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Sunday, July 20
Review: Drop, Anchor - by Ben Barton
by
Charles Christian
on Sun 20 Jul 2008 06:14 PM BST
drop, anchor is the new chapbook collection by Ben Barton. Although the author is described as 'a queer poet from Folkestone' this is not a collection of gay poetry. True, there are some that deal with aspects homosexual relationships but essentially this is a highly accessible – and readable – collection of 21 shortish (in some cases very short – there's even a haiku in there) poems about love and life. And lovers and family. And even encounters in supermarkets. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.
Although I suspect one of the key poems for Barton is The Re-Birth Remembered – about his still-born twin brother, which manages to be tear-inducingly sad without resorting to the usual cliches, the piece I found the most moving was Commandment No.5. This deals with the equally painful – but far more prevalent yet never seriously addressed – issue of the strained relationships that appear between fathers and sons as both grow older. Here's the opening stanza
My father is a stranger to me.
He never turns-up uninvited.
Sitting cautiously on the sofa
Genteel
He waits – never asks,
for a mug of tea.
• drop, anchor by Ben Barton is published by Erbacce Press (ISBN 978-1-906588-18-2). The price is £3.99 and you can order it direct from Ben Barton or, via PayPal, from Erbacce.
www.erbacce-press.com
www.benbarton.co.uk
Sunday, July 6
News & Reviews catch-up
by
Charles Christian
on Sun 06 Jul 2008 06:24 PM BST
And now for a quick catch-up on various stories that have landed in out in-box that don't quite fit into the normal publishing scheme of things...
• Poetry – it's grim out there... The organisers of the Ledbury Poetry Festival report that of the 972 poems entered for their annual competition, the largest single category was 'sadness' (incorporating death, decay, despair and disillusionment) which accounted for 33% of entries. We know how they feel, our hearts sink when we receive yet another piece about changing the sheets that still carry the smell of the narrator's recently departed lover, brother, mother, significant other. However in terms of high crimes and poetry misdemeanours, we think poems containing the words 'shards' and/or 'motes' should be banned.
• Reviews – it's taken a while but can we mention regular IS&T contributor Rachel Fox's new collection More about the song. Without doubt it is the most enjoyable new collection I've read this year. Reflecting her performance work at folk clubs around the country, it is also one of the few collections that name-checks Donny Osmond, Simon Cowell, Robert Plant, the Eels, Nina Simone, Bjork, Radiohead, George Bush, MySpace and PR consultants in one volume in a fashion that is totally natural, unforced and unpretentious. This is what she has to say about MySpace...
Spacing
When you die, what happens to your MySpace profile?
Does it jam, does it crash, do your friends get told?
Does a bulletin post all the funeral details?
Does 'about me' blur as your body goes cold?
The collection cost £7.00 for a generous 80 pages of poetry – and its printed on recycled paper and card. You can find full details on Rachel's website at www.crowd-pleasers.net – in the meantime, to quote the poem on the back cover of the collection...
Exposing
Does a blurb ever lie?
Can it tell what's inside?
Go on, open me up
I have nothing to hide
• Competitions – finally, news of two competitions...
Café Writers Open Poetry Competition 2008
Entry Fee: £4 per poem; or £10 for 3 poems and £2.00 per poem thereafter. Closing Date: 30th November 2008. Prizes: 1st £750 2nd £300 3rd £150 also £150 Book Vouchers awarded to best poem from a permanent Norfolk (UK) resident. Judge: Penelope Shuttle. Cafe Writers is a Norwich-based group that runs monthly readings and open mic sessions. Entry forms available from www.cafewriters.org.uk
First International Erotic Tanka Contest
Deadline Postmark: Dec. 31st 2008 Eligibility: Open to everyone + MUST BE AT LEAST 21 YEARS OLD Subject matter: Erotic, sensual/physical tanka. Tanka that expresses love in all its manifestations. Please NO pornography!! Prizes: First Place $100 Second Place $50 and Third Place $25 (Prize monies maybe reduced if there are insufficient funds due to number of entries.) Entry Fee: $1 per tanka No limit on number of tanka submitted. Cheques, money orders, made payable to Pamela A. Babusci, or cash. Foreign entries CASH ONLY, US MONIES.
Rules: Submit tanka on 3x5 index cards. One card with just the tanka on it and the second card with your tanka and your name, address, telephone number, and email address on the front upper left of the card. Entries MUST be typewritten or printed legibly. Entries that cannot be read be will destroyed. Enclose an SASE, with sufficient postage (or 2 IRCs for international entries) if you desire contest results. ONLY unpublished tanka will be accepted. NO tanka that is being considered for publication or entered into tanka contests elsewhere. NO tanka that has been published on-line or in on-line tanka workshops should be entered. TANKA IN ENGLISH ONLY.
The contest will be judged blindly. Karen Shiffler will receive all entries and send ONLY the blind entries to the judge. Send entries to: First International Erotic Tanka Contest, Karen Shiffler, 1464 Lake Road Webster, NY 14580 USA. Questions: email moongate44@gmail.com – subject line: Questions: Erotic Tanka Contest.
Saturday, June 7
Martina Thomson's Ferryboats - reviewed by Ken Head
by
Charles Christian
on Sat 07 Jun 2008 01:49 PM BST
Ferryboats
by Martina Thomson
Hearing Eye Publications, 2008, Pamphlet Series No. 54 www.torriano.org
ISBN: 978-1-905082-36-0, £3.00, 32pp
Reviewed by Ken Head
The publication reading for this volume of twenty-nine poems took place at the Torriano Meeting House in London on 9th March and until then I had never heard of Martina Thomson. Not unusual with poets, given how little exposure they receive in the mainstream media and on the shelves of the major bookshop chains. Without the lifeline of small presses, open mic events and, increasingly, online publication, even the best of the new would probably either never achieve publication at all or simply pass us by unnoticed, which is why series such as Hearing Eye’s pamphlets, published at a good price and an impressive level of quality, are so valuable.
Martina Thomson was born in Berlin, of Austrian parents, came to England as a child and is now a potter living and working in London’s Camden Town. Ferryboats is her first published volume of poetry, although a prose work, On Art And Therapy, was published by Virago in 1997 (See www.fabooks.com for more.)
The collection begins with Glaze Test, a short poem, fourteen lines written in couplets, about the response to “glaze and flame” of “The contours of three brushstrokes / on my test piece”, before moving to draw a parallel between the lines of her brush on clay and those “ever-shifting versions” which she finds in nature, in “the line a hill draws / in the sky ... ever-shifting versions / as I walk towards it – ”. “So many goes”, she adds, “at touch / and demarcation”, the thoughtful conclusion of an artist and a poet for whom representing reality is an infinitely varied and complex task.
Meditative concentration on the relationship between the concrete and the imagined is a quality found throughout the collection and is used skilfully in a variety of ways. In Silver Spoon, for example, “the small silver spoon / in the palm of my hand / my fingers across it / my thumb in its hollow –” leads to a dream of yesterday, the memory of her mother serving coffee “in the blue room / among her friends” and asking, “Ein Mokka?”. It is difficult not to grasp what this suggests about what was lost in the family migration from Germany all those years ago.
“Yesterday dreaming” is perhaps a useful shorthand for a number of the poems in this collection. Tristanstrasse, for example, remembers her first home, the milk-cart rattling over cobblestones, “the high, clear sound of Hübner’s bell”, but recalls at the same time a more sinister reality, which doesn’t need explaining, of “black boots ... in the street / ... the dog ... poisoned”.
In the moving Elegy for C. L. R., which is placed among the concluding poems, we read of “His fingers ... / like the strings of an instrument, / when he raises them / the air makes music. / His words are agile creatures / that ferret out distinctions, ... / that span distances.” and remember Shakespeare’s Prospero, his power to transform, undoubtedly this poet’s gift also.
• Ken Head's poetry weblog is at www.listeningforlight.blogspot.com and he'll appreciate your dropping in to browse and maybe leave a comment if you're passing.
Sunday, June 1
Catherine Edmunds reviewed by John Irvine
by
Charles Christian
on Sun 01 Jun 2008 08:50 PM BST
wormwood, earth and honey
by Catherine Edmunds
(85 pages, Paperback, Circaidy Gregory Press, 2008, ISBN: 978-1-906451-04-2)
Reviewed for IS&T by John Irvine
Catherine Edmunds’ new book of verse wormwood, earth and honey recently released by and available directly from Circaidy Gregory Press, could not have got off to a better start for me. The cover art, her own creation, is my kind of art: bold brush strokes, visual texture and rich colours. In fact, the cover art has an almost ethereal marine feel to it.
I am familiar with Catherine’s work, and have been fortunate enough to read it on many occasions. There is, though, a vast difference between reading the odd offering and reviewing an entire volume. Firstly, I chose poems at random from throughout the book, reading to set within my mind a ‘feel’ for the collection. Then I took it quietly and slowly, as the exceptional poetry herein deserves to be taken. What a smorgasbord of sensations I encountered:
• whimsy:
Eric was fashionably dressed
in bumptious cumulo nimbus
• enigma:
a cave beneath a jasmine tree, full of secrets
dying leaves, wormcasts, earth and honey
• deviousness:
whereupon it (the wind)
transmogrified into a golden retriever
• and glorious madness:
Erik laughed with the sound of thistles
waggled antennae and smirked at Mavis
Catherine is no superficial poet awash with jolly statements that cannot possibly be misinterpreted. She is a thinker’s poet, a writer whose words very often conceal and beguile, and whose meanings frequently wear the camouflage of allegory and metaphor. If you want the most from her poetry, you will have to think about it. This is not a book for skimming during a free moment in the lavatory. Even her humour requires careful attention.
She is a compelling storyteller, weaving complex and sometimes lyrical tales with surprisingly few words. There’s no waste with this poet. Every word, every line break, every nuance is calculated for maximum effect. The lady handles drama, sentiment, nonsense and humour with equal aplomb. Catherine is what every seriously talented poet must be: a gimlet-eyed observer.
She is also versatile. Not content with just the contemporary style of free verse, she is equally at home with the sonnet (a particular favourite of mine,) haiku/senryu and a plethora of other styles and fancies. Pernickety paragons of punctuation will be disappointed. There isn’t a lot of it. For me, though, the lack of it gives Catherine’s work a sense of immediacy and sometimes restlessness that I like very much indeed.
So… if stolen hedgehogs, unrequited love, heroic prunes, things called Eric, romantic mittens, unhappy penguins, myth and legend and assorted other unforgettable characters are your meat and spuds, then this book is for you. But make no mistake: this book is not just about fun and games. There is a very serious underbelly throughout this book. Sometimes angry, sometimes hopeless, sometimes just plain glorious. It’s all in there:
• Anger:
his foot’s kicked a twelve inch monkey wrench
he picks it up, nods once to the car
then goes to look for his mother
• Hopelessness:
it’s not a police matter
they’re just bruises
they’ll heal
• Glory:
as clouds gather
walk with me in colour
A favourite piece? Well, I think I’d have to confess and say that ‘grandfather’s beard’ took my fancy. Perhaps not the most deeply meaningful of Catherine’s offerings, but it is dry and wry enough to purse my mouth… with laughter. Or maybe ‘The Ballad of Shane and Mavis.’ Or perhaps even…
To sum up: this delightfully complex volume of poetry will please any reader who likes to take their time, ponder a lot and gaze at the heavens, but someone who also has a sense of the ridiculous. If I had one regret it would be that Catherine didn’t see fit to sprinkle a number of her wonderful drawings throughout the book. I give this book my Supreme Golden Syrup Pudding Award… I read it twice before lunch, and now I’m off back for thirds.
Here is one her poems from the collection
bike
he sat on his motorbike
garish, resplendent,
in periwig, surcoat and pantaloons
he waited
we waited
they waited
all waited
for the fish underneath him to ripen
and when it did
the fumes exuded
took him to Tajikistan
(and back)
and then all the way to France
• Catherine Edmunds
Saturday, May 10
Mixed reviews – and new sites to check out
by
Charles Christian
on Sat 10 May 2008 10:28 AM BST
• My old friend Alexis Byter has just launched a prose and photography blog called, appropriately enough, Words & Vision. It is only just starting to carry content but if you are interested in prose poetry and 'street photography' check it out – or even better bookmark it. www.wordsandvision.com
• Next up, regular IS&T contributor P A Levy says he has "been working hard on getting a new web site up and running – the clueless collective’s magazine of poetica is a spoof of some of the more, shall we say arty and pretentious, literary magazines. I have to confess that it’s all me; I’m the guilty one. I wrote all the rubbish. Anyway, if you get the time please pop by and have a browse at www.cluelesscollective.co.uk and I shall try and entertain you." I've checked it out – it definitely does entertain – Dick & Tom's guide to poetry should be included in every creative writing course.
• Finally, long-time stalwart of the UK haiku and haibun scene Stanley Pelter has a new collection of haibun out. Called insideoutside (published by George Mann Publications, ISBN 9780955241574) and featuring an introduction by Diana Noel, this really should be called something like The Dangerous Book of Haibun for Boys (and Girls) as the contents, aided and abetted by Stanley's pen & ink illustrations, push the form into a far more edgy zone than you normally see with haibun. I liked this collection (tho I can imagine some people being frightened by) not least because it makes you think, whereas all to often haibun just lull you off to sleep. You can order insideout direct from Stanley for £8.00 + £1.50 p&p (contact him direct for euro & US dollar rates) by emailing spelter23@aol.com
Thursday, March 27
Poems (CD) by David Francis
by
Charles Christian
on Thu 27 Mar 2008 07:09 PM GMT
This CD of poetry and music by New York poet David Francis has been sitting in my in-tray for an appallingly long time. Nothing personal David, it's just that the last time I received a CD of poetry and music to review, it turned out to be recited by mad people – and played by mad people. Nothing could be more different than this CD. Called Poems, the poetry is good. The music is good, in a folk/acoustic style (which in some respects has the mellowness of some Steely Dan tracks). And the production values of the CD are excellent.
There are a total of 18 short poems (and equally short musical accompaniments) on the CD, all prompted by a 22 date tour of the UK he did in 2006, which gave him an opportunity to revisit the places in and around London where he used to live and write many years previously. Listening to this CD is both a relaxing and thought provoking experience – and one I'm going to be happy to do again. I'm not sure to the distribution details for the CD however you can order it online from CD Baby for $15 (about £8.00).
www.cdbaby.com/all/davidfrancis
There are also some sample tracks you can hear free of charge. Here is one of them – In a Storm... http://audio.cdbaby.com/21af9def/mp3lofi/d/a/davidfrancis3-10.mp3
Monday, March 17
Rachel Fox reports on StAnza
by
Charles Christian
on Mon 17 Mar 2008 08:05 PM GMT
Rachel Fox reports on the StAnza poetry festival which took place at St Andrews last weekend – StAnza is the only regular festival dedicated to poetry in Scotland...
Unlike lots of poets and poetry folk I have to say I always approach
StAnza with mixed feelings. I have had good experiences there - for
example I went to a great workshop with Matt Harvey 2 years ago (and I
am not normally a workshop kind of a person). He was really encouraging
and helped me a lot in terms of confidence (he was probably the first
person involved in poetry to say 'you're good, you should do this').
However I've also had some dire StAnza moments too. I tried the
Masterclass a few years back and hated it (it was with Jane Hirshfield
- she was fine but some of the participants...aagghh!) Plus I've sat
through a lot of (for my taste) overly poetic outpourings about nature
and nature and, oh yes, more nature - oh the droning voices, oh the
overdeveloped imagery, oh the polite audience...
Last year I even tried
the Slam as people kept telling me I'm a performance poet (which I
don't think I am particularly... in fact I'm sure I've said at least a
hundred times that I think the whole literary/performance split in
poetry is a nonsense really... some of the supposedly great literary
poets can perform well... some of the supposedly performance poets can
be as literary as they come... if in a less 'look at the width of my
phd' kind of a way). The Slam was OK, I didn't embarrass myself, but it
let me know the Slamming thing is not for me... the hooter, the time
limit, the juke box jury. Yuk.
Anyway... this year rather than a full
weekend and a lot of family organising I just chose a couple of events
on the Thursday. I got there early and tried to see the exhibition bits
(hmm... so-so). I bumped into a few friendly faces, spent ages in
Waterstones (we don't have big bookshops in Montrose), bought a Don
Paterson book (I give in, he is a clever bastard... and funny... and
miserable and oo, you are awful but I like you...), saw the poetry
films on show in the Byre (fantastic - the Larkin one, the family
values one...), ate lunch in quiet caff (just as well - no food at the
lunchtime Studio Theatre show... again...)
The lunchtime show itself
was great though (food or no food) featuring Raman Mundair (from
Shetland, via Northern England, via India). She was one of those poets
that's so full of life it's a joy to behold. She sang (beautifully),
she smiled like she knew how to do it, she had a great range of
material (for me the highpoints were the very sad poem about racist
killings in London and the very exciting poem about dance and life and
everything). I felt we should all dance off down the stairs at the
end... but of course we didn't. This is St Andrews, dear, walk nicely
and bow to the royalty.
I went on to the Past & Present next -
largely I have to admit because I wanted to see Adrian Mitchell but
didn't fancy the Sunday night reading (lots of reasons... too many to
detail). It was a great event. Tom Leonard was amusingly droll and
bitter (and like Don Paterson's...older brother? Uncle?) and Adrian
Mitchell was just... delightful (how English that sounds). He was
talking about Blake but most of all he was talking about life and joy
and happiness. Like the simply delicious Michael Morpurgo (who I also
saw at StAnza a few years back) he made you want him as a Dad, or an
Uncle or a Grandad... how nice it must be to have men like that in a
family... men with hope! I never knew my Grandads or uncles (or Dad of
course) so I think about these things. That may not be a literary
poet's take on the event but you can read that stuff elsewhere...I 'm
always pleased to see good specimens of humankind and rejoice in their
wondrousness!
So that was it for me. I went back off to the public
transport system and family life, my mixings with the literary world
over for another long while probably. I do like some writers but being
around a lot of them for any length of time gives me a headache.
• A version of this also appears on Rachel's blog http://crowd-pleasers.blogspot.com/
Tuesday, March 11
Broken Voices - Paddy Trrant's book reviewed by Sarah Bower
by
Charles Christian
on Tue 11 Mar 2008 08:27 AM GMT
BROKEN VOICES
Broken Things by Padrika Tarrant
Reviewed by Sarah Bower
Padrika Tarrant is a familiar face to regulars at Norwich’s Cafe Writers evenings. I almost wrote, a familiar voice, but that would have been misleading. Because, as this first collection of stories proves, there is nothing familiar about her voice at all.
Tarrant’s fictional world exists somewhere just under the skin of the quotidian ‘every day’ world, in a space of which most of us are unaware most of the time and are thankful for it. On one level, her writing is firmly grounded in place; particular cities and even the streets in them are often mentioned by name, though Tarrant does not have to make explicit references for us to know where we are – in sad bedsits and bleak council flats, in charismatic churches where fear of the devil holds greater sway than the love of god, on late night buses and empty underpasses and streets where dead dogs lie in gutters and dead souls pass unnoticed.
Yet Tarrant does not see these places with the same eyes as we do. Her storytelling strips away the mundane to reveal, with scalpel-like precision and great compassion, what lies beneath. In stories such as Darling and Coffinwood, the dead are not gone, but merely waiting to reveal themselves to those who take time to care for them, to inflate their lungs with old carrier bags or coax their shy presences with saucers of milk. In Gas we are confronted by the mundane and catastrophic consequences of being turned upon by what we believe we have tamed. It is one of our conceits as the only species possessed of self-awareness to personify the inanimate, and Tarrant is not afraid to take this to its logical and chilling conclusion, to show us just where our arrogance will get us.
Broken Things is a very fine collection indeed, funny, terrifying and provocative. Padrika Tarrant’s imagination is not a comfortable place to be, but it is darkly addictive, like a switchback ride or an hallucinogenic fix, and you will come away from it changed. These are simply some of the best short stories I have ever read.
Broken Things is published by Salt at £12.99 (Hardback, ISBN: 978-1-84471-343-1)
• Sarah Bower is a novelist, short story writer and teacher of creative writing. She was the winner of the 2005 Cafe Writers Short Fiction Award. Her first novel, The Needle in the Blood, was published by Snowbooks in 2007 and was Susan Hill’s Novel of the Year 2007. Her second, The Book of Love, comes out in April 2008.
Wednesday, March 5
Two book reviews
by
Charles Christian
on Wed 05 Mar 2008 08:56 PM GMT
Charles Christian writes...
Couple of interesting books have arrived here during the past few weeks. The first is Ten Poems about East Asia & Kitsch Nebula Ampersands And – and that really is the title, not a typo – by sometime IS&T contributor Ralph-Michael Chiaia. Very nicely produced, perfect bound paperback – and a pleasure to hold and read. In all there are about 30 poems in the book's 47 pages in a style that combines the intensity of some of the Beat poets with the simplicity of haiku and the mysticism of zen koan. I particularly liked
Terenganu
A gecko scares the hell out of her
I bolt into the bathroom to kill it.
It chews a cockroach.
An old Malay: it's monsoon season.
and
his 'daiku' (death haiku)
hysterical universe,
how dare you mock me
with your tick-ticking?
• The book is published by Coatlism Press (ISBN: 978-0-9802073-0-9), price US$13.95 and is available from www.coatlism.blogspot.com
The second title is Never A Straight Line by the Canadian poet Bernice Lever. Again, this is another attractively produced book, also a perfect bound paperback (yes, I know we are meant to read poetry for its content but it doesn't alter the fact that an attractive or imaginative corporeal offering adds to the overall sensory impression and the pleasure of reading) containing 66 poems over 95 pages. Lever has divided her book into five 'themes' and while some of them miss the mark for me (poetry is also a very subjective art form from the point of view of the reader) the majority hit the target. I particularly enjoyed Reunion with its all too redolent opening stanza...
Spare me this misnamed meetings
with ghosts from the past
forerunners of horrors to come
reminding us all that we can never go back. And Red Dog Retreat about the skiers cabin built on a mountain summit in Lever's British Columbia.
• Never A Straight Line (ISBN: 978-0-88753-438-6) is part of the Black Moss Press Palm Poets Series. Price C$15.00. For more info visit www.colourofwords.com or email bernice@colourofwords.com
Thursday, January 3
Book review by Ken Head
by
Charles Christian
on Thu 03 Jan 2008 10:59 AM GMT
Instead of Silence – reviewed by Ken Head
Instead of Silence: Selected Poems: Miriam Van hee
Translated by Judith Wilkinson
Shoestring Press, 2007
www.shoestringpress.com
ISBN 13: 978 1 904886 45 7
ISBN 10: 1 904886 45 0
Paperback £8.95 , 74pp
Miriam Van hee was born in Ghent in 1952 and is widely regarded as one of Belgium’s finest poets, although she writes both in Flemish and Dutch. Having studied Slavic Philology at the University of Ghent, she has since worked as a lecturer in Russian at the Interpreters’ Academy in Antwerp. She has published eight collections to date, together with translations of the work of other important poets including Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam. She has also won a number of awards and seen her work translated into French, Polish, Swedish and Lithuanian, with Austrian and Mexican collections in preparation. Instead of Silence offers poems selected from six collections published between 1980 and 2002 and represents not only the first translation of her poetry into English, but also an acknowledgement of the standing of her translator, Judith Wilkinson, a poet herself, whose first chapbook of translations from Flemish and Dutch poetry, In An Unguarded Moment, was published online in 2006 by www.languageandculture.net
In her introduction to this edition, Wilkinson remembers an email from Van hee in which the poet states her preference for plainer, more everyday translation and says of her work in general that she likes “a certain bareness”. The truth of this becomes apparent, because many of the poems have no titles, make no use of the upper case and are punctuated entirely by rhythm, line breaks and the flow of thought. They are spare but at the same time highly focused, sober but allusive, brief but needing to be read with care. Nothing is made easy and it remains for the reader to explore the spaces between the words, where interpretation takes place. A good example is the second of two short poems jointly entitled The Camp, from the 1980 collection Interior and quoted here in full:
that I never walked there
in the mornings in the fog
that I have always worn
clothes that fitted nicely that I
have read books that belonged to me
that I have never stolen
that I have never had to choose.
Rather than explain that overwhelming last line with its rare and very deliberate use of the full-stop after the final crucial verb, this reviewer would remind the reader of William Styron’s great novel Sophie’s Choice and say no more. Good poems make demands on their readers, take us to places we might not always choose to visit and one of the effects of Van hee’s economy and brevity is to create perspectives that encourages such difficult but important journeys. As she writes in Photograph, “a film does not end/without an explanation”. Our lives are intricate patchworks quilted by many hands and these clear-sighted, compassionate poems explore with unflinching concentration the sometimes painful complexities of the stitching. They meditate, both sombrely and lyrically, upon the business of being human, crossing many landscapes, bearing moving witness to the effects of war and social change, of loss and dispossession, laying bare the experience of modern urban life, of love and family. They deserve to be widely read.
See sidebar for cover shot
Sunday, November 18
Tobias Hill reviewed by Brian Cole
by
Charles Christian
on Sun 18 Nov 2007 10:17 PM GMT
Love in the City
Nocturne in Chrome & Sunset Yellow by Tobias Hill
Salt Publishing (2006), 67pp, £8.99, ISBN: 9781844712625
‘Nocturne’ and ‘Yellow’ sound strange in the title of a collection of poems - would this be poetry of music and painting? In a way it is; elegiac verses transmit the essence of Hill’s love for London, his unsentimental nostalgia for his city, the Thames and Londoners, and evoke Elgar and Monet. Running through it like a river is change, death and rebirth, dispossession and repossession. Hill celebrates the new while at the same time mourning, but holding, the past.
Hill was new to me but I felt an immediate connection. No Londoner, past, present or would-be, can be unaffected by his lyricism, gentle rhythmic tone, simple yet sensual language, economy of method, rhyme and delicate but powerful affection for this city. He takes us deep into a London of ghosts, old lights and names, greasy spoons, tide-washed steps and polyglot humanity, where rich meets poor, nature the man-made and the present the past. ‘I will never have seen enough of you’ he says, in the final line of ‘October’.
Memories are stimulated; close your eyes and you could be on the green island of Primrose Hill, looking south at dusk, when the sky is yellow and the office windows needles of chrome light; or on a night train, rattling into Victoria on a high curve, the ramshackle yellow-lit streets swilling mysteriously below you. It is a London of ‘pizza ovens, Peking duck and piss, / the air half-edible and wholly foul’.
We visit numerous people and places; Hampstead Heath; L’Algeroise; John’s Kabul Café; railway gangers working through the night; a young couple inexpertly clearing their derelict garden. We even take a trip to Paris, and Matisse, but soon come back.
Hill’s voice is very English, reserved but not inhibited. He uses an easy narrative, as befits someone who also writes novels, and infuses his lines with tender vulnerability. He suspends before the reader the imminence of change, and of the attendant regret that is both inevitable and accepted:
Daffodils wave their yellow heads at her
and suddenly she thinks of poetry:
beautiful things. The perfect words you say
only later, too late, driving away’.
(from ‘Yellow’)
Hill is unfussed by form and writes in flexible, natural stanzas. It is his rhythms that are so beguiling and gives his simple language a rare beauty:
In the garden
the goldfish are nuzzling
at heaps of soft late summer rain.
If I could have only one thing,
it would be some moment like this,
when one small fact puts all the facts right,
when the rain clears the London air
and my thoughts lie suddenly clean
and bright in the strength of their own wellspring.
(from ‘September’)
Not all is sadness, sweetness and light. Hill’s voice is far from gritty, but while there is none of a city’s brutality here, we do encounter bailiffs, bouncers and a religious madman.
Of the thirty-two poems, twelve make up a series ‘A Year in London’. The rest of the collection is concerned with various aspects of London and its denizens, as in ‘Five Ways of looking at my Grandfather’, a work of some personal poignancy but one which sits oddly with the collection generally.
Acute forensic skill is not required to enjoy Tobias Hill, yet his poems offer more and more with every reading.
• Review by Brian Cole
Saturday, November 3
Review: Separation & Overlap - a three ring circus of poetry
by
Charles Christian
on Sat 03 Nov 2007 09:30 AM GMT
Separation and Overlap, a Three-Ring Circus of Poetry
• Slide by Brendan Hawthorne, produced by Poetry Monthly Press, £7-99 from 20, Wharfedale Street, Wednesbury, West Midlands
• The Pig by Peter Lewin, Flux Gallery Press, £7-95 from 33 Orders Lane, Kirkham, Preston P24 2TP
• Catch a Falling Tortoise by Paul McDonald, £7-99 from Cinnamon Press, Meiron House, Glan yr afon, Tanygrisau, Blaenau Ffestiniog LL41 3SU
Ex-saddle maker Paul McDonald is a lecturer in American Literature at Wolverhampton University and both ring master and clown in the arena of this review. His interest in literature comes through with poems about Bukowski, Gertrude Stein, and Delmore Schwartz, in which we learn that beer isn't for sipping, wine not for sniffing but both for gulping. Gulp! And Delmore is an old man at 47 and down on his luck, whereas Gertrude is lucky that Alice Tolkas knows one other genius, Picasso, and he is willing to do Gert's portrait..
Lewin is the man who spreads the sawdust in the ring, his literary persons are the lecturer, who believes himself an undiscovered Ezra Pound and thinks today's poetry is crap; and one Liam, who is Bukowski, Lenny Bruce and Jerry Lewis all rolled into one.
Hawthorne is up all night moving the big top to its next destination. He has had one succesful major poetry book published, in which he massaged his readers with a bit of what they were looking for, and now he wants them to share with him the traumas of staying up all night worrying about the arrival of the answers to everything in life (... and how to get some peaceful sleep!).
There are wild animals in Lewin's circus, head-bangers living in hostels, mothers who look at their sons and say Who the fuck are you? while Hawthorne is always walking tightropes between suicide in steel grey rivers and walking home with a bag of chips, and McDonald is clowning about. He throws pies in the face of his old science teacher concerning his toupee, tells of a kid playing hide and seek with no one bothering to look for him, and stays in a hotel that displays Liberace's truss in the lobby.
McDonald lectures abroad, and also likes his holidays, and there are poems of his visits to Athens, China, and Vegas, whereas Lewin is more at home in the Lancashire area, his childhood cocking a doodle do at the newsreels in the cinems, his adult life partaking of over-cooked cabbage, visiting charity shops. Hawthorne, except for a rain-rattling stay in a caravan, is mostly at home nursing his moody delinquent of a liver (too many brandy-snaps?), observing the painted trout of a trolley lady in the town's bus shelters; the ghost train of fairground lying in a ditch.
Hawthorne's range of mood can be wider than this, but the tightrope, the trapeze, and the lion's cage, with an occasional hug of one of the sequinned ladies, is what he wants on this current billing. He is intent on putting over the wanderings of his mind during the sleepless nights of middle aged twenty-first century man. There's lustful propositions, perfume like a thorium injection, and constitutional bullying amongst other things. It's an evening performance not a child's matinee.
McDonald says that games of silly buggers often end in/tears and points to the murder of Joe Orton, and so he is careful to announce the end of a comic poem, like having your back massaged with a slug, with a crack of his ringmaster's whip and moves quickly on to hunting for crabs off the pier, Buildwas Abbey, or discussing his mate's vow to have the balls of the boys who stare at his young daughter on cocktail sticks, with squares of ham and cheese, if they dare to touch her. This is a book that throws itself into your face like the torn printed-paper from the clown' s bucket, and leaves you soaking it all up.
Lewin charts the violent intent of the wolf that sits outside the door and waits for the latch to lift. He is the blade of the flick knife, the sperm at the crime scene. The poet's packed his bag and said goodbye to the circus, and wants to get on, but is wary of thinking he's Philip Larkin, or doing a Phd. in English Lit. and bragging about it. He's good at sticking three darts in every subject, but should perhaps try the rifle-range and shoot from a different angle occasionally. He smears cheese on the settee, spills coffee down the back of the telly, send the cat running up the curtains, and he's only been asked to look after the babby while his daughter gets on with her knife-throwing act. If you pitch your tent on similar fairgrounds-for-comment, you'll love this volume.
If Hawthorne was thinking of changing his job its too late now, he's stuck his head in the lion's mouth and done the roaring sounds. Now he's waiting in that ghastly 3am hour of fear and dread, for the seal of approval. The ball is in the air, and we shall see if this brave attempt at doing something different, without a safety net, has come off. The show as gone on and now its up to you audience. Go on feed your brain, you can't live on candy floss forever!
• Review by Geoff Stevens
Tuesday, September 11
The Book of Blood – reviewed by Dot Cobley
by
Charles Christian
on Tue 11 Sep 2007 05:58 PM BST
The Book of Blood by Vicki Feaver
Cape (2006)
66pp, £9.00
ISBN: 0224076841
It has taken twelve years for Vicki Feaver’s third collection, The Book of Blood, to appear. The ‘Blood’ of the title includes the blood of murder, sacrifice, menstruation, ancestry, and of wild creatures shot for food. As in her previous book, The Handless Maiden, she draws on classical mythology and fairytales, paintings, female sexuality, sex and death, but there are new themes here too: love poems, and others dealing with mental illness. This is a wise, wide-ranging, excitingly uneven book, with occasional disappointments, such as ‘Borrowed Dog’ and ‘Spider’.
Women who turn to murder are a recurring theme in both collections. In The Handless Maiden Judith, grieving for her murdered husband, ‘rolled in the ash of the fire/ just to be touched and dirtied/ by something’ (‘Judith’). This idea is picked up in ‘Cinderella’. Feaver’s Cinderella rolls in the ashes then:
I print the shapes of grief
hands
feet
breasts
belly
open mouth
onto fine linen sheets.
This impassioned defiance finds a chillier echo in ‘Blodeuwedd’, a poem based on an ancient Welsh tale, blodeuwedd being the Welsh word for owl (literally, ‘flower face’). The narrator, a woman fashioned out of flowers, tells how she conspired with her lover to murder her husband, then was turned into an owl as punishment:
Sometimes, I lunge at your lighted
windows: printing the glass
with breast, talons,
outstretched wings,
flower face of a desperate girl.
‘Blodeuwedd’ is only one of many poems where people turn into birds or animals, and vice versa. ‘Bufo Bufo’, where the fable of the frog prince is turned on its head, starts as a seemingly straightforward description of a toad in the narrator’s cellar, then we are told that it’s spring, the toad’s mating season: ‘But he’s my prisoner – soft, warty stone// who at night swells/ to the size of a man.’
‘Glow-Worm’ is the first of a dozen love poems at the heart of the book (in both senses). This is a deftly controlled piece, full of assonance and half-rhymes – shine/immune, lawn/palm, butt/cigarette – with rhythms that start to run forward, then are pulled gently back. The charged restraint of the writing, the hints of budding intimacy, and the symbolism of the title all combine to make this probably the sexiest poem in the book. This is Feaver at her best: well worth the wait.
• Reviewed by Dot Cobley. In a fortchcoming anthology Dot Cobley says of herself “I’ve got six different jobs, I attend four assorted poetry groups, and do most of my writing between 5:00 and 6:30am.”
Wednesday, September 5
Moonlit Burrowing – Little Gods reviewed by Matt Howard
by
Charles Christian
on Wed 05 Sep 2007 04:49 PM BST
Little Gods by Jacob Polley
Picador (2006)
51pp, £8.99
ISBN: 9780330444200
Polley’s excellent debut The Brink, published in 2003 was a remarkable critical success. The collection was a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the T S Eliot, Forward and John Llewellyn Rhys prizes. In Little Gods Polley presents a much more unified collection; work that is, as the blurb states, guided by ‘old-fashioned lyric inspiration’.
The poems here are persistently concerned with the end of a relationship. Whilst there is not a stringent narrative in the sequencing of the poems, Polley has taken care to present a collection that starts in ‘April’ and moves towards ‘October’; the middle of the collection hinges on two poems neatly placed on opposite pages, ‘Twilight’ and ‘Morning’. The overall feel is of a difficult landscape, each image or emotion is sensitively explored; easy or sentimental conclusions are avoided. Indeed, the voice is disarmingly naked and direct, in ‘Dor Beetle’ the conjured ‘shit-eater’ is commanded ‘At the end of love, start burrowing'.
It is to Polley’s great credit that poems from the seat of such emotion are harnessed into affecting lyric forms. This lyric impulse is a significant departure from The Brink, this new collection includes some truly wonderful sonnets – opening poem ‘The Owls’ is likely to be much anthologised. Polley’s ear is present in abundance, he is unafraid to use full rhymes to drive pounding rhythms, take the close of ‘The Cheapjack’ (Forward Shortlisted for best single poem 2006):
…Here’s my nod,
Here’s my wink,
Here’s my blood for the ink.
I’m begging you now; my life for the lot.
The unforgiving landscape of Little Gods is littered with common images; owls, beetles, rain, the moon and glass all reoccur as powerful symbols. There is the distinct feeling of the occult in the poems, there are allusions to witches and goddesses but this is not to say that the poems follow old tropes. There are striking individual images that endure such as ‘Rain’s inconsequence to the sea’ from ‘Rain’ and in ‘Black Water’ the bitter conclusion ‘your heart’s no more than meat’.
There are instances where the writing falls flat, ‘Mirror’ for example seems more like effort waiting, unable to shift gears. But such lapses are rare and each such piece is in tune with the unsettling world of the collection as a whole.
Little Gods is a work that opens the door on deeply intimate emotions. That Polley can engage so forcefully for a full collection is testament to the quality of his writing. There is no easy sentiment and no saccharined ending reached; by ‘October’, the last poem listed in the collection’s contents, Polley can only conclude:
Each mind’s a different, distant world
This same moon will not leave.
(There is an unlisted, short lyric buried at the close of the collection – you’ll have to buy it to find out what it says.)
Jacob Polley has talent in spades. After two full length collections it is clear that there is real purpose to his writing. Future work from him is eagerly awaited.
• Reviewed by Matt Howard
Thursday, August 30
Robert Creely and Robin Robertson reviewed
by
Reviews Editor
on Thu 30 Aug 2007 03:59 PM BST
In the first our book reviews postings Jo Kjaer reviews Robert Creely's last collection and our new book reviews editor Matt Howard reviews Swithering by Robin Robertson.
On Earth by Robert Creeley
University of California Press (2006)
100pp, £12.95
ISBN: 9780330441681
Robert White Creeley, May 21st 1926 Arlington, Massachusetts – March 30th 2005 Odessa, Texas.
Creeley’s last collection On Earth was being written when he died in March 2005, and contains over thirty new poems, many touching on the twin themes of memory and presence. These were written understanding death was imminent, (he had emphysema). The poems have fragility and his particular brand of prosody born out of the Black Mountain school of Projective speech achieves this as if it had been invented for his leaving:
In the sky
stars flash by.
Boats
head for heaven.
(from 'The Puzzle')
His sparseness on the page is in direct contrast to his reputation for conversation; he spoke, communicated, and discoursed with a huge audience and shared himself and his poems with an ease and openness rarely found in literary creators. If he talked to explore the meaning of life before achieving economy in his poems it was done without artifice – nowhere is artifice evident in Creeley.
His last poems recall friendships and intimacy as he gives death a side-ways look – aware but still in charge. Writing about a fellow poet, junkie and overlooked hero of the Beat underground, John Wieners, Creeley minces words finely, without sentiment but with wry humour and rare imagist lyricism:
There is music in pain but not because of it, love in each
persistent breath,
His was the Light of the World, a lit match or the whole
city, burning.
(From 'For John Wieners')
Creeley was always writing about a character called Robert Creeley. Using a limited vocabulary of ordinary words – 'here', 'there', 'the', 'you', 'one', he retells his experience in a variety of closed yet aligned ways. He knows the inevitable shortfall between desire and fulfillment and views these voids as productive elements so that the absence in his form or rhythm becomes an interval of all our experiences, as if you hear him thinking as you read:
If that has to go, it was never here.
If I know still you’re here, then I’m here too
and love you, and love you.
(From 'Old Song')
Creeley was attentive to the mind’s processes which meant, to him, an existential confidence in uncertainty, and it is for this above else I love his works. Uncertainty is a challenging subject to focus on for most of one's 78 years, without producing a voice of negative portent. His work rarely appears in prominent anthologies; this maybe due to a prodigious output but without any one defining poem or the sparse presence created by his minimalist approach.
'The Puzzle', 'When I think', 'After School', 'Sad Walk' and 'Caves' show him calling on his life to show itself one last time as if to check in that library of his mind for anything he still needs to respond to with amazement or regret. And it is almost impossible, even if you've never met Robert Creeley, to read from 'Caves', 'Try lying in the dark/ ask someone to turn off the light./ Then stay there till someone else comes.' without hearing his voice, rough and warm with its signature end stops finally asking us:
Which way to go
up down
backward
forward ?
(From 'The Puzzle')
I wish I had meet him but I’m glad to have found him – his understated lines come over to me as a huge lesson in less is more.
• Jo Kjaer has been awarded the 2007 Cafe Writers Commission to write a pamphlet of poetry on Norfolk
Swithering by Robin Robertson
Picador (2006)
96pp, £8.99
ISBN: 9780330441681
The book’s blurb clarifies the two meanings of the Scots verb swither ‘to be doubtful, to waver, to be in two minds; and to appear in shifting forms.’ This protean impulse energises Robertson’s third collection through meditations on loss, relationships and an easily worn eco-spiritualism.
Actaeon from Ovid’s Metamorphoses looms over the collection and is present in two central longer poems. Actaeon is turned into a stag after unintentionally seeing the goddess Artemis bathing, he is then killed by his own hounds. ‘The Death of Actaeon’, one of many ‘afters’ in the collection, is wonderfully treated by Robertson’s assured voice. In the moment of his realisation, Actaeon is drawn ‘torn between shame and fear’; this sense of masculine guilt and loss broods through all of the poems.
Robertson shifts gear with his theme in beautiful poems addressed to his daughters, refreshingly moving the writing from simple explorations of the split of masculine and feminine and away from traditional goddess poetry. In ‘Leavings’ and ‘Donegal’ Robertson explores the inevitability of letting his growing daughters go in moving lyrical lines; in the latter poem he draws himself on a beach watching one daughter swimming ‘his hands full of clothes, full of / all the years, / and the daughter going / where he knew he could not follow.’
The poems dealing with adult relationships are less even. True, there are examples of the tender lyric that we have come to expect from Robertson such as ‘Net’ and ‘Bow’. However, pieces such as ‘Crossing the Archipelago’ and ‘The Custom-House’ that deal with the end of a relationship seem less successful.
Robertson has previously explored sex and sexuality in his earlier collections, most memorably in ‘Wedding the Locksmith’s Daughter’ from Slow Air. Poems on this theme in Swithering such as ‘The Glair’, ‘Asparagus’ and ‘Rainmaker’ appear out of place, indeed it is hard to see how they made the grade for such a strong collection.
There is less risk taking with form in this collection than in A Painted Field and Slow Air. Aside from the Actaeon poems the majority of the pieces are shorter and in the main Robertson seems to find his voice most comfortable in shorter, sparer lines. Notwithstanding this the collection as a whole presents a good deal of formal variation that rewards sustained readings.
Robertson has always presented an economical and muscular voice, one that is particularly adept at capturing the natural world. This is present in abundance in Swithering in poems such as ‘The Park Drunk’, ‘The Lake at Dusk’ and ‘Entry’. The drunk who wakes to ‘the morning’s soft amnesia of snow’ sees:
…each bud
like a candied fruit, its yellow
picked out and lit
by the low pulse
of blood-orange
riding in the eastern trees.
Writing of such physical exactness, allied to the human – here it is the tramp’s drinking ‘to close the biggest door of all’, is where Robertson’s voice excels; even if the vision is bleak.
Overall Swithering is a brooding collection that has only the briefest of positive glimmers. Mostly these appear through versions of Neruda and Montale.
Swithering must surely represent further evidence of Robertson’s place in the first-rank of poets writing in Britain today. Overall Swithering is a pointed work with a clear trajectory. There are poems here that will unsettle but engage, some too have every chance to endure along with the weight of their burden which Robertson captures poignantly in these lines from ‘Trumpeter Swan’:
…you can’t hold on
to the height you find,
you can never be taught how to fall.
• Matt Howard has just completed the Advanced Poetry Diploma at UEA and is about to start an MA in creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University.
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