as such.

And the view from this chamber looks like an intriguing combination of Heat magazine and Who’s Who. Dougie Poynter rubs shoulders with Denise Levertov, so perhaps it’s actually more fantasy dinner party territory. There’s little separation between discreet worlds.

The lack of discretion relates to another likely source for the chapbook’s title: facebook with it’s ubiquitous ‘like’ button. In the World Wide Web evoked by this reading, incongruent content is flattened and vertiginously stacked. The communal voice of Wikipedia is imitated to teasingly bamboozling effect in ‘Turboprop’, and an enthusiastic nutter invites us to his or her page in ‘How to growl: Starter Techniques’, then we are treated to a series of video clips, perhaps brought up by the search-term ‘Cumbernauld’.

As  I wrote that last paragraph, a nagging possibility came into my head. I have just gone online to see if all this stuff is really there. It is! I just watched the video of the growling man who takes himself SO seriously it’s quite too hilarious. Colin Herd is making me look at things - weird things. Now I’m beginning to think that maybe this is partly what he’s aiming at: to force awareness of groups we might feel unrelated to or even alienated from and moreover, to force us to see them dispassionately. The level voices make it pretty hard for the reader to be judgemental. Is this taking us back into ‘I am a camera’ territory? In fact even the perceived mainstream is having its tightly-fitted lid lifted. This is the queering of everything with boggling political ramifications.

Anyway, I’ve also just checked the Wikipedia entry for ‘turboprop’ and yes, I found the text of Herd’s poem pretty much verbatim. It’s hard to tell whether it’s only not completely verbatim because of Wikipedia’s shifting sands, but I’m choosing to enjoy the thought that here we have a teasing intro from the poet himself with ‘nozzle, obviously.’.

The experience of sifting boredly through a tedious morass of online bumf to find what you’re halfway looking for is an act of reading/researching we have had to adapt to en masse only in the last generation. Are Colin Herd’s acts of transcription or near-transcription a clue to one of his themes – the relation of the individual to internet culture: the acceptance of new ways of seeing, interpreting and relating that the internet has demanded of us?

Such a take on the poems could be followed into its moral implications. The challenge of our age might prove to be the making of moral decisions when nothing is swept under the carpet out of sight anymore. Everything is there, hanging around in cyberspace like the YouTube suicide video of a high-school teen-killer, justifying itself incompatibly with everything in opposition to it.

The contest between an individual consciousness, like Colin Herd’s, and the illusory communal ones is lost here, every time at the first hurdle, without a fight. This is poetry as pratfall. But think how enduring those vaudeville acts of seeming levity have proved as a guide to the prevailing social pressures of the silent film era. The everyman characters of Laurel and Hardy and Chaplin’s loveable tramp come to mind.

And with the silent film era, we arrive at another of Herd’s celebrity cameos. In ‘I am’, the protagonist, in an act of Promethean theft, attempts to take an eyeball from the man of a thousand faces, Lon Chaney. This is a poet who is not afraid to become disfigured to get everybody’s points across.

Bobby Parker's 'Ghost Town Music' reviewed

Bobby Parker

Ghost Town Music

The Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2011, £7

9781907812446

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It is impossible not to connect Bobby Parker’s debut with the poetry of Charles Bukowski. The apprehension about doing so stems from the negative connotations inevitably brought forth by such a comparison – dreggy bedsit scribble, easy cheap indulgence, soggy English American affectation. It is both a shame and a testament to the singular Bukowski that his influence has become so ubiquitous; likewise, it is a testament to Parker that his incorporation of Bukowski poetics is for the most part transgressive and not derivative, even incidental at times. His project has the strange quality of both extreme affect and lack of artifice – a staged lack of poeticity that somehow comes across as authenticity.

Ghost Town Music is more notebook than collection, featuring a comic strip, photography, reproduced handwritten scraps and typewritten pages. Again, these come across as entirely natural, expected, a kind of vital ambience for the poems themselves. And it is the poems themselves that are most worthy of discussion. Therein, however, lies the problem. Quoting from any of the individual poems as representative exemplars of Parker’s shtick would inadvertently undermine the way GTM functions as a whole. There is an absence of metaphorical language throughout – one poem even featuring a deleted section: “(THE EDITOR THOUGHT THAT THIS LINE WAS TOO / LYRICAL TO BE INCLUDED IN THE COLLECTION)” – and a plethora of unabashedly crude rememberings of high, horny and broke adolescence. Situated together in a nonlinear progression of scrawled reminiscence, which is charmingly human and naked, the pieces blur together into a never-pitifully-melancholy shard of growing up, and while on their own there is nothing particularly exciting or interesting about the language the poems utilise, as a speedily read mass they insinuate their – how to put this? – genuineness into the reader.

For example:

In the time between

getting the sack

from one job in a factory

and walking into town

to the recruitment agency

for another job in a factory

I marvelled at

the way the sun

made people on the street

seem happy to be alive.

That is one poem (most are untitled and the book is unpaginated) in full. And in a sense, it’s not very good. If I were to read it on its own I would dismiss it as Bukowski-aping affect. It is hackneyed, and the marvelling at the people in sun is crudely functional. And yet as part of a collection read chronologically it, along with the other parts, coalesces into a believable authentic speaking self documenting an existence that is very much undocumented – as far as I can see – in the young contemporary poetry scene: a poetry about a particular kind of existence and formative surroundings free from mainstream stylisation, not locked into Movement-dogged bogstandard English plainspokenness. It is the fact that these poems read like they could not have been written any other way that gives them their aura of authenticity, of genuineness, despite the obvious affectation.

The fragments of introspection are what work best for me, when Parker is less concerned with portraying a lifestyle than expressing personal feeling. ‘Little Bean’ is, as Luke Kennard has noted, quite simply heartbreaking and I wouldn’t want to taint it by speaking of it further. But also affecting are the fragments like this one, appearing sporadically, little notes to self made public:

If I want sun

I close my eyes under a lightbulb

If I want sea

I close my eyes and listen

To the toilet flush...

Parker’s poetry in this collection, wilfully messy and semi-edited as it may or may not be, is a becoming. There is a humanity that presses against the words and helps give them their force, and as the poems ransack childhood and early adulthood for purpose, so their quality as poetry seems to be writing towards itself. It is a journey towards something enacted in the process of the poems together and the implication of what the poet is working towards as poet, and I think it will be a journey worth joining. 

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By Joshua Jones.

Two Reviews - Anna Woodford's 'Birdhouse' and Kenneth Fields' 'Classic Rough News'

Anna Woodford - Birdhouse (Salt, 2010)

What is immediately striking about Anna Wooford’s Birdhouse is that it manages to pull off the difficult trick of managing to be both sexy and sweet. An undercurrent of tension runs through many of the poems in this collection, tugging the lyric in new and exciting ways, but its restrained in an cocoon of delicate intimacy. In the title poem, Woodford starts with:

You fiddle with the catch
between my legs until my mouth
springs open and I am
crowing like an everyday bird that has
entered the heights of an aviary.

This is of course a poem proclaiming not too subtly that the characters are having s-e-x. But the expertly-enjambed first line break turns what could be merely an engaging mundanity into a captivating image, while the poem’s climax of “my next cry / rests on the tip of your tongue” leaves the poem bridging the gap between intimacy and intensity, fragility and strength.

A lot of the poems in the collection are infused with a fragile lyricism while maintaining an engagingly chatty tone in its free verse. For example, the opening two lines of ‘Taking in the Washing’: “Next to your boxers, my bra / is undone, how vividly” are both lyrical in the best sense of the word, distilling the excess of lust and seduction into a perfectly-placed image, while still retaining a sense of looseness, of freedom with language and form.

Many of the poems in Birdhouse operate like this - beginning with an image of the familiar (but still rendered startling) domestic, before transcending them with colourful imagery and fanciful metaphor. A washing line becomes a timeline, diamonds become a memory box, while time itself is undone in ‘Looking Back’ where the narrator wishes:

If there was a master tape
of our night
I’d get my hands on a copy
and set it to rewind,
so I could watch our bodies
unmaking love

Here Woodford is playing with time, with the essence of being. Yet rather than boring us with ontological navel-gazing, she instead launches us on flights of fancy with thematic seriousness and linguistic playfulness - “unmaking love” being one of the best examples of this invention. It’s a fantastic line; cold, hard and tersely conveying so much while saying so little.

This then is a collection which operates within the boundaries of the lyric and is respectful of them, while seeking to go beyond them, teasing the gaps and fractures in the verse. If some of Woodford’s less ambitious pieces fall flat because of their failure to escape the everyday, her linguistic play and the elegies to her grandparents reveal an understated, intelligent and genuine poetry. Woodford has achieved the unthinkable - a collection about sex and death which makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside.

Kenneth Fields - Classic Rough News (University of Chicago Press, 2005)

There is much to admire about Kenneth Fields’ Classic Rough News - the construction of an intelligent, sceptical and resolutely cosmopolitan poetic presence, an interior dialogue which manages to resist navel-gazing, and a finely-crafted verse. A collection of sonnets and sonnet-like lyrics, Classic Rough News makes it immediately clear that Fields is a polished writer, adept at the technicalities of writing - although this does seem less impressive when you consider that Fields has spent 40 years as a Creative Writing professor.

Still, these are well-crafted lyric poems Professor. Fields’ clear and concise language allows us to immerse ourselves in a world of memory, reflection and doubt, juxtaposed with the delights and the strains of the everyday. Fields also has a nice line in snappy epigrams: “The melancholy man laughs last, / Not necessarily, no, not necessarily best” - the surface effortlessness of Fields’ language combining well with the abstracted melancholy of the verse.

Fields’ collection seems wholly unconcerned with giving impressions, and, given the prevalence of ‘impressionistic’ pieces in the mainstream poetry scene, this could be considered a good thing. And it would be, if the alternative vision which Classic Rough News offers wasn’t so bloody boring.

Fields has then written a collection which is easy to admire but hard to love. He is obviously a master of the sonnet form, and there are times when his perfectly-enjambed lines create a dance with the narrative imagination while giving sensory pleasure, a sense of things unfolding. Witness these lines from ‘Before Sleep‘:

“This room goes on forever. The dark hush
Glows like departing love that will not go.
There are no edges; here everything is rounded
By light and its companion. As if dazed,”

Unfortunately intimate moments like these are few and far between in the collection. Too often Fields resorts to the knowing and the arch, which, when contained in a sonnet form so naturally predisposed to the delicate and the personal comes across as jarring and forced. There seems then an unfortunate disparity between Fields’ content and his form.

Many of the poems take the form of fictions, and the same characters often crop up from poem to poem. However, the rigidity of the sonnet form does not allow time for Fields to develop his fictions or his characters and so we are instead left with snatches of a poetry that feels incomplete. This sense of there being something lacking, rather than being tantalising and suggestive, becomes, due to the flatness of Fields’ language, frustrating and in the end quite dull.

Classic Rough News is then a rough draft of a poetry that could be much better executed. If Fields abandoned the sonnet form which does not allow space for his ideas to develop and showed more of the humour promised by the blurb, then he could have a great collection on his hands. Unfortunately, as it stands, it is neither classic, nor news.
--
by Robert Van Egghen

Some Reviews

Jonty Tiplady

Zam Bonk Dip

Salt Publishing, 2009

reviewed by Andy Spragg

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Choosing to engage with excess has long stood as a hallmark of a kind of poetry that tends to be labelled – sometimes pejoratively – as 'experimental'. As poetic strategy it is often embedded within a particular slipstream of theory; an acknowledgement that the poem's frame is one that inevitably works to exclude a variety of dialogues in favour of developing some form of narrative or epiphany-driven coherence. At its worse this exclusion creates a totality anchored in the tediously domestic, a sort of complicit agreement between reader and writer that asserts an absence of linguistic or thematic challenge. If such an approach defines itself by its ability to disregard the incongruities that hover beneath the surface of language then Jonty Tiplady's book forms its refreshing antithesis. He is all about excess, both linguistically and thematically. As a poet he evokes JH Prynne's 'Nearly too much / is, well, nowhere near enough' from Down Where Changed, an desire to engage with such a vast and eclectic range of stimuli that the poem's frame strains to contain it all.

Zam Bonk Dip collects together a number of Tiplady's chapbooks, and serves as an excellent showcase of his distinctive approach. The writing is defined by a technique that manages to be doggedly consistent without losing its innately compelling edge, a style that takes its cues from the saturated language of both the media and the internet. It's playful, funny and highlights the hyper-speed tenacity with which our vocabulary currently evolves. This is no more apparent than in the third section of the title poem, where Tiplady exclaims '{...}anoint the/blobject beckoning on the Olympic Stadium.' ('Zam Bonk Dip') He could well have pulled the whole thing out of a Guardian article on Stratford's latest folly, or from a comment posted under a Youtube clip, or found it amongst the quagmire of writing that populates blogspot – he may well invented it himself – and in that fact lies the most engaging aspect of Tiplady's work. It is full of such moments, and yet it manages to be tender as well: 'It's always time to sing again/careless soul.' ('Zam Bonk Dip') Here's Whitman's contained multitudes, albeit shot through with a twitter-feed attention span.

Tiplady is not the first of his contemporaries to make gestures towards an inclusive meshing together of high and low culture by any means. In fact, case could be made that it is an overly familiar strategy, even amongst the more 'mainstream' poets of the day. Luke Kennard (with whom Tiplady shares Salt as publisher) demonstrated an ambitious scope in source material throughout The Harbour Beyond the Movie, however his usage conceded to a certain authorial flourish, a sense of the writer signposting his own reading list. With Tiplady it feels like a natural extension of the language, the mode of expression itself, rather than a contrivance or device.

Another thing that distingushes Tiplady is his comparative fearlessness when it comes to the 'low' culture component in his writing. It's hard to imagine Kennard writing, 'I met this girl the other day, she had a nice ass. I wanted to tit-fuck that ass.' ('Dear World And Everyone In It') Taking such a line out of context is unfair as it strips away that which frames it; it does, however, highlight the intrinsic value judgements that usually deflate a poet's decision to engage with excess, that they tend to be guided by an unconscious aesthetic conservatism. For Tiplady no such reservation exists, or if it does then it plays out beneath the surface; his usage of such difficult concepts draws attention to the dialogues that infiltrate deep into culture. There is a curious double logic at play. Internet pornography's popularity embeds certain linguistic codes into the cultural strata, regardless of where the individual may stand morally; likewise when Tiplady exclaims 'LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE' ('OOV'), it is impossible to not know who he is referring to. There is an affirmation (a word that Tiplady charges with particular significance in 'Dear World and Everyone in it'): here are the dialogues, now what shall we do with them?

For all its heteroglossic intensity, Tiplady's work manages to describe patterns of love and human relationships in a novel and emotionally striking way. The poems that demonstrate real success are the ones that manage to contain elements of genuine tenderness in the narrative voice; no mean feat when you consider some of the aggressively chauvinistic language Tiplady's chosen to incorporate. Lines such as, 'and I love you, through to/pieces of heaven{...} give me my conker back' ('Manic Milk') are demonstrative of Tiplady's desire to communicate something of love, something of communication itself, through his fractal language games. It's the striking tension between these two that sustains Zam Bonk Dip throughout, a want for clarity amongst an excess of signification. Tiplady's success lies in his ability to make this a compelling exercise; one that acknowledges its own inevitable failure, but is no worse a read for it.

Sandra Tappenden

Speed
Salt Publishing, 2007
reviewed by Joshua Jones

1.

Sandra Tappenden’s second collection is a wilfully idiosyncratic, forcefully contemporary and strangely confessional work of fractured lyric and prose poetry, riddled with absurdism and wreathed in irony. It is for all of these reasons that it, initially, is a compelling read, but upon closer inspection reveals itself to ultimately be lacking in force. While she has a seemingly inexhaustible supply of striking imagery, her phrasing is always cocooned in a rather banal safety net of irony, and while she is evidently aware of the difficulties of using language, particularly in light of the philosophy of the 20th Century and poetry since the Language movement, she seems content to merely present an awareness of this, an acknowledgment of its difficulty{1}, the – “constantly uncapturable” (5) – before retreating from the danger of meaning into the supposed prevention of criticism that is blank irony; or, more irritatingly, into Bridget Jones-esque domestic singledom. In ‘Blame’, following on from the above quotation:

Tenuous moral concepts depend upon

where anyone stands. It’s easier

to lay down, groovy-single,

playing the same track

over and over.

True. But surely the role of poetry is to resist the easy option? Of course, the poem from which this is taken can also be read as ‘giving in’ ironically – earlier in it the speaker makes reference to her “compromised heart”. But where does that get us? For a collection entitled Speed, Tappenden really is often a quite lazy writer, happy to rehash postmodern poetics, sprinkle in a bit of self-conscious idiosyncrasy” (“I’ve found it helps to carry an egg in pocket” [1]) and trite, ironised confessionalism, and voila, we have a book of poems happy to sit there not really doing anything much other than chasing circles around itself.

Which is not to say the book is without merit. On the contrary – her imagery at the very least creates the illusion of singing with movement and vitality. So why not apply the same exuberance to content? In a characteristic line, again from ‘Blame’:

Naivete is forgivable when both parties

are unaware they’re innocent.

2.

The story now has gaps where once I knew all the lyrics.

[...]

There are clues here in a lyric full of holes.

(‘St Swithin’s Day’, p. 16)

In a long sequence – ‘Matthew Arnold Refuses To Exit the Building’ – Tappenden somehow manages to create what I can only describe as a pastiche of pastiche{2} . The second in the sequence (‘To behave repeatedly like an idiot does not mean I am an idiot’):

All I can think to say is that if I had a hammer

there’d be one less cat in the world or I’m sorry

I seem to have confused you with my dad.

But it’s not really a shop, it’s a mist-ridden 7 a.m.

Sunday boot fayre where you rush up in red or dead

hangover shades with a fiver for a something lovely.

It takes moments to realise crucial pieces are missing

but hey you say it’s all part of a long game

a bit like bridge or that other one called crevasse.

(25)

To which all I can muster is a yawn. Throughout the sequence, cats and arrows and other deliberately blank signifiers appear, their sole purpose being to relate with one another to produce the implication of a possible meaning, one that clearly isn’t there; but even this isn’t done with a purpose, with a political or philosophical aim the way the Language poets consistently did. Instead it is simply being ironic for the sake of being ironic, behaving like an idiot for the sake of behaving like an idiot. This is a poetry which seems terrified of even the possibility of having to engage with anything beyond banality and pointless circularity. More than that, she seems to actively have little faith in her own medium. References to poets and poetry abound:

Where does anyone live nowadays?

Certainty is a product like anything else

and poets are not much use are they

I often think I overhear someone say.

(‘People who are drawn to take free stress tests’, 42)

If I tell you the sunset is salmon topped with grey...

[a long breathless assault of imagery follows which is actually pretty decent]{3}

call me a liar will you

(‘Mastery’, 4)

I should like to be rigorous without seeming pedantic.

I should like to drink the Indian and the Atlantic.

I should hope. I do, but I’m howyousay? compromised, so.

(‘There must be something in the water’, 55)

Once upon a time being a poet meant more

(‘The unexamined life is not worth living’, 65)

And so on.

Tappenden knows how to write appealing, infectious, bouncy, exuberant images and how to play with enjambment and to deadpan &c&c. The problem is her poetry takes failure as failure, and despite all its energy it seems to me it has little faith in the concept of movement{4}. I’d recommend not bothering with this collection. Kennard’s nailed contemporary absurdist, ironic and distinctly English poetry that is actually doing something and believes in itself; Speed, on the other hand, is fluff.

Notes

1.  "to state the difficulty, to state the difficulty of stating, is not yet to surmount it – quite the contrary" - Jacques Derrida

2. I picture Fredric Jameson hitting himself over the head with his own book.

3. The parenthesis is, in case it’s not apparent, mine. (I also happen to think it would, if developed, make a far superior poem to the one that is actually there. But hey, that’s just me, right?)

4. For a nice summary of what I mean by movement see Neil Williams’ essay here. It is of particular interest in its situating its discussion of movement in Plato’s philosophy, which serves to reinforce and further explicate notions of movement familiar to readers of Heidegger and Derrida.
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Jim Goar - Seoul Bus Poems and David Gewanter - The Sleep of Reason
by Rovert Van Egghen


Urgh, I thought, when presented with Seoul Bus Poems by Jim Goar. A collection of poems, most of which, according to the blurb, “began on a bus, [one] began in Bangkok, and others in rooms in rooms between Yonsei University and Bongwon-sa”. No doubt there will be a lot of gap yah anecdotes and half-baked political pieties in a bubble-wrap of self-righteousness. Fortunately, proving that old adage about books and covers true, I was wrong, very, very wrong.

Seoul Bus Poems is a subtle collection, and indeed at first reading it can seem rather flat and uninspiring. Opening with “I don’t want to write / about leaves. The change in / seasons. my love”, almost begs the response of well, good for you. It also does not help that Seoul Bus Poems contains some absolute clunkers: my favourite being “Just do me a favour, my suicidal rose / And get of the ledge / You’ll kill the dirt if you fall”. Emo angst has never been done so well. Yet it would be too easy to dismiss Goar’s collection as the kind of poetry the ‘experimental’ kid reads at your local Open Mic.

The key to appreciating Seoul Bus Poems instead lies in appreciating the sounds of the words on the page, the dances with language which Goar undertakes. Lines like “breaking little rakes akimbo” and “blocks of western migration / lemon rubbed teeth of cicadas” roll around the tongue, and sound fantastic when read aloud. What Goar is doing then is creating a sensation of sound, a Cageian clangour of percussion in a most wonderful impression of the noise of a bustling Seoul. What does “lemon rubbed teeth of cicadas” mean? Who cares? What matters is how it sounds, the way the sound of a city rises from Goar’s words.

These poems appear then like little sketches of an environment, fleetingly viewed from a bus window as the landscape passes by, already gone before it can be comprehended. It is this transparency which gives Goar’s poem their curious lightness, There is a fluid lucidity to them, as images are revealed with all the vividness of rememberance. Witness:

        Opera of Korea

             fish in the store     window


                red lights

                    and around      more

                        red lights

Simultaneously a capturing of the fish viewed, the baffling uniformity of a city at night, and the sense of journeying through a city at night, Goar is able to create a challenging urban perspective through his masterful formatting and economy with words.

Goar’s collection then is one which promises little but delivers lots. Its loose fluidity means Seoul Bus Poems is unlikely to stay in the mind days after reading, but it does provide food for thought, evoking a landscape which is slipping away as it is being seen. It is, as Goar puts it, “a map under glass remembering”.

If only the same could be said for David Gewanter’s The Sleep of Reason. Again proving that old adage, The Sleep of Reason sounds great, promising “alternately delightful and startling poems” where “allegory comes alive” and “Gewanter’s delicate musicality and keen sense of humour sparkle”. Instead the only sound to come out of the collection is one big cumulative yawn. By the end of the collection, I felt like a cheerleader who had snagged a date with the star quarterback, only to find out he cried when we made love.

Not to say that our star quarterback does not have some good qualities; his hair is nice. And the concepts behind a lot of Gewanter’s poems are promising. ‘Gag’ is about a comedian who eviscerates his family for laughs, which could, indeed should, be fantastic but Gewanter does not so much press the moral of the poem as slam it in our faces, ending with “Should we call it art / just because real people / get hurt”.

This also occurs with the last poem in the collection 'Hocus Pocus' which begins with a quote from Mariah Carey. However, apparently Mariah is not enough name-dropping, as soon Cassius Clay, Adam Ant, Mr Graham and, inevitably, Oscar Wilde appear - none of them adding anything to the poem, other than giving it an air of burlesque comedy which jars with Gewanter’s moral about mortality and “the Angel / hustles back to the girl’s bed”.

The poems in the collection which are more focused, such as 'Cobbler’s Children and Divorce' and 'Mr. Circe', work better as instead of seeking to entertain, confuse and lecture us all at the same time, Gewanter demonstrates an effective tone. However, there is something flat about much of Gewanter’s writing - a lack of energy which means that what might be “an offbeat satire for an off-kilter age” is actually bloody boring.

Gewanter seems to possess neither an ear for the musicality of language, nor a mastery of form. Most of the poems in this collection take a vague free verse form, and on the rare occasion that there is a bit of variety, One-Page Novel for example, it seems tacked on and redundant.

The Sleep of Reason then is a disappointing collection. It sounded brilliant on the blurb. A poem about 100 rabbits with herpes?! Bet that’s brilliant, funny, quirky and off-beat. Well it’s not, not even a little bit.



Three Reviews - Don Paterson, Sarah Howe and Joe Dunthorne

Don Paterson - Rain (Faber, 2009)
by Robert Van Egghen

I recently broke one of the unwritten rules of twenty-first century life and read the reader comments section of an online newspaper. It was a well-intentioned article about getting more children reading poetry. Most of the comments were dismissive, hostile or obscene, or sometimes all three. One though was quite baffling – “all modern poets are crap, apart from Don Paterson”.

You could be forgiven for assuming then, on the basis of that comment, that Paterson must be some sort of literary giant, towering above all other poets and rendering their efforts obsolete. Well then…you would be wrong. Rain is a good collection, but ultimately it falls short.

The good comes in the disorienting quality of the poems – the wry playfulness of ‘Two Trees’ where, having seemingly built the poem up to end with a great revelation, Paterson shrugs “trees are all this poem is about”; the nagging sense of loss in ‘The Swing’ where the narrator describes putting up a swing for his children but having done so sees only “the child that would not come”. But then, just like Frank and Nancy, Paterson goes and spoils it all by ladling big dollops of sentiment everywhere.

While the lesson, or moral, of the poem is left implicit (can the narrator not have a child, or are they choosing not to have one?), lines like “the bright sweep of its radar arc / is all the human dream” distort the focus of the poem, while the poem’s culmination in “I gave the empty seat a push / and nothing made a sound”, which desperately wants to be an earth-shattering ending but isn’t, ends up leaving us with the sense that Paterson has missed his cue. This is also the case with ‘The Circle’, written for his son. Yet, while you cannot dispute the sentiment or the context, Paterson’s ending the poem with “look at the little avatar / of your muddy water-jar / filling with the perfect ring / singing under everything” again means that what starts out as a subtle dialogue between father and son ends up striving for something metaphysical and missing it.

The poem for his other son, ‘Why Do You Stay Up So Late’ is better, and quite moving in its stark depiction of the complexities of the father-son relationship with the son trying to understand what it is his father does, ending with the bleak couplet “then I paint it with the tear to make it bright. / That is why I sit up through the night”. Yet too often, one of Rain’s main strengths, the formality of Paterson’s poetry, ends up becoming one of its greatest weaknesses.

The title poem apart, where the lyric acquires the force to brush such concerns aside, Paterson’s verse too often seems sing-song, as if the main focus of the poem is to find a good rhyme. ‘The Rain at Sea’ would be much more effective if it did not contain such clunky rhymes as “There would be all hell to pay. / I turned and shut my eyes and lay”. Yet, just when it seems that Paterson has rather overdone it, ‘The Lie’ appears, building its mystery slowly through its hypnotic AABA rhyme scheme before bringing the whole thing crashing down and leaving us dazed and disoriented with the ferocity of it all.

Rain then is a confusing collection; sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes both at the same time, and never clear whether Paterson meant it to be this way or not. It is a deeply earnest book, and yet it contains an ode to a goddess of Georgian techno. It beseeches us that “I fell to somewhere far below the earth” but at the end reassures us “none of this matters”. Paterson’s mastery of clear, direct English is to be admired, but the existential musings get tiring and the sentiment wears off after a couple of readings. Rain ultimately seems a strangely faceless collection, and what was so enchanting initially seems to have evaporated – the poetic equivalent of the Cheshire Cat.


Sarah Howe – a certain Chinese encyclopedia (Tall-Lighthouse, 2009)
by Joshua Jones

Sarah Howe’s debut pamphlet (part of Tall-Lighthouse’s Pilot series) is a strong beginning to her poetry career. She seems to operate in three modes: elegant lyric poetry, honed imagism and the lightly experimental, yet manages for the most part to retain a unity of tone. Though none of the poems are compelling enough to immediately rave about, or original enough to be beguiled by, the consistent strength and craft of this short collection is more than enough to satisfy for now, and hint at not only a lot more quality work to come, but a hybridity of style that is sorely missing from a lot of young poets I read, and that promises a rewardingly diverse debut full length as and when it comes.

In ‘Earthward’, a crystal clear meditation on the image of “the shadowplay/of trees/against the blinds” is compared to the way

        you stare

at a pale face across the bed
        so long
you hardly see it –
        fingers trembling,
vague as a street
        at night[...]

Which is a gorgeous piece of writing. However, as the short piece concludes, it morphs from merely pretty to subtle profoundity:

        they shook
with a gusting stutter
        more restless still
for being not
        the thing itself.

The way it blurs the personally observant and phenomenological questioning with such grace is the key to the poem’s success. And it is this understated yet assured grace that allows a collection of sometimes disparate styles of writing to feel so comfortable together.

My other favourite is ‘Yangtze’, the most interesting of the three that are explicitly about the poet’s dual heritage. It opens with solid images: “The moon glimmers/in the brown channel”, “Declining cliffs/sink beneath vast water”. But as it progresses the poem itself begins to sink beneath its certainty of what it sees and records: “below/a sunken valley persists”, and a fisherman’s nets “catch not fish/but the wizened finger/of a submerged branch”. The lines begin to break more abruptly, the voice deliberately becomes even less sure of itself, and it ends with a repetition of the opening lines. The unknown, the new, the journey into a strange land the speaker feels, but isn’t, a part of, is brilliantly conveyed through the writing’s shifting epistemological register.

I have very few complaints about any of the rest of the poems. There are stutter-steps in some of them, the odd clunky line break (‘Hypothesis’) or overwrought technique (‘Night in Arizona’). But each of the pieces are a pleasure to read, and I look forward to following Howe’s development as one of the most consistently quality new poets I’ve read.


Joe Dunthorne - Faber New Poets 5 (Faber, 2010)
by Joshua Jones

This is a decent, if not exactly groundbreaking pamphlet. I’ve been uncertain as to whether or not I should bother reviewing the Faber series. My views on them are paradoxical, and inevitably end in disappointment: I expect something great, and they have such potential to bring new poetry to a wider audience; yet I also expect them to be bland and to neglect the more interesting, less mainstream styles and writers. Katchinska’s was excellent, and I really enjoyed Sam Riviere’s. There are others I won’t even comment on, and just one I’m yet to read. I was going to write about Jack Underwood’s, but I think I’ll just wait until he gets a full collection out.

Anyway, back to Dunthorne. It has compelling moments. ‘Cave Dive’ is beautiful, and succeeds through not overwringing its extended metaphor. Time and memory blur, ending with beguiling fluid clarity: “From his lips/he scatters balls of glass”. ‘Sestina for My Friends’ is absolutely hilarious; I have nothing to fault. It’s funny and light, at the same time as being subversively intelligent, self-aware and succinctly contemporaneous.

The rest of the poems are fine. They’re meticulously constructed, but they read more like an MA portfolio than a debut publication. I want to be stunned by a new poet, I want them to justify me reading them and not one of the other, equally talented, equally MA’ed writers less lucky or connected. Dunthorne, sadly, doesn’t do that here. The poems are, however, well-written enough and have enough character to keep my eyes open for a collection from him as and when.

Which brings me to the last poem, ‘Workshop Dream’. It’s very funny, recalling the New York poets and all their acolytes in tone and featuring the laugh out loud line

We stepped out onto the beach. The water
made the sound: cliché, cliché, cliché.

It is both a celebration and a satire of an individual’s collaboration with MA Creative Writing culture. The problem is it doesn’t really penetrate. It’s perfectly enjoyable, a wry admission, but little more. One could, if one were so inclined, read it as a shrug-shouldered laugh in the face of less commercially visible/viable work that doesn’t wear its shiny, clinical postgrad badge bright for all to see (and thus tends to be more ignored). The other issue it brings to mind is what I’ll call The Luke Kennard effect. So many young male poets today simply read like less talented versions of Luke Kennard. Perhaps I’ve just read too much Kennard, but masses of poets seem content enough not to/unaware enough to step out of the shadow of the American-influenced absurdist postmodern/poststructural satire he has perfected. The wonderful line quoted above, for example, is pretty much exactly the same as a line from a Kennard poem (owls cooing ‘Ted Hughes, Ted Hughes’, and another of his poems, from The Harbour Beyond the Movie, does the same kind of thing. Can’t remember which off the top of my head).

I would feel bad about writing around Dunthorne’s poetry instead of solely about it, but I don’t. It’s not original or engaging enough, for me, and there are plenty of other poets whose work deserves and demands more attention. So, while it’s a polished, funny short collection, it’s simply not in the same league as a lot of other good writers around at the moment (Michael Pederson, for example, or Laura Elliott, or Agnes Lehoczky, &c, &c). Still, his novel Submarine is really fucking good, one of the best first novels I’ve read in the last few years. So maybe buy that instead and ignore my bitching about his poetry.