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‘A Pocketful of Chalk’ by Claire Booker
Arachne Press 2022 I emerged from Claire Booker’s ‘A Pocketful of Chalk’ refreshed, as if from a journey across the downs and cliff-tops that she so clearly loves. In my reading I had accompanied the poet as she melded with the South Downs landscape in all of its dimensions: physical, emotional, ecological and temporal. She has a talent for communicating her sensory experience at all of these levels, in some poems interweaving subtle currents to hint at autobiography and loss. The first poem in the book sets out her dynamic agenda: I’m sick of weighing the word I want a Marbled White to burn my eyes with its impossible exactness… |
This is a collection of remarkable honesty, breadth and depth. It’s full of Booker’s insights into her own experience and her perceptions at precise moments, seasons and times. For example, ‘Looking Towards Smock Mill’ is an ecstatic view of long late afternoon shadows across the landscape as the narrator gazes across downland and identifies with ‘my sister the smock mill’ and tangentially with the two-dimensional chalk ‘Long Man’:
I’m Stilt Woman, Giantess of the Hill.
If I turn, I’ll vanish.
The Long Man has his own vision in ‘Long Man Dreaming’. Here the narrator is in the car park next to the ancient etched figure, when the landscape returns to its origins as a seabed. Her car takes part in the transformation:
Inside the carburettor petrol chatters
its abrasive dialect of long-dead foliage…’
‘The leather seats are growing
back their bones. The walnut dashboard sways gives shade.
A series of poems about memory and beloved people is introduced by ‘Bringing You Back’, a poem in memory of a friend. Inspired by a Buddhist bell that had been hers, the narrator sees a remembered image of her on a spit of land, stooped in awe of shells I crushed/without seeing.
Memories of childhood and a ‘First Kiss’ follow, delicately evoked by a landslip of sights[…]from the top of Folly Hill. In ‘Remembering Chocolate’ a father is lost to dementia but restored to the narrator by his care for her gift, and then reinvented as a musical instrument in ‘Anniversary’.
There are snapshots: a clifftop walk ‘Towards Beachy Head’, vivid with butterflies and birds, the mew, mew of buzzards. There’s human presence too, in the white triangles inching along a swatch of sea, and the clifftop boys who gaze up as a lark unravels its song, seamlessly. There’s a graveyard where Obediah Legg, aged 67, waits for glory; a Grey Heron, God of pond whose neck stacks, unstacks, restacks as it swallows Two throatfuls of frog; and an Osprey with inexplicable wings. In ‘The Fisherman’s Daughter’ the voice of a girl who made a good catch, but knows she is trapped, speaks:
Once the little’uns arrived, I knew
there’d be no hole big enough to wriggle through.
Fish don’t know how to go backwards.
That’s how it works.
Booker sees everything with a storyteller’s eye and writes in a poet’s rich metaphoric language. The poems in ‘A Pocketful of Chalk’ are simultaneously personal, universal, mysterious and revealing. Anyone looking for a guide-book of scenic walks in South-East England will be disappointed. This collection is very much more than that.
I’m Stilt Woman, Giantess of the Hill.
If I turn, I’ll vanish.
The Long Man has his own vision in ‘Long Man Dreaming’. Here the narrator is in the car park next to the ancient etched figure, when the landscape returns to its origins as a seabed. Her car takes part in the transformation:
Inside the carburettor petrol chatters
its abrasive dialect of long-dead foliage…’
‘The leather seats are growing
back their bones. The walnut dashboard sways gives shade.
A series of poems about memory and beloved people is introduced by ‘Bringing You Back’, a poem in memory of a friend. Inspired by a Buddhist bell that had been hers, the narrator sees a remembered image of her on a spit of land, stooped in awe of shells I crushed/without seeing.
Memories of childhood and a ‘First Kiss’ follow, delicately evoked by a landslip of sights[…]from the top of Folly Hill. In ‘Remembering Chocolate’ a father is lost to dementia but restored to the narrator by his care for her gift, and then reinvented as a musical instrument in ‘Anniversary’.
There are snapshots: a clifftop walk ‘Towards Beachy Head’, vivid with butterflies and birds, the mew, mew of buzzards. There’s human presence too, in the white triangles inching along a swatch of sea, and the clifftop boys who gaze up as a lark unravels its song, seamlessly. There’s a graveyard where Obediah Legg, aged 67, waits for glory; a Grey Heron, God of pond whose neck stacks, unstacks, restacks as it swallows Two throatfuls of frog; and an Osprey with inexplicable wings. In ‘The Fisherman’s Daughter’ the voice of a girl who made a good catch, but knows she is trapped, speaks:
Once the little’uns arrived, I knew
there’d be no hole big enough to wriggle through.
Fish don’t know how to go backwards.
That’s how it works.
Booker sees everything with a storyteller’s eye and writes in a poet’s rich metaphoric language. The poems in ‘A Pocketful of Chalk’ are simultaneously personal, universal, mysterious and revealing. Anyone looking for a guide-book of scenic walks in South-East England will be disappointed. This collection is very much more than that.
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The Pleasure of Firing Back by Graham Buchan
Lapwing Press 2022 Graham Buchan’s collection The Pleasure of Firing Back falls into two halves. The first is a sustained exposé of the horrors of man’s inhumanity to man in times of war and under totalitarian regimes. The second is a medley: love poems with a sardonic twist; sideswipes at democracy’s more tasteless manifestations in the West’s media; a sarcastic observation of human civilisation’s reckless destruction of other species. |
The collection is dedicated to the memory of the author’s father, who ‘died too soon’, and the first poem, ‘Father’, is a bitter acknowledgement of the pain of loss and Buchan’s sense that ‘the Universe is not intelligent’. In the second poem. ‘Pints’ Buchan sets out his stall for the rest of the first twenty-five poems: most give voices to defeated men who ‘fall silent with the weight of their lives.’ Victims and perpetrators of violence, invaders and the invaded, the oppressed and their oppressors, are laid out before us with chilling empathy, clarity and conviction. Here are scenarios from the French revolution (‘Blood and Heads’); from the Second World War (‘Imbros’), from conflicts in south-East Asia, Iraq, Ukraine (‘WHEAT’; ‘NUMBER’), from the Nazi holocaust (‘Drancy’; ‘Nicole Weil’) and from repressive totalitarian règimes including the Stalinist era in Russia. Some poems are written to be interpreted as universal, others are set in a specific time and place. The last poem in the first half of the collection is the most overtly political: ‘The Stories That Don’t Get Told’ plots the life of a man born in Krakow who lived to the age of 98, after a life of repression, imprisonment and neglect, one of the many individual lives whose stories are not documented. The refrain in this prose poem is The details are sketchy.
Perhaps because of their powerful historical subject matter, the first twenty-five poems in this collection carry a real punch for me. Buchan has clearly researched, out of a passionate interest and a strong sense of disgust, the violence and inhumanity of twentieth-century wars and authoritarian rulers. He takes a close-up view of the places and incidents on which he focuses, by presenting testimonies from individuals who are caught up in the relentless action of an oppressor.
In ‘Drancy’, for example, ‘Max’ is being transported through France in a cattle truck bound for Drancy, the French internment camp run by the French police, and later the SS, which converted in 1942 from a new local community into a prison for holding Jews destined for extermination in Auschwitz. Surrounded by ‘crying children/ and the desperate screams of women…’
On the journey Max wondered if,
through the slats of the truck,
he might catch a glimpse of the Eiffel Tower.
He had never seen the Eiffel Tower.
Arriving in Drancy (not having glimpsed the Eiffel Tower) he finds himself reluctantly aware of ‘…a constant cacophany of cries and weeping, Urine and excrement puddled the floor. /Barefoot children, bitten by rats. Max’s thoughts on the nightmare journey have been of the atoms, so fixed and strong, of the Eiffel Tower, of the atoms of the train itself, and the rails, that, relentlessly parallel, so fixed and strong, went East./ Parallel lines, to a vanishing point. I found this portrait of Max and the implacable train one of the most moving poems in the collection.
A more brutal exposition of the way that human minds can compartmentalise their thinking in order to deal with the experience of atrocities against their own kind is a sequence of prose poems about a government employee whose job is torture and whose passion is the music of Beethoven. We enter his mind as he goes about the daily business of inflicting pain on the prisoners, whom he calls ‘ants’ (perhaps a shortened form of ‘antagonists’ or perhaps simply to dehumanise them in his mind) as efficiently as he can. This makes painful reading: explicit descriptions of torture alternate with the torturer’s knowledgeable and appreciative thoughts on Beethoven’s music. The effect is chilling: Beethoven is almost made complicit with the day’s work in which, for example,
Ant number three is whimpering a lot and is becoming delirious. We used the sanding disc on sections of his back. We might lose him.
This torturer is not a lone monster in the system: Tomorrow afternoon I interview six hopefuls to fill the place Reynolds left when he got sick. (The use of the English language name significantly brings this scenario home to Western readers.)
As the sequence progresses, we see the torturer preparing for an employer-sponsored vacation at the seaside with his family, with thoughts typical of any hard-worked civil servant. And ruminating on his favourite composer, he remembers ‘some sort of music professor’ whom Reynolds had suggested breaking with sleep deprivation: Drive the bugger mad with his favourite Beethoven symphony. But I overruled him. For one thing, I didn’t want to spoil my own enjoyment…
It’s essential to compartmentalise work and pleasure. He has the ambition of the family man providing for his wife and children: his brutality is driven by his need to extract a high rate of confessions and information. A psychopath rather than a sadist, he comments on Beethoven’s late quartets: They are only “spiritual” if you are “spiritual” yourself, and if you are “spiritual” you are soft in the head.
In the second half of the collection Buchan addresses the evil of the banal, to coin another phrase. In these mostly short poems, he holds up the triviality and venality of much of what we call civilisation: primetime television, the noise with which we surround ourselves, a cannibalistic view of sex; a minimalist protest against drug abuse (seventeen lineated repetitions of the word ‘selfish’ under the title ‘Addict’.)
There’s a portrait of wealthy ‘Howard and Miriam’ whose private assertions of their attitudes — to sex, cheese and war (‘War sharpens the intellect’, says Howard)—lead up to their final years on cruises where they ‘loved the landscapes; they didn’t like the people.’
There’s black humour, disillusion, and surreal imagery in the poems, particularly in the second half. There are nods to climate change and species extinction (‘Estuary House’, ‘Toot Toot, Beep-Beep’; ‘Vaquita’).
In the last few poems there’s an awareness of mortality which may be autobiographical—'My Drugs’ lists in mildly humorous rhyming verse the medication that enables the narrator to keep his body alive. He also nails the colours of this collection to the mast in ‘I’ve Told My Poems’:
‘Go, poems, and take no prisoners
shoot on sight,
cut the cables
in television palaces
eat newspapers and digest them in acid
Go, poems
face down religion,
and blind your enemies
with magnificence.
‘Glimmer’, the final poem, finishes by suggesting a spark of hope after the ‘experiments’ of ‘the century of psychosis’:
Responsibility and imagination have located the gene for ideology, and have crushed it in the crucible,// Ah…, kindness.
Apart from this glimmer of light, there are two positive poems about music: ‘On A Wet Night’, a tribute to Jimi Hendrix, and ‘The Presence Of Music’, in which the last stanzas read:
‘We can imagine: Handel’s music
filling space below clouds,
the population dancing, carried along
on a wave of exultation,
their brains burning with joy,
their energy delaying the chasm of chaos
Do some planets
have atmospheres filled with music?’
Considering the collection as a whole, I found myself questioning the wisdom of juxtaposing these two halves in one collection, even after studying the poems intently to look for the rationale for doing so. My doubts rest not on the philosophy animating both halves, which is not inconsistent with an overarching view of humanity on a path to its own destruction, but on a difference in gravitas and energy between the two sections. I found that for me all the most memorable images and lines are in the first twenty-five poems. Consider: ‘the men fall silent under the weight of their lives’(‘Pints’); ‘The dull expectation declines to silence’ (‘Stadium’); ‘The train hissed and whistled, shrugged and clanked’(‘Drancy’); ‘He remembered fondly,/ how trees liked to hold hands under the soil’ (‘Memoir Of An Optimist’); ‘Death is hidden in clocks./ Clocks, like sleep, contain the idea of death’ (‘Music’).
The repetitions that characterise so many of the poems in the second half of the book were for me—forgive the tautology—too repetitious, however aptly they reflect the songs, advertising slogans and dumbed down style of the popular media. Buchan also uses repetition in the poems of the first half, but to greater poetic effect, combined with narrative and imaginative imagery that keeps the poems fluid and interesting.
This is a collection that ‘does what it says on the tin’ — The Pleasure of Firing Back is evident in Graham Buchan’s astringent and at times blackly humorous writing. His father would, I am sure, be honoured by the dedication to his memory.
Perhaps because of their powerful historical subject matter, the first twenty-five poems in this collection carry a real punch for me. Buchan has clearly researched, out of a passionate interest and a strong sense of disgust, the violence and inhumanity of twentieth-century wars and authoritarian rulers. He takes a close-up view of the places and incidents on which he focuses, by presenting testimonies from individuals who are caught up in the relentless action of an oppressor.
In ‘Drancy’, for example, ‘Max’ is being transported through France in a cattle truck bound for Drancy, the French internment camp run by the French police, and later the SS, which converted in 1942 from a new local community into a prison for holding Jews destined for extermination in Auschwitz. Surrounded by ‘crying children/ and the desperate screams of women…’
On the journey Max wondered if,
through the slats of the truck,
he might catch a glimpse of the Eiffel Tower.
He had never seen the Eiffel Tower.
Arriving in Drancy (not having glimpsed the Eiffel Tower) he finds himself reluctantly aware of ‘…a constant cacophany of cries and weeping, Urine and excrement puddled the floor. /Barefoot children, bitten by rats. Max’s thoughts on the nightmare journey have been of the atoms, so fixed and strong, of the Eiffel Tower, of the atoms of the train itself, and the rails, that, relentlessly parallel, so fixed and strong, went East./ Parallel lines, to a vanishing point. I found this portrait of Max and the implacable train one of the most moving poems in the collection.
A more brutal exposition of the way that human minds can compartmentalise their thinking in order to deal with the experience of atrocities against their own kind is a sequence of prose poems about a government employee whose job is torture and whose passion is the music of Beethoven. We enter his mind as he goes about the daily business of inflicting pain on the prisoners, whom he calls ‘ants’ (perhaps a shortened form of ‘antagonists’ or perhaps simply to dehumanise them in his mind) as efficiently as he can. This makes painful reading: explicit descriptions of torture alternate with the torturer’s knowledgeable and appreciative thoughts on Beethoven’s music. The effect is chilling: Beethoven is almost made complicit with the day’s work in which, for example,
Ant number three is whimpering a lot and is becoming delirious. We used the sanding disc on sections of his back. We might lose him.
This torturer is not a lone monster in the system: Tomorrow afternoon I interview six hopefuls to fill the place Reynolds left when he got sick. (The use of the English language name significantly brings this scenario home to Western readers.)
As the sequence progresses, we see the torturer preparing for an employer-sponsored vacation at the seaside with his family, with thoughts typical of any hard-worked civil servant. And ruminating on his favourite composer, he remembers ‘some sort of music professor’ whom Reynolds had suggested breaking with sleep deprivation: Drive the bugger mad with his favourite Beethoven symphony. But I overruled him. For one thing, I didn’t want to spoil my own enjoyment…
It’s essential to compartmentalise work and pleasure. He has the ambition of the family man providing for his wife and children: his brutality is driven by his need to extract a high rate of confessions and information. A psychopath rather than a sadist, he comments on Beethoven’s late quartets: They are only “spiritual” if you are “spiritual” yourself, and if you are “spiritual” you are soft in the head.
In the second half of the collection Buchan addresses the evil of the banal, to coin another phrase. In these mostly short poems, he holds up the triviality and venality of much of what we call civilisation: primetime television, the noise with which we surround ourselves, a cannibalistic view of sex; a minimalist protest against drug abuse (seventeen lineated repetitions of the word ‘selfish’ under the title ‘Addict’.)
There’s a portrait of wealthy ‘Howard and Miriam’ whose private assertions of their attitudes — to sex, cheese and war (‘War sharpens the intellect’, says Howard)—lead up to their final years on cruises where they ‘loved the landscapes; they didn’t like the people.’
There’s black humour, disillusion, and surreal imagery in the poems, particularly in the second half. There are nods to climate change and species extinction (‘Estuary House’, ‘Toot Toot, Beep-Beep’; ‘Vaquita’).
In the last few poems there’s an awareness of mortality which may be autobiographical—'My Drugs’ lists in mildly humorous rhyming verse the medication that enables the narrator to keep his body alive. He also nails the colours of this collection to the mast in ‘I’ve Told My Poems’:
‘Go, poems, and take no prisoners
shoot on sight,
cut the cables
in television palaces
eat newspapers and digest them in acid
Go, poems
face down religion,
and blind your enemies
with magnificence.
‘Glimmer’, the final poem, finishes by suggesting a spark of hope after the ‘experiments’ of ‘the century of psychosis’:
Responsibility and imagination have located the gene for ideology, and have crushed it in the crucible,// Ah…, kindness.
Apart from this glimmer of light, there are two positive poems about music: ‘On A Wet Night’, a tribute to Jimi Hendrix, and ‘The Presence Of Music’, in which the last stanzas read:
‘We can imagine: Handel’s music
filling space below clouds,
the population dancing, carried along
on a wave of exultation,
their brains burning with joy,
their energy delaying the chasm of chaos
Do some planets
have atmospheres filled with music?’
Considering the collection as a whole, I found myself questioning the wisdom of juxtaposing these two halves in one collection, even after studying the poems intently to look for the rationale for doing so. My doubts rest not on the philosophy animating both halves, which is not inconsistent with an overarching view of humanity on a path to its own destruction, but on a difference in gravitas and energy between the two sections. I found that for me all the most memorable images and lines are in the first twenty-five poems. Consider: ‘the men fall silent under the weight of their lives’(‘Pints’); ‘The dull expectation declines to silence’ (‘Stadium’); ‘The train hissed and whistled, shrugged and clanked’(‘Drancy’); ‘He remembered fondly,/ how trees liked to hold hands under the soil’ (‘Memoir Of An Optimist’); ‘Death is hidden in clocks./ Clocks, like sleep, contain the idea of death’ (‘Music’).
The repetitions that characterise so many of the poems in the second half of the book were for me—forgive the tautology—too repetitious, however aptly they reflect the songs, advertising slogans and dumbed down style of the popular media. Buchan also uses repetition in the poems of the first half, but to greater poetic effect, combined with narrative and imaginative imagery that keeps the poems fluid and interesting.
This is a collection that ‘does what it says on the tin’ — The Pleasure of Firing Back is evident in Graham Buchan’s astringent and at times blackly humorous writing. His father would, I am sure, be honoured by the dedication to his memory.
The Call of the Clerihew: ed. George Szirtes and Andy Jackson
(Smokestack)
A clerihew is defined on the cover of this anthology of 800 examples of them as “a childish anti-panagyric, a flat-footed, Hidibranistic, eponymous quatrain designed to cut everyone down to size”, and in the preface by the editors as ‘the limerick’s shorter, smarter sibling’ — it makes its point in four lines as opposed to the limerick’s five. It‘s named after Edmund Clerihew Bentley. Writing in the first half of the 20th century, EC Bentley was a journalist and novelist, who died in 1956 leaving a literary legacy of largely unmemorable detective novels and three successful books of biographies in which he lampooned figures from past and present, history and fiction, in the poetic form that bears his name.
In their preface George Szirtes and Andy Jackson set out the rules for writing clerihews very clearly, pointing out that the first line of the four must always consist of the name of the subject of the poem, the rhyme scheme (AABB) must be very tight, but that there are no metrical constraints on the lines. The resulting mini-biographies combine irreverent satire, inventive manipulation of sound to produce end-rhymes at all costs, ridiculously irregular metre and line-lengths, and little grains of fact, producing effects that are gently humorous, often surreal, and sometimes hilarious.
Fifty poets are represented in ‘The Call of the Clerihew’, brought together in a Facebook Clerihew group over several years. They range from ‘serious’ poets to poets known for their comic writing, and from well-known writers to more obscure names. The editors have given their book a strong structure by grouping the poems under headings, arranged in alphabetical order: "Ancient Rome and Ancient Greece", "Artists" and "Australians" are the first three sections, while at the end of the book we find "US Politics", "Television" and "The Editors". Were this book to be re-edited today, no doubt the last section would be "Zoom Events."
What examples to offer you from these 800 gems? The editors make a fine showing. ‘Despots’ includes this from Andy Jackson:
Kim Jong-Un:
Bit of a wrong ’un
Though being the subject of a personality cult could prove
A good Korea move.
and in ‘Poets’ George Szirtes made me smile with
ee cummings
unpublished hummings
will shortly be published in a book
just l(oo)k
For me the star and master of the form in ‘The Call of the Clerihew’ is Mark Totterdell. Again and again he gets the mix just right: here’s one of his (from ‘Playwrights’) that made me laugh out loud:
George Bernard Shaw
Forebore,
After much persuasion from his editor,
From writing ’Pygmalion versus Predator’.
‘The Call of the Clerihew’ testifies to the “addictive” pleasure of writing in this playful form. I was inspired to write a couple of clerihews myself after writing this review. It’s not as easy as these 50 poets make it seem.
The Call of the Clerihew, edited by George Szirtes and Andy Jackson, Smokestack, £7.99
(Smokestack)
A clerihew is defined on the cover of this anthology of 800 examples of them as “a childish anti-panagyric, a flat-footed, Hidibranistic, eponymous quatrain designed to cut everyone down to size”, and in the preface by the editors as ‘the limerick’s shorter, smarter sibling’ — it makes its point in four lines as opposed to the limerick’s five. It‘s named after Edmund Clerihew Bentley. Writing in the first half of the 20th century, EC Bentley was a journalist and novelist, who died in 1956 leaving a literary legacy of largely unmemorable detective novels and three successful books of biographies in which he lampooned figures from past and present, history and fiction, in the poetic form that bears his name.
In their preface George Szirtes and Andy Jackson set out the rules for writing clerihews very clearly, pointing out that the first line of the four must always consist of the name of the subject of the poem, the rhyme scheme (AABB) must be very tight, but that there are no metrical constraints on the lines. The resulting mini-biographies combine irreverent satire, inventive manipulation of sound to produce end-rhymes at all costs, ridiculously irregular metre and line-lengths, and little grains of fact, producing effects that are gently humorous, often surreal, and sometimes hilarious.
Fifty poets are represented in ‘The Call of the Clerihew’, brought together in a Facebook Clerihew group over several years. They range from ‘serious’ poets to poets known for their comic writing, and from well-known writers to more obscure names. The editors have given their book a strong structure by grouping the poems under headings, arranged in alphabetical order: "Ancient Rome and Ancient Greece", "Artists" and "Australians" are the first three sections, while at the end of the book we find "US Politics", "Television" and "The Editors". Were this book to be re-edited today, no doubt the last section would be "Zoom Events."
What examples to offer you from these 800 gems? The editors make a fine showing. ‘Despots’ includes this from Andy Jackson:
Kim Jong-Un:
Bit of a wrong ’un
Though being the subject of a personality cult could prove
A good Korea move.
and in ‘Poets’ George Szirtes made me smile with
ee cummings
unpublished hummings
will shortly be published in a book
just l(oo)k
For me the star and master of the form in ‘The Call of the Clerihew’ is Mark Totterdell. Again and again he gets the mix just right: here’s one of his (from ‘Playwrights’) that made me laugh out loud:
George Bernard Shaw
Forebore,
After much persuasion from his editor,
From writing ’Pygmalion versus Predator’.
‘The Call of the Clerihew’ testifies to the “addictive” pleasure of writing in this playful form. I was inspired to write a couple of clerihews myself after writing this review. It’s not as easy as these 50 poets make it seem.
The Call of the Clerihew, edited by George Szirtes and Andy Jackson, Smokestack, £7.99
'Elastic Man' by Paul McGrane
Indigo Dreams
£8.99
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Paul McGrane’s debut collection is an enjoyable glimpse into the mind of a man whose tastes, formed in the last decades of the twentieth century, will chime with those of many readers today. His title acknowledges a debt to Mark E Smith of The Fall, the punk band first formed as The Outsiders in the 1970’s, whose glory years were in the late ’80s but whose music spanned 40 years. They named themselves after novels by Albert Camus. Perhaps it’s a fanciful idea but there is something of Camus’ cool but compassionate view of the plight of the ordinary citizen in some of these poems.
McGrane approaches social and political issues with a sharp eye for ironic parallels, as in “Toy Story”. Here the iconic film animation for children and collectible Victorian lead soldiers are the springboard for a meditation on the futility of warfare and the passing of the defunct British Empire. The definition of an army as “Made for the pleasure of others” shocks and surprises from the beginning. The images of children playing at war, with soldiers ‘ID marked and posted daily for a child’s version of war trapped in games of kill-or-be-killed over and over again...’ |
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and appropriate sound effects:
‘Some of us got to drive big cars
vroom vroom beep beep wee
ambulances tring-ling-a-ling…’
are juxtaposed with the reality of death: those cherished toys, like their real counterparts, have been
‘broken trampled lost / mangled and flung to the flame…’
In “Harbinger” McGrane approaches the issue of global warming with a kind of philosophical sang-froid, without in any way denigrating the seriousness of its implications. He’s writing from the future, when ‘the gates were off their hinges’ and
‘summer brought first fruit fall, abandoned beaches,
storms with names that came crashing through the alphabet’
and bathetically remarks that ‘Someone should have asked what the fuck was going on, / marching with a bedsheet for a banner…’
Several poems are about individuals, strangers and lovers. ‘the bomb that will
bring us together’ riffs directly off a song by The Smiths. McGrane’s poem is a love-song about breaking through shyness, bypassing declarations of intent, to find ‘the joy of surrender and the loss of control / as we were lost, with help from alcohol ...’
The humour in this collection is tinged with wistfulness. In “poem in which I meet denis norden” we meet a narrator who has found a way to be important: ‘for weeks months years / strangers would exclaim / denis norden / you met denis norden / in a bank’
though in fact he had only been in a queue at the bank with a man who was ‘almost certainly norden’, he couldn’t recall what he had said or done, the bank was gone now and nobody now knew who Denis Norden was!
In ‘Regret’, another poem about a supposed meeting with a celebrity, the narrator’s partner, ‘long before I said I’d never loved you’, approaches a woman in a shop where they’re ‘staring at the furniture … cuddle drunk’ and, believing she is the singer, Sade, talks to her consolingly about having failed to make a hit since the 1980’s. We never learn whether this is a case of mistaken identity or not, because the narrator isn’t listening but has wandered off to the Mirrors department and is looking at his reflection, ‘wondering if my eyebrows /
could be closer together’.
As a poem about a relationship, this is hard to beat for subtlety.
Other media icons turn up in the poems: Blondie; Tommy Cooper the comedian; Benny Hill; James Bond. The angle of McGrane’s vision of them brings their attraction to life. This is the ordinary man in the street given a voice. He’s kind, flawed (as in the poem ”Stop”, in which the narrator neglects to help a stranger), socialist with a small ‘s’, concerned with fairness and equality, worried about the big issues without feeling able to influence them easily, and anxious about the motives of those who can.
These poems are well-crafted, not a word wasted. Their direct language is deceptive: their subtlety hides messages in full sight. This is a really readable, enjoyable collection.
This review originally appeared in "Write Out Loud" (writeoutloud.net) in January 2019
‘Some of us got to drive big cars
vroom vroom beep beep wee
ambulances tring-ling-a-ling…’
are juxtaposed with the reality of death: those cherished toys, like their real counterparts, have been
‘broken trampled lost / mangled and flung to the flame…’
In “Harbinger” McGrane approaches the issue of global warming with a kind of philosophical sang-froid, without in any way denigrating the seriousness of its implications. He’s writing from the future, when ‘the gates were off their hinges’ and
‘summer brought first fruit fall, abandoned beaches,
storms with names that came crashing through the alphabet’
and bathetically remarks that ‘Someone should have asked what the fuck was going on, / marching with a bedsheet for a banner…’
Several poems are about individuals, strangers and lovers. ‘the bomb that will
bring us together’ riffs directly off a song by The Smiths. McGrane’s poem is a love-song about breaking through shyness, bypassing declarations of intent, to find ‘the joy of surrender and the loss of control / as we were lost, with help from alcohol ...’
The humour in this collection is tinged with wistfulness. In “poem in which I meet denis norden” we meet a narrator who has found a way to be important: ‘for weeks months years / strangers would exclaim / denis norden / you met denis norden / in a bank’
though in fact he had only been in a queue at the bank with a man who was ‘almost certainly norden’, he couldn’t recall what he had said or done, the bank was gone now and nobody now knew who Denis Norden was!
In ‘Regret’, another poem about a supposed meeting with a celebrity, the narrator’s partner, ‘long before I said I’d never loved you’, approaches a woman in a shop where they’re ‘staring at the furniture … cuddle drunk’ and, believing she is the singer, Sade, talks to her consolingly about having failed to make a hit since the 1980’s. We never learn whether this is a case of mistaken identity or not, because the narrator isn’t listening but has wandered off to the Mirrors department and is looking at his reflection, ‘wondering if my eyebrows /
could be closer together’.
As a poem about a relationship, this is hard to beat for subtlety.
Other media icons turn up in the poems: Blondie; Tommy Cooper the comedian; Benny Hill; James Bond. The angle of McGrane’s vision of them brings their attraction to life. This is the ordinary man in the street given a voice. He’s kind, flawed (as in the poem ”Stop”, in which the narrator neglects to help a stranger), socialist with a small ‘s’, concerned with fairness and equality, worried about the big issues without feeling able to influence them easily, and anxious about the motives of those who can.
These poems are well-crafted, not a word wasted. Their direct language is deceptive: their subtlety hides messages in full sight. This is a really readable, enjoyable collection.
This review originally appeared in "Write Out Loud" (writeoutloud.net) in January 2019
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Tutti Frutti by Konstandinos Mahoney
SPM Books £10.45 “Tutti Frutti” by Konstadinos Mahoney (PSM Publications)
Second Prize winner of the Sentinel Poetry Book Competition, 2017 A skilled observer, Konstandinos Mahoney communicates his enthusiasm for life and language in every poem of TUTTI FRUTTI, his honest, warm, perceptive first collection. Close encounters of every kind are the keynote. In settings ranging from London to Greece to Hongkong, Prague and the USA, the poems introduce us to lovers, parents, children, neighbours, ephemeral relationships that have left only a gleam of sensuality in the poet’s mind, and deeper relationships that have left lasting scars or memories of love and fulfilment. The rather garish cover of this substantial collection didn’t prepare me for the range and depth of the poems inside, though the suggestion of “pick’n’mix” sweets in the title is, on reflection, appropriate to its varied themes. The first poems in the collection offer vignettes of a boy’s sensual awareness of his own and adults’ sexuality. ‘Tutti Frutti’ and ‘Aunt Aphrodite’ are memories of early encounters with female desire and physicality: home from school, the boy “barges in” and sees “… sun shining in stripes/on naked duplicated breasts…” and “little me” is drawn in to dance with his mother and her friend to the ecstatic music of Little Richard. |
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And when Aunt Aphrodite calls when he’s alone, she clearly wears no knickers, though the incident falls short of child-abuse and is most memorable for the grotesque presence of the middle-aged Aphrodite, with “Gum stuck like a boil/between thin-pencilled brows.”
The agitation of the boy who is “trying to ignore her pendulous breasts/the sticky wetness on my tight-clenched knees” renders this a painful memory, though it’s simultaneously a wryly funny story of innocence.
One of my favourite poems in the collection makes a more tender reference to a Greek goddess. ‘Athena Nike’ tells how the poet’s Greek mother, in a museum where “she refused point-blank to let me hire a wheel-chair”, encounters a marble statue of the goddess, “marmoreal wings flaring behind her/skewed by a wind fierce enough to blow/her off-course…”
The old lady, “surgical stockings stuck out before her” stares through the marble at her own past, through invasion in Smyrna, flight to Alexandria, Athens in the occupation and everything else that has led up to this moment in the museum with her son: “gifting our story the ancient way/there beneath Victory’s beating wings.”
There’s another tender, sensual memory in ‘Dormition’, a title inspired by the Greek Orthodox Church’s celebration of the “falling asleep” of the Virgin Mary. The last tercet of this vignette is a beautiful evocation of a Greek shore: as a son helps his mother to float in the water,
“From the shore drifts
a pulsing chant of cicadas,
the fragrant scent of pine.”
Encounters with the poet’s father are of a different kind. There’s an ambivalence which only shows in the later poems, where through age and sickness the father who has been distant and controlling, “Stiff-backed, clipped tache”, inspecting his son like a sergeant-major, is seen as vulnerable, pitiable. There’s a hint of the poet’s complex feelings in “Passing the Ball” in which the father is shaken by having dreamt of his best mate’s decapitation in the war, and the son dreams “That night, a ball lands at my feet/looks up, tries to speak.”
‘Mutiny’ and ‘Piano Practice’ flesh out the resentment of the adolescent boy. ‘Airborne’ offers insight to the father’s state of mind, mysterious to the young son but clearer in retrospect as an adult. When his father remarks, in a plane over the Alps, “Wouldn’t mind if we went down right now, together,” the son innocently wonders if the wish has been fulfilled as they safely land and leave the aircraft.
After the poems exploring childhood and adolescence, the setting moves to Mahoney’s adult environment. ‘Heavenly Turtle’ and ‘Night Market’ are vibrant with the sounds, smells and people of Asia. In ‘Aberdeen Street’ we meet another family; we’re in Hongkong, hearing the creak of a harbour-side tenement, smelling
”… the rank odour
of body waste as the fragrant ladies
creep in at dawn to empty
night soil from kitchen bins.”
We’re coming home with the fisherman father, through streets
“loaded
with pomelo, pak choi, bitter melon;
shops stocked with jars of fungi, penis,
horn…”
And then we’re with the son as he listens through the wall to his parents making love, plays with a toy aeroplane, dreams of flying off one day, away from his father.
The last third of the collection is truly “pick’n’mix”: a train journey to Prague; ‘Chasing the Fall’ in the USA, sexual encounters with beautiful bodies; a poem for Cavafy; a brief return to the dreary mood of ‘Monday’ as a schoolboy who hasn’t done his homework; the sadness and joy of having a daughter, as a little girl and as a grown woman.
The splendid inventiveness of ‘Dr Mirabilis and the Brass Wall That Will Save England’, which riffs off a claim by the 13th century alchemist Roger Bacon and a comedy by Robert Greene to make a comment on Brexit, introduces a final series of poems that touch on politics: transgender issues in ‘Pride’; illegal immigration in ‘African Icarus’; terrorism and the media in ‘Hell’s Kitchen’. And in amongst these, a joyous poem celebrating love and spontaneity, ‘The One’.
TUTTI FRUTTI is not as sweet as its title promises: it’s more robust than that. My favourites in the collection are the poems that take me to experience sensually exotic places and their inhabitants, and those that open into the confusing world of the child and adolescent boy as he frankly explores his feelings and his relationships with his family. It’s a substantial and promising debut for Konstandinos Mahoney as a poet.
This review was originally published by Write Out Loud (www.writeoutloud.net) in December 2018
The agitation of the boy who is “trying to ignore her pendulous breasts/the sticky wetness on my tight-clenched knees” renders this a painful memory, though it’s simultaneously a wryly funny story of innocence.
One of my favourite poems in the collection makes a more tender reference to a Greek goddess. ‘Athena Nike’ tells how the poet’s Greek mother, in a museum where “she refused point-blank to let me hire a wheel-chair”, encounters a marble statue of the goddess, “marmoreal wings flaring behind her/skewed by a wind fierce enough to blow/her off-course…”
The old lady, “surgical stockings stuck out before her” stares through the marble at her own past, through invasion in Smyrna, flight to Alexandria, Athens in the occupation and everything else that has led up to this moment in the museum with her son: “gifting our story the ancient way/there beneath Victory’s beating wings.”
There’s another tender, sensual memory in ‘Dormition’, a title inspired by the Greek Orthodox Church’s celebration of the “falling asleep” of the Virgin Mary. The last tercet of this vignette is a beautiful evocation of a Greek shore: as a son helps his mother to float in the water,
“From the shore drifts
a pulsing chant of cicadas,
the fragrant scent of pine.”
Encounters with the poet’s father are of a different kind. There’s an ambivalence which only shows in the later poems, where through age and sickness the father who has been distant and controlling, “Stiff-backed, clipped tache”, inspecting his son like a sergeant-major, is seen as vulnerable, pitiable. There’s a hint of the poet’s complex feelings in “Passing the Ball” in which the father is shaken by having dreamt of his best mate’s decapitation in the war, and the son dreams “That night, a ball lands at my feet/looks up, tries to speak.”
‘Mutiny’ and ‘Piano Practice’ flesh out the resentment of the adolescent boy. ‘Airborne’ offers insight to the father’s state of mind, mysterious to the young son but clearer in retrospect as an adult. When his father remarks, in a plane over the Alps, “Wouldn’t mind if we went down right now, together,” the son innocently wonders if the wish has been fulfilled as they safely land and leave the aircraft.
After the poems exploring childhood and adolescence, the setting moves to Mahoney’s adult environment. ‘Heavenly Turtle’ and ‘Night Market’ are vibrant with the sounds, smells and people of Asia. In ‘Aberdeen Street’ we meet another family; we’re in Hongkong, hearing the creak of a harbour-side tenement, smelling
”… the rank odour
of body waste as the fragrant ladies
creep in at dawn to empty
night soil from kitchen bins.”
We’re coming home with the fisherman father, through streets
“loaded
with pomelo, pak choi, bitter melon;
shops stocked with jars of fungi, penis,
horn…”
And then we’re with the son as he listens through the wall to his parents making love, plays with a toy aeroplane, dreams of flying off one day, away from his father.
The last third of the collection is truly “pick’n’mix”: a train journey to Prague; ‘Chasing the Fall’ in the USA, sexual encounters with beautiful bodies; a poem for Cavafy; a brief return to the dreary mood of ‘Monday’ as a schoolboy who hasn’t done his homework; the sadness and joy of having a daughter, as a little girl and as a grown woman.
The splendid inventiveness of ‘Dr Mirabilis and the Brass Wall That Will Save England’, which riffs off a claim by the 13th century alchemist Roger Bacon and a comedy by Robert Greene to make a comment on Brexit, introduces a final series of poems that touch on politics: transgender issues in ‘Pride’; illegal immigration in ‘African Icarus’; terrorism and the media in ‘Hell’s Kitchen’. And in amongst these, a joyous poem celebrating love and spontaneity, ‘The One’.
TUTTI FRUTTI is not as sweet as its title promises: it’s more robust than that. My favourites in the collection are the poems that take me to experience sensually exotic places and their inhabitants, and those that open into the confusing world of the child and adolescent boy as he frankly explores his feelings and his relationships with his family. It’s a substantial and promising debut for Konstandinos Mahoney as a poet.
This review was originally published by Write Out Loud (www.writeoutloud.net) in December 2018
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'Jinx' by Abigail Parry
Bloodaxe Books £9.95 Abigail Parry’s debut collection introduces Spook, Jack of Hearts, Snake, Goat, Bette Davis and others in a cast of characters fictional, cinematic and historical, threatening and threatened, monstrously attractive, attractively deceptive, ambiguous to a fault. This is a book by a poet whose theme is deception and trickery as an art in itself as well as an endemic part of human life.
Parry’s poetic virtuosity makes her work very rewarding to read aloud as well as on the page. Without conforming to conventional forms she weaves lines in repetitions and refrains so that many of the poems resemble incantations, spells, charms or chants. In ‘Girl to Snake’ an adolescent girl invites “Ropey Joe” to slither upstairs (“thin enough/to slip beneath the door and spill your wicked do-si-do/in curlicues and hoops across the floor”) “There are things I want to know” is her refrain, elaborated from stanza to stanza with “Oh tell me tell me tell me/about absinthe and yahtzee…”; “about lightning and furies…”; “about hellhounds and rubies…” and a catchy, breathless, irregular pattern of internal rhymes, half-rhymes and end-rhymes that binds the whole confection together and is irresistibly addictive when read aloud. |
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In ‘Love song for a Minotaur’ repetition and rhyme create a formal equivalent to the mythical bull-headed monster’s labyrinth and mirror the emotional state of loss and entrapment:
“The road was long and looped around,/ a riddle ran around its rim,/it slid and shut without a sound,/it shut me out, and shut me in.”
The ten subtly convoluted quatrains are like a Moebius strip : “A riddle is a tricksy thing – /it hooks its ending to its start./I don’t know how to work the string/that rigged a bloodknot round your heart.”
In Abigail Parry’s world ‘The Lemures’ haunt the living: “They belong to you/and they will wait for you – in the borders of the wet garden,/the silence behind the beech hedge.” – these “restless spirits of the dead” (Parry’s note) invade the middle-class pursuits of suburban citizens, it seems. Parry endows them with the cuddly, deceptively cute image of the lemur sloth (whose claws, however, are long and sharp). They seem more annoying than distressing: “they hoard rubber balls/and the past and all your lost things, and always want to know/when you’re coming back, when.”
The past indeed inhabits many of these poems, I dare to guess, with ex-lovers thinly or more hermetically disguised, for example in the fabric of ‘The Quilt’ (“the one who didn’t want to be another patch in your fucking quilt…”). The illusions of the cinema screen, where the image of a man can be “winked out/before the eyes of the gathered crowd,” inspire ‘The fuss you made about your wedding veil’. Fairground peepshows and illusions are the inspiration for ‘The Amazing Geraldine’.
The cinema also inspires monsters and monstrous situations: Dario Argento provides the horror of ‘Turn the Blue Iris’ which finishes with typical black-humoured pun: “You’re –/what’s that word? Exposed on celluloid.” In ‘Black Lagoon’ “what else/was struggling, upwards, gagging on the light?”
This is a rich, playful collection with Parry’s preferred images recurring throughout, in the same way that the refrains and rhymes recur with subtle variations within the poems. There are decks of cards; Tarot cards in ‘Olly-olly-oxen’, poker hands in ‘Keeper’ and individual cards to which Parry lends personalites. There are jewels and precious gems. There are hearts, as bloody meat and as relics. The colours of the collection are red and black; most birds are crows, ravens and magpies: carrion eaters, jokers and harbingers of fate and death. Knots and magic charms stud the poems. The Snake, the Goat and the Devil lurk disguised as would-be lovers or ex-lovers. Dominoes are masks or gaming pieces. Puppets are not always within their masters’ control. “Spook” is everywhere up to his tricks, picking pockets, telling lies.
Parry’s vigorous, dynamic poems can be enjoyed without referring to her notes or looking up her literary and cinematic sources, but taking the trouble to do so adds immensely to their imaginative impact, as long as the less erudite reader (among whom I count myself) doesn’t mind occasional trips to consult Google and Wikepedia. This is not a collection to skim-read and put back on your shelf. Hermetic and layered, it offers new interpretations and more extravagant images with each opening of its covers.
Janice Dempsey November 2018
This review first appeared in "Write Out Loud" www.writeoutloud.net
“The road was long and looped around,/ a riddle ran around its rim,/it slid and shut without a sound,/it shut me out, and shut me in.”
The ten subtly convoluted quatrains are like a Moebius strip : “A riddle is a tricksy thing – /it hooks its ending to its start./I don’t know how to work the string/that rigged a bloodknot round your heart.”
In Abigail Parry’s world ‘The Lemures’ haunt the living: “They belong to you/and they will wait for you – in the borders of the wet garden,/the silence behind the beech hedge.” – these “restless spirits of the dead” (Parry’s note) invade the middle-class pursuits of suburban citizens, it seems. Parry endows them with the cuddly, deceptively cute image of the lemur sloth (whose claws, however, are long and sharp). They seem more annoying than distressing: “they hoard rubber balls/and the past and all your lost things, and always want to know/when you’re coming back, when.”
The past indeed inhabits many of these poems, I dare to guess, with ex-lovers thinly or more hermetically disguised, for example in the fabric of ‘The Quilt’ (“the one who didn’t want to be another patch in your fucking quilt…”). The illusions of the cinema screen, where the image of a man can be “winked out/before the eyes of the gathered crowd,” inspire ‘The fuss you made about your wedding veil’. Fairground peepshows and illusions are the inspiration for ‘The Amazing Geraldine’.
The cinema also inspires monsters and monstrous situations: Dario Argento provides the horror of ‘Turn the Blue Iris’ which finishes with typical black-humoured pun: “You’re –/what’s that word? Exposed on celluloid.” In ‘Black Lagoon’ “what else/was struggling, upwards, gagging on the light?”
This is a rich, playful collection with Parry’s preferred images recurring throughout, in the same way that the refrains and rhymes recur with subtle variations within the poems. There are decks of cards; Tarot cards in ‘Olly-olly-oxen’, poker hands in ‘Keeper’ and individual cards to which Parry lends personalites. There are jewels and precious gems. There are hearts, as bloody meat and as relics. The colours of the collection are red and black; most birds are crows, ravens and magpies: carrion eaters, jokers and harbingers of fate and death. Knots and magic charms stud the poems. The Snake, the Goat and the Devil lurk disguised as would-be lovers or ex-lovers. Dominoes are masks or gaming pieces. Puppets are not always within their masters’ control. “Spook” is everywhere up to his tricks, picking pockets, telling lies.
Parry’s vigorous, dynamic poems can be enjoyed without referring to her notes or looking up her literary and cinematic sources, but taking the trouble to do so adds immensely to their imaginative impact, as long as the less erudite reader (among whom I count myself) doesn’t mind occasional trips to consult Google and Wikepedia. This is not a collection to skim-read and put back on your shelf. Hermetic and layered, it offers new interpretations and more extravagant images with each opening of its covers.
Janice Dempsey November 2018
This review first appeared in "Write Out Loud" www.writeoutloud.net
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'The Malvern Aviator' by Richard Skinner
Smokestack Books £4.99 Opening “The Malvern Aviator’, Richard Skinner’s new pamphlet, the words ‘not for the faint-hearted’ came into my mind. For this is not an easy read: Richard Skinner’s eclectic gathering of source material and his tangential approach to its significance at first left me wondering whether I was quite up to ‘tackling’ the dense content and inventive structure of his poems.
If the opening poem, ‘The Cloud of Unknowing,’ sets a theme for the next sixteen, it seems to be that we need mysticism in an era without religion, and that we depend on material symbolic structures and signs. The title of the poem comes from the mediaeval book of mysticism which inspired the Protestant sect of the Lollards, who were persecuted in the reign of Richard III. Skinner’s poem describes a belief system as a finely constructed temple, built ‘on the dross of the land’, where ‘when we are slain,/we walk through a door/and enter the jardin.’ And find ourselves alone, with only the images of birds ‘in a wish tree’ and the sound of a bell, that ubiquitous element of religious ritual. The imagery is worthy of the Rubaiyat. The message is existential. |
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Skinner has several poems that build on this philosophy. “Bardo for Pablo” asks how we can find a way through the accumulation of what we know, to reach our true feelings: ‘People don’t change, they only stand more nakedly revealed’.
“Ardennes” begins in description: we’re looking through a window at a rain-lashed landscape but after the first three lines the focus turns from the spatial world to the temporal. With the line ‘Mounds become pauses’ the poem becomes an expression of the nature of the present moment and its character in a world of ‘the urge to elucidate, explain’ which ’kills the moment stone dead.’
Other poems are highly visual in their impact. “Corsican Ram Skull” is a meticulously observed memento mori. The skull is described in micro and macro terms: ‘edges of eye sockets delicate frills/of milk teeth’ and ‘growth lines a moraine/incrementally ascending a high col’. The final ‘frozen baa’ is a surprise after the elegant references to nature.
“Nightscape in grey/violet” is another very particular image: a midnight vision of a townscape in moonlight. The ambience, and the precision and economy of the colour description, remind me of J M Whistler’s paintings of Battersea Bridge. “Via Fiora Oscuri” is another, very different urban image, this time a sketch of Milan on May Day 2015, sewn with images of unrest and violence.
“Cento”, referencing Antoine Saint-Exupèry’s Wind Sand and Stars, is a rich journey through stratosphere, space and time, remarkable for its kinetic and visual imagery: ‘All the stars are out now, revolving slowly, a whole sky marking the hour.’ and the moon is “gleaming on the cold stone tiles of the sea…’
Then there are ekphrastic poems. In “Fabiola” an installation of three hundred similar portraits is a springboard for Stringer’s continued discussion of the relationship between perception and knowledge. Giacometti’s ‘Head/Skull’ (1934) is the occasion of a playful cinquain.
Many of these poems are journeys on which we embark with Stringer, often from a starting point known only to the poet: we travel with him, enjoying the sights and sounds along the way, and with him arrive, sometimes at a destination that only he understands. “Black Water Side” takes us from the inside of a mind (‘a house full of people running through rooms/ looking for keys’) to the realisation that we can only deal with externals in life (‘…naps/errands, routine’) leaving us at the acceptance that ‘You’ve nowhere else to go and you’re sure of it now/this is the wrong mountain.’
“The Iris Gallery” is a journey through images (dream? surreal painting? cinema?) that is highly enjoyable as long as we don’t insist upon asking “Why?”. Even in poems that seem to be about historical situations, (for example, “Dark Nook” and “Eclipse, Salisbury Plain, 1903”) Stringer seems to withhold key information, leaving the reader with a mystery that they suspect even Google won’t be able to solve.
The last three poems in the collection, including the title poem, are obviously based in personal and family memory, as is “The Summer of Red Mercedes”. Perhaps for that reason I find them the most accessible, though not the strongest poems in the collection. “Chinese Apples” is a story of how the poet’s mother’s experience as a young girl has created triggers to her senses through memory. “The Astorians” is a biography of his grandparents’ relationship: the story flowers from the initial moment and the particular image of his grandfather’s saxophone playing, the narrative travelling forward and back in time throughout the poem.
This is a rich, varied and well-constructed collection based on Richard Stringer’s themes of time, memory and the relationship of material to spiritual life. The enigmatic nature of many of the poems is a function of his thesis and they are the more rewarding for that.
Janice Dempsey November 2018
This review first appeared in "Write Out Loud" www.writeoutloud.net
“Ardennes” begins in description: we’re looking through a window at a rain-lashed landscape but after the first three lines the focus turns from the spatial world to the temporal. With the line ‘Mounds become pauses’ the poem becomes an expression of the nature of the present moment and its character in a world of ‘the urge to elucidate, explain’ which ’kills the moment stone dead.’
Other poems are highly visual in their impact. “Corsican Ram Skull” is a meticulously observed memento mori. The skull is described in micro and macro terms: ‘edges of eye sockets delicate frills/of milk teeth’ and ‘growth lines a moraine/incrementally ascending a high col’. The final ‘frozen baa’ is a surprise after the elegant references to nature.
“Nightscape in grey/violet” is another very particular image: a midnight vision of a townscape in moonlight. The ambience, and the precision and economy of the colour description, remind me of J M Whistler’s paintings of Battersea Bridge. “Via Fiora Oscuri” is another, very different urban image, this time a sketch of Milan on May Day 2015, sewn with images of unrest and violence.
“Cento”, referencing Antoine Saint-Exupèry’s Wind Sand and Stars, is a rich journey through stratosphere, space and time, remarkable for its kinetic and visual imagery: ‘All the stars are out now, revolving slowly, a whole sky marking the hour.’ and the moon is “gleaming on the cold stone tiles of the sea…’
Then there are ekphrastic poems. In “Fabiola” an installation of three hundred similar portraits is a springboard for Stringer’s continued discussion of the relationship between perception and knowledge. Giacometti’s ‘Head/Skull’ (1934) is the occasion of a playful cinquain.
Many of these poems are journeys on which we embark with Stringer, often from a starting point known only to the poet: we travel with him, enjoying the sights and sounds along the way, and with him arrive, sometimes at a destination that only he understands. “Black Water Side” takes us from the inside of a mind (‘a house full of people running through rooms/ looking for keys’) to the realisation that we can only deal with externals in life (‘…naps/errands, routine’) leaving us at the acceptance that ‘You’ve nowhere else to go and you’re sure of it now/this is the wrong mountain.’
“The Iris Gallery” is a journey through images (dream? surreal painting? cinema?) that is highly enjoyable as long as we don’t insist upon asking “Why?”. Even in poems that seem to be about historical situations, (for example, “Dark Nook” and “Eclipse, Salisbury Plain, 1903”) Stringer seems to withhold key information, leaving the reader with a mystery that they suspect even Google won’t be able to solve.
The last three poems in the collection, including the title poem, are obviously based in personal and family memory, as is “The Summer of Red Mercedes”. Perhaps for that reason I find them the most accessible, though not the strongest poems in the collection. “Chinese Apples” is a story of how the poet’s mother’s experience as a young girl has created triggers to her senses through memory. “The Astorians” is a biography of his grandparents’ relationship: the story flowers from the initial moment and the particular image of his grandfather’s saxophone playing, the narrative travelling forward and back in time throughout the poem.
This is a rich, varied and well-constructed collection based on Richard Stringer’s themes of time, memory and the relationship of material to spiritual life. The enigmatic nature of many of the poems is a function of his thesis and they are the more rewarding for that.
Janice Dempsey November 2018
This review first appeared in "Write Out Loud" www.writeoutloud.net
The House of Ghosts and Mirrors by Oz Hardwick
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‘The House of Ghosts and Mirrors’ is haunted by fifty years of the poet’s psychic and physical life. It starts at the end of that life, and finishes with his birth, when he screamed –
‘– a slapped baby scream
that clawed my throat – then hunkered between
stiff sheets and eiderdowns.’ (The Ghost House)
In the first poem, we’re asked,
‘Is it really so bad to begin with an ending…’
‘the long forgetting that hangs
in the air, its cold breath
dampening your sleepless face.’ (The Pros and Cons of Immortality)
The poems take us in and out of fantasy, always keeping a core of autobiographical narrative that saves them from any glib label. There’s humour, brooding philosophy and rich language that keeps taking us aback with surprise and pleasure. The imagery is sensual and often visual. Where it’s fanciful it rings true because it’s derived from glimpses of half-forgotten places, people, events and dreams, fragmentary but fully imagined, with one foot always in physical memory.
The subject of family is introduced early on, in Archaeology, a sonnet-length poem in which the narrator’s father is discovered under the floorboards, smoking his pipe and smiling, ‘Don’t let me catch you down here.’ The last line, ‘but we both knew I had no choice’ is the more chilling for the detailed, matter-of-fact description of the father. Family history and significant souvenirs, as well as the persona of his father, are packed into six taut lines, among them:
‘… he dusted himself down/with a souvenir brush brought from Toronto…’
‘… He lay,/oil under his cracked nails, ten no. 6/and a brass lighter packed into his shirt pocket…’
Taken alongside the dead girlfriend lying in the shadows, this is truly the stuff of dream-memory.
Later, we meet Dad, who was Not that Sort of Hero, in a tribute to his war service and modesty. In another poem, Lacuna, an unexploded bomb that the child remembers knowing about lies in the basement, ‘beneath the thin skin of floorboards, dozing,/fat as a whale, its pinprick eyes slightly open.’
Lyrical poems are scattered throughout the collection. Life Cycle explores life led at a cellular level, in scintillating musical language and images: it begins,
‘We swim in silver, bloom in winter light,
shedding shells, green and gold,’ – and an echo of this image returns like a refrain at the end of the poem.
In Stars like Sentinels a moon over mountains inspires images far from any cliché:
‘The moon is heavy tonight, / plump and livid…’ and ‘It eyes nothing. / Broken-toothed hills snap at its arc.’ Family haunts this poem, too:
‘The last bite of the moon disappears,/leaving me with paper saints,/eagles, lions and lambs: guardians/you set to watch my solitary transit.’
There are childhood memories, of fever-dreams (Baba Yaga), of streets and neighbours made strange by the lens of childhood (Street of Small Windows), and remembered pleasures. In Leaves we experience the child’s joy in colour and touch:
‘And I slept deep in leaves, nested
like a mouse, bird, snake,
the phoenix rising from burning leaves,
fire blazing behind summer eyes.’
There are adolescent incidents, and poems that recall adolescence by riffing off music by Bowie, and the loneliness in Edward Hopper’s painting, “Automat”. And there are people met and lost. Ophelia in Leeds 6 is a portrait of a girl who ‘wanted to be Ophelia.’ in the simple telling of her story and the attic room where she ‘makes up / her face, her past, and countless futures’, lies the narrator’s moving empathy. In Exchange an adolescent kiss haunts the narrator’s ‘awkward mouth’ when forty years later, in quite a different context, it’s ‘remembering her foreign tongue’.
And there are frankly surreal images inspired by fragments of memory. The Apotheosis of Ceyx translates a memory of a beach outing into a surreal scene whose imagery is worthy of Stanley Spencer. A scene of rows of old women stolidly knitting on the sands suddenly becomes a replay of a myth about the gods’ revenge on a loving married couple who blasphemously claimed their marriage was on a par with Zeus’s to Hera. Ceyx, the fisherman husband in the myth, becomes in the poem a boy on a bike who cycles into the sea; the knitters absurdly transmute into seagulls and flap away to find him, like the wife of Ceyx in the myth. The poem rattles along at a fine pace, in a musical, jolly rhythm like a seaside postcard. A more sinister image of Knitting appears in an eponymous poem later: this grey woman ‘knits fast, but the scarf grows faster’ and it engulfs the narrator.
Towards the end of the book the narrative turns darker and more surreal. In The Gift there is a mysterious demonic Italian with a garden in a suitcase, in a flooded city. We travel to The Ruins at Night where ‘Dogs drink from mercury pools / forget their masters, lick the bones/ of refugees and lovers…’ Vague is a filme noire sequence in Paris, where ‘eyes, black/with secrets, suck light from morning/cafés’. Hallowe’en brings a Séance and ‘something takes shape in the candlelit air.’ In Wishbones, ‘the tooth fairy, / black-mouthed at the window. sucks dreams.’
And there are sad realities: Mother is a small, totally heartfelt poem in which at last, ‘Ashes to ashes: she stepped outside.’ Ice is a walk in familiar territory on a cold winter night forty years on from ‘a drunken New Year’s kiss/that never ended, and remains, still,/the most honest thing you ever did.’ These last poems are the richest and strangest of all. The narrator has grown up and come home – come full circle – by the last page.
This is a substantial and most honest collection: emotion and memory distilled into words by a poet whose mastery of the craft seems wholly instinctive and intuitive. I have read it twice and will read it again, with huge pleasure.
Oz Hardwick is a York-based writer, photographer and musician. He is Professor of English and Programme Leader for Creative Writing at Leeds Trinity University. In his spare time, Oz is a respected music journalist.
Janice Dempsey 24/10/18
This review first appeared in "Write Out Loud" www.writeoutloud.net
‘– a slapped baby scream
that clawed my throat – then hunkered between
stiff sheets and eiderdowns.’ (The Ghost House)
In the first poem, we’re asked,
‘Is it really so bad to begin with an ending…’
‘the long forgetting that hangs
in the air, its cold breath
dampening your sleepless face.’ (The Pros and Cons of Immortality)
The poems take us in and out of fantasy, always keeping a core of autobiographical narrative that saves them from any glib label. There’s humour, brooding philosophy and rich language that keeps taking us aback with surprise and pleasure. The imagery is sensual and often visual. Where it’s fanciful it rings true because it’s derived from glimpses of half-forgotten places, people, events and dreams, fragmentary but fully imagined, with one foot always in physical memory.
The subject of family is introduced early on, in Archaeology, a sonnet-length poem in which the narrator’s father is discovered under the floorboards, smoking his pipe and smiling, ‘Don’t let me catch you down here.’ The last line, ‘but we both knew I had no choice’ is the more chilling for the detailed, matter-of-fact description of the father. Family history and significant souvenirs, as well as the persona of his father, are packed into six taut lines, among them:
‘… he dusted himself down/with a souvenir brush brought from Toronto…’
‘… He lay,/oil under his cracked nails, ten no. 6/and a brass lighter packed into his shirt pocket…’
Taken alongside the dead girlfriend lying in the shadows, this is truly the stuff of dream-memory.
Later, we meet Dad, who was Not that Sort of Hero, in a tribute to his war service and modesty. In another poem, Lacuna, an unexploded bomb that the child remembers knowing about lies in the basement, ‘beneath the thin skin of floorboards, dozing,/fat as a whale, its pinprick eyes slightly open.’
Lyrical poems are scattered throughout the collection. Life Cycle explores life led at a cellular level, in scintillating musical language and images: it begins,
‘We swim in silver, bloom in winter light,
shedding shells, green and gold,’ – and an echo of this image returns like a refrain at the end of the poem.
In Stars like Sentinels a moon over mountains inspires images far from any cliché:
‘The moon is heavy tonight, / plump and livid…’ and ‘It eyes nothing. / Broken-toothed hills snap at its arc.’ Family haunts this poem, too:
‘The last bite of the moon disappears,/leaving me with paper saints,/eagles, lions and lambs: guardians/you set to watch my solitary transit.’
There are childhood memories, of fever-dreams (Baba Yaga), of streets and neighbours made strange by the lens of childhood (Street of Small Windows), and remembered pleasures. In Leaves we experience the child’s joy in colour and touch:
‘And I slept deep in leaves, nested
like a mouse, bird, snake,
the phoenix rising from burning leaves,
fire blazing behind summer eyes.’
There are adolescent incidents, and poems that recall adolescence by riffing off music by Bowie, and the loneliness in Edward Hopper’s painting, “Automat”. And there are people met and lost. Ophelia in Leeds 6 is a portrait of a girl who ‘wanted to be Ophelia.’ in the simple telling of her story and the attic room where she ‘makes up / her face, her past, and countless futures’, lies the narrator’s moving empathy. In Exchange an adolescent kiss haunts the narrator’s ‘awkward mouth’ when forty years later, in quite a different context, it’s ‘remembering her foreign tongue’.
And there are frankly surreal images inspired by fragments of memory. The Apotheosis of Ceyx translates a memory of a beach outing into a surreal scene whose imagery is worthy of Stanley Spencer. A scene of rows of old women stolidly knitting on the sands suddenly becomes a replay of a myth about the gods’ revenge on a loving married couple who blasphemously claimed their marriage was on a par with Zeus’s to Hera. Ceyx, the fisherman husband in the myth, becomes in the poem a boy on a bike who cycles into the sea; the knitters absurdly transmute into seagulls and flap away to find him, like the wife of Ceyx in the myth. The poem rattles along at a fine pace, in a musical, jolly rhythm like a seaside postcard. A more sinister image of Knitting appears in an eponymous poem later: this grey woman ‘knits fast, but the scarf grows faster’ and it engulfs the narrator.
Towards the end of the book the narrative turns darker and more surreal. In The Gift there is a mysterious demonic Italian with a garden in a suitcase, in a flooded city. We travel to The Ruins at Night where ‘Dogs drink from mercury pools / forget their masters, lick the bones/ of refugees and lovers…’ Vague is a filme noire sequence in Paris, where ‘eyes, black/with secrets, suck light from morning/cafés’. Hallowe’en brings a Séance and ‘something takes shape in the candlelit air.’ In Wishbones, ‘the tooth fairy, / black-mouthed at the window. sucks dreams.’
And there are sad realities: Mother is a small, totally heartfelt poem in which at last, ‘Ashes to ashes: she stepped outside.’ Ice is a walk in familiar territory on a cold winter night forty years on from ‘a drunken New Year’s kiss/that never ended, and remains, still,/the most honest thing you ever did.’ These last poems are the richest and strangest of all. The narrator has grown up and come home – come full circle – by the last page.
This is a substantial and most honest collection: emotion and memory distilled into words by a poet whose mastery of the craft seems wholly instinctive and intuitive. I have read it twice and will read it again, with huge pleasure.
Oz Hardwick is a York-based writer, photographer and musician. He is Professor of English and Programme Leader for Creative Writing at Leeds Trinity University. In his spare time, Oz is a respected music journalist.
Janice Dempsey 24/10/18
This review first appeared in "Write Out Loud" www.writeoutloud.net
Ghosting for Beginners by Anna Saunders
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Anna Saunders’s “Ghosting for Beginners” is a rich procession of phantoms and monsters. An undercurrent of anxiety for the material world grounds the collection: these spirits are anything but fey; these ghosts are part of the natural and spiritual life of this world.
“Ghosting”, the modern equivalent of “sending to Coventry” someone you want to dismiss or hurt, is the sub-plot of the witty title poem. It’s a meld of visual images: “Oh gauzy digits / hovering over the keys” and ironic commentary on the practice so common in the digital age:
“There’s no need to hang around graveyards / with malevolent intent…” and
“Imagine how the ghouls will envy you / when you become a spectre on social media.”
Here are historical ghosts, (“I said, Thomas, There is a Piece of Work about the Ghost”), mythic ghosts (“The Lapwing”, “A Wild Swan in the Tunnel”), spirits raised by nature’s alarm (“The Eye in the Tree”), urban ghosts (“A Murmuration Seen above the City.”) There’s a prophet on the train, the Angel of Revelation in a New Age shop, and William Blake’s monstrous Ghost of a Flea. Hauntings are sometimes funny, often vengeful, but can equally be benign though sad.
There’s plenty of wit and humour in this collection. I enjoyed the visit of the Angel of Revelations to a New Age shop, “dressed only in a cloud”, appalled at the whimsy on the shop’s shelves, who creates an apocalyptic scene that sets off the smoke alarm and brings security running to pin him down as he roars at the pigeons outside the window.
In “The Song” Saunders gives lyrical expression to personal feelings of loss and mourning by evoking a walk in the woods accompanied by the memory of her father, and returning home alone listening to a robin with “the urgent song of a creature/ asserting its claim on a darkening earth.”
But in “A Ghost before Dawn” she advises a widow to forget, to leave her husband “in the liminal”, this “filmy, limpid creature / too ethereal to embrace”. She warns:
“… our desires are gravity / holding the dead / fixed down to the earth.” And
“How can we hear the one note of the dawn/ when night is still whispering in our ears?”
Saunders turns a steady but slant-wise gaze on creatures of the night and the imagination
with her joyfully visual phrasing. Her use of language is as imaginative as the creatures she has invented and researched. In “On How Ghosts Take the Moral High Ground”, the licentious former lover, now dead, as a spirit is “scrubbed clean” – “All his sins are exfoliated now, his new skin / light as bible paper, lucent as rain.”
This is a collection that I will look forward to opening often, with new favourites emerging with each reading.
Janice Dempsey
October 2018
This is Anna Saunders's sixth collection. She is the founder of the Cheltenham Poetry Festival.
This review first appeared in Write Out Loud (www.writeoutloud.net)