Reviews Every Month? Meade and Morelle Smith

Reviews below:
Gordon Meade, The Year of the Crab, published by Cultured Llama,
and Morelle Smith, Shaping the Water Path, published by diehard

 

   Gordon Meade                                          Morelle Smith

Gordon Meade
The Year of the Crab. Cultured Llama, 2017  £10
Review by Sally Evans

Gordon Meade, the Scottish poet, who spent some years working near London, has been a good while known for his succinct, witty and wry poems about birds and animals, in books such as A Man at Sea, The Private Zoo, and A Singing Bestiary. The last was published with drawings by artist Douglas Robertson, by Cultured Llama, the publishers who have produced this new book.  It is an entirely new departure in poetry for its author, as he deals with his encounter with cancer. The main message of this book, both explicit and implicit, is that writing used properly can get you out of trouble.

If you overcome cancer you are a winner, not merely a survivor, argues Meade in one of his poems. Using the craft he has learned writing of birds and animals, he firmly and gracefully describes a whole range of effects of cancer on his life: how the doctors did or didn’t interact with him, how he felt, how he determined to beat it by reading and writing. The poems refer to various gurus including Eve Ensler and Plath. ‘1) Why have you got cancer. 2) Do you want to live?’ Is the header quote in one poem. His reading of cancer is not medical so much as confrontational. Writers who have overcome cancer and dealt with it repay our attention as we follow his poems.

Meade’s other major tactic is to retreat to his homeland in Scotland, to a house with a view of the ocean (important in his use of seabird poetry) and with his wife and daughter there. All these things are strengths to him.

The poems are varied – cancer is not a narrow field. One of the first poems is about an apricot. Woodpeckers, the sea and sleep quickly follow. (‘I have decided not to sleep at all’). Meade sometimes refers to the illness as ‘The Crab’ or ‘Mr C’ but usually these poems are straight talking. We are often at the consultants’ desks, not often comfortably, but we also consider the Ferryman (Charon) and even Shackleton and Scott, in poems that add depth and actual excitement to the experience of cancer.

There are three sections: St Bartholomew, basically referring to his time in London, St Monans, his coastal hometown in Fife, and Ninewells, the name of the Dundee hospital. All the sequencing has been done very carefully and the last poem, Autumnal, stands on its own and invigorates us with a view of the sea.

Poetically the book is mature and sound. In its theory and approach, it has relevance for everyone involved with cancer – surely a majority of readers, when friends or relatives are hit by the disease. I cite the circumstance that while I was reviewing this book and had it on a table in my bookshop while writing it up, my attention was turned to something else for a moment, during which time a customer snapped up the book and made off with it. I had to obtain another copy to complete my reading. I would certainly not have left it half read.        Sally Evans

 

 

Morelle Smith
Shaping the Water Path. diehard, 2017 £5
Review by Geraldine Green

I enjoy poems of travel and place. I also enjoy prose poetry. On opening this collection I discover on the Contents page that this collections contains both.

It’s always a little tricky, describing prose poem, a slippery genre between poetry and prose. I like that slipperiness! I applaud it! And enjoy the overlap between poetry, prose, poetic prose, prose poetry. So it was with great pleasure that I travelled with this skilful writer, sharing her journeys inner and outer.

Let me start with an extract from Chester Morning Orchestra

The yellow beech leaves quiver.
One jackdaw flies off.
One rattles its wings,
One hops to another branch.

One yellow leaf falls, circles,
spins down to earth.
Hunched birds, waiting.

The poet deftly sets up anticipation in the reader.  For what are they waiting?

Then, through the streets of pink stone and red brick,
swings the sunlight.
It riffles the spires of cathedral and church,
like the strings of an instrument,
tuning the morning.
The jackdaws fly off, into song.

It’s a beautiful interweaving of birds, trees, buildings of brick and stone, captured beautifully in this poem, all waiting for sunrise and light to draw them awake.

There are certain recurring images and ideas running through this collection: bridges, parallel roads, mirrors, reflections, thresholds – the liminal places and times where we slip from one world into another. Morelle Smith, I feel, understands these ‘thin worlds’ that parallel our own. Here’s an example from On the Kennett and Avon Canal:

This is the threshold, this is the world’s way, stone at your sides, you are sheltered, supported, your feet are the wings of your passage through distance and tall grass. The world has its wonders, remember us, stones at the entranceway, marking the path that leads to the river.

***

This unceasing flow that catches us, tumbles us as though we are stones waiting to be polished by the energy of light and water, is captured with great sensitivity, delicacy and strength of language in Smith’s fine collection.

I’ll leave you with an extract from Kilcreggan Ferry

A thin rope ties it to the wooden jetty.
The sun shines, out of reach of clouds.
The beach is pebbles, grey and rounded,
warm to the touch.
The sun has the whole estuary to itself,
fingers water, turns stones inside out,
revealing their true colours.

Geraldine Green, 3.8.2017

NEWS

News, friends. Having noticed that the Reviews situation has worsened ie it has reached the point you cannot get the damn things for love nor money, generally speaking, this site will attempt to publish reviews every month.

We will review small press poetry books that are brought to our attention. In order to keep up the flow, we are inviting reviews from readers. These will be moderated (this is a nicer way of saying accepted or rejected). If you are a competent reviewer and can convince me you have read the book properly and provide an internet corroboration for the book’s recent publication, your review will be eligible for posting here.  The purpose of the review site is to inform readers of the existence of new books of poetry and of the interest of these books. I will not be publishing negative or petty reviews.  If you really don’t like a book, don’t advertise it. Easy.

If you know of a book you’d like to review,  please email me at sally evans 35 at gmail dot com. If as publisher or author, you’d like a review of your book, please also email me. We’ll take it from there.

Please head your emails KPA Reviews, then I’ll know what you’re talking about. With your help there’ll be a reviews post every month.

End of year delights

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Goro Takano. Silent Whistle-Blowers.
Blaze-Vox Books, Buffalo, New York.

Aidan Andrew Dun. Unholyland: The Trilogy.
Skyscraper Publications, Warwickshire

Richard Livermore. Negative Energy: 24 essays and blogs.
Elephantasia Press, Edinburgh

So many of the media personalise end of year reviews that I was tempted to header this Sally’s Christmas Choices. I didn’t because that seems to categorise books mentioned as seasonal presents, almost stocking fillers, and this is not what I intend at all.

These are two major publications deserving an in depth discussion, which inevitably in both cases have been held over until I realise there is little of the year left. I then do Richard Livermore’s book the honour of landing up beside them.

Goro Takano. Silent Whistle-blowers. Blaze-Vox Books, Buffalo, New York.

It hasn’t been a good year for the world and it cannot have been a good year for Goro Takano, whose wife died in Japan during the year. He is an international poet, from Hiroshima, who has worked at Tokyo Universitiy, Kyoto University and the University of Hawaii, and who now  teaches English and Literature in the faculty of Medicine, Saga University, Japan.

Takano writes in an effervescent and powerful English which has an American flavour as possibly all Japanese English has. It is inventive (though all poetry is inventive), varied, exuberant and contemporary. His boxes of tricks include erasure, demanding stories, self-interviews or play-plays, and things a bit more like, though  not very like, conventional poems, set between a huge battery of usually cryptic quatrains. Post-truth isn’t the measure of it.

Take the poem A Dragonfly. It starts with what might in his own terms be quatrains, though they are consecutive, and then brings in a number of direct questions, each of which is answered, or at any rate followed,  by a quatrain. The questions go like this:
Wasn’t that a poet / the sick / a woman / a sinner / a painter / a priest / a playwright
who ……. this way? and they all have different verbs. You could have fun inventing the verbs for each right now. … And what about the dragonfly? it is born with a transparent mind at the start of the poem, and to end the poem, it revives the human word “dragonfly” and the poet’s foot falls on it. Eh? Everything Takano does makes the reader work, but not as hard as he has already worked to make this dazzling  book.

So, have some quatrains, and then have A Wake Song, or A Rope, a Gun and Gas (prose paras with a heading quote from Yeats). Or try One Night Saga of Mr Takano’s Wife – one of the closest pieces to a straight story, but not so very straight that it is not poetry. It is all poetry, and the pieces are regularly interspersed with Quatrains, which we havent begun to make head or tail of yet. I cannot even start on their variety but they are puzzling, separate, related riddles, sometimes lyrical, sometimes talking of language and painting, sometimes of the legacy of atom-bomb pain that is bound to be there in a man born in Hiroshima. Sometimes they are in Tokyo, sometimes they are  ‘in the middle of nowhere’. The weirdest things happen in them, and after a while you begin to expect or anticipate their weirdness. Over to the reader.

The book production totally matches the work, which is something we love to see. When a poetry book is properly produced, we are holding the poems themselves. The book is large format, allowing for wide lines of both the poetry and prose. It has condensed its substantial bulk into a 106 page paperback. The cover is comfortable matt black with an undescribed flower on the front cover.

While the worldwide university poetry structure is allowing poets to  work to this standard, it is succeeding. Now to that other sector of the poetry world, the unbacked independent poet.

 

Aidan Andrew Dun. Unholyland: The Trilogy. Skyscraper Publications, Warwickshire

This is a modern epic, a substantial trilogy finally published in whole. It has been known for some time, and when the first of its three books was published I wrote a review of it to which I must refer (below) as a start. I am not going to say quite the same things again, but one is never short of discussion points on a poem like this.

Unlike Takano’s work the book is entirely composed of one metric form: sonnet after Pushkinian sonnet, till the pattern gets into your head and releases you to read the poem flowingly. (There are slight variants in the raps where the Puskinian sonnet does acrobatics but it is never far away.)

Though the poem is entirely set in Palestine/Israel, the poet himself (like Takano) is an international figure, having (I believe ) connections with Goa. After a childhood in the West Indies, he has been working mainly in London, performing his work with ebullience and  gradually biting into establishment disapproval of his individual line in poetry. The last few decades have not been an era of appreciation of rhyme – not by the poetry fraternity, although the general population still love it, which is a central reason for the publishing world’s complaint that “poetry does not sell”.

One of the most extraordinary things about this long and detailed poem, whose location is clear from the title ‘Unholyland” is that its poet has never visited Israel or Palestine. Yet his grip of the history and his sense of the emotional lie of the land are second to none.  After reading the first book, which fully sets the scene of this  epic, described as ‘a love story’ on the main title page, and leaves us with Moss and Jalilah disturbed in love by gunning helicopters, the second book, Jalilah, seems a little more quotidian, following Jalilah’s teenage life after a strong account of her recovery from injury. In  fact this is a lull in which conviction of the characters as real living people is built up, as in a novel the hero or heroine becomes alive from familiarity. Jalilah has been introduced in the first book as a stunning teenage rapper (undoubtedly a legacy of the performance scene in London and England at the time of writing the book). For much of the second  book she is an ordinary teenager and schoolgirl.

Throughout this narrative the poet’s virtuosity with the form  builds up until it becomes almost an easy read, if you are not looking out for the adroitnesses. The effect of Byron’s Don Juan is perhaps sought, with its witty and regular metre, and in book three there is a welcome rise in temperature of the verse.  This might be a moment to say I would like to see this poet work in terza rima, which also has the capacity to settle into a long narrative and become second nature in the writing and reading. As it is there are some very clever twists purely in the use of the narrative form. Somewhere in the third book (I had it marked) he is gloriously self referent, describing a man who’d lived in a squat in London and written this long poem: it is a delightful piece of poetic structure to come across in the reading.

This is a poet who does not compromise. His very subject matter is sensitive to many echelons  of the establishment. His tirades against the use of warfare to coerce  Palestinians, the absurdity of the lives of communities there, his testimonies of the poverty and wealth, the secret natural friendships across the divisions, the force that  goes from his beliefs into his poetry, his potential to be an outsider, and yet he is steadily gaining ground as a known and accepted poet: the more you read this book the more you realise that, typically of the best poetry, it is about two things: the subject of the poem, and the actual poet.

Read my earlier review :
http://poetryscotlandreviews.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/unholyland.html

 

Richard Livermore. Negative Energy: 24 essays and blogs. Elephantasia Pr, Edinburgh

After the above reviews this finally must be a book notice (it is growing late, or rather it is  growing light). Like many poets Richard Livermore is an independent poet, unattached to universities or institutions; but less usually he is an independent academic. He publishes a poetry and culture journal, Ol’ Chanty, for many years in paper form, then on the internet, and nowadays intermittent, but it is still on the internet. He also publishes books, mainly his own poetry. I think that is increasingly seen as a strong  way to go. But this book is a selection of his essays. Read by his fairly large community on the net, they are strong, intelligent, culturally incisive and deeply anarchic. Read some of his work on his Ol’ Chanty blog, easy enough to look up, and you may well discover you would like to read these essays.

Stunning work on Stirling’s history

Paraig MacNeil, The Brooch the Yarn and the Unicorn.
ebook, http://goo.gl/FVFN1s.
There is no one like Paraig MacNeil to unify a theme across history, and here he is doing just that in a unique and effective manner. He weaves a narrative in English poetry around original Scottish tales in a variety of historical languages, covering the Castle and Its great Tapestries and their symbols. Only MacNeil could take a story spanning many centuries and progress it from Arthurian days to the present Castle restoration, in rhyming couplets in modern English.

While being within his oevre in broad terms, The Brooch the Yarn and the Unicorn is different from any other of Paraig MacNeil’s poetic works.

Once you latch onto what MacNeil is doing in unifying the piecemeal stories of Scotland, you are a convert for life, realising that the cumulative work is like, say, the Arabian Knights tales, or a piecing together of Homeric history, or the Aeneid. It is such a major body of work that it is difficult to realise it close up. We are too accustomed to page length poems and faint themes from other poets, but here we have a sustained and fertile poetic mind producing really powerful work.

 

The Book of my Friend

Nuala Watt. Dialogue on the Dark, Calder Wood Press, 26pp
Richard Livermore. The Secret of the Crocodile’s Smile. Edinburgh, Elefantasia Press, viii, 36 pp.
A Note on Reviewing

 

Nuala Watt. Dialogue on the Dark

Nuala Watt’s at first sight unassuming pamphlet is not the work of a hesitant beginner. Despite its short length it is more like a book: considered, sound and complete.

In part it is the outcome of this author’s recently achieved PhD on the poetics of partial sight. It begins boldly as it means to go on, by printing Milton’s sonnet On His Blindness and replying with a sonnet of the author’s own, using the same rhyme scheme, the same rhyme sounds and even some of the same words, so we have

You mourned sight sent
before you into death. Let me invent
a new account – half light to place beside
your grief, the beauty of blind life denied.

Even naming Milton as ‘John Milton’ brings the great poet down to her level, or rather raises the author to his.

All Nuala Watt’s poems land bang on target. There’s The View, concerning the eye’s famous trick of “seeing” the world upside down – which the brain corrects. It’s at the end of the book, because

Vision is still a draft.
…
The box on stilts will be a cathedral.
Those holes will become your face.
We walk on our hands over a deep blue ground.

In between, there are several poems about water – Mermaid and Selkie, and about other disabilities than partial sight – Floors, and A Prayer to be released from Prayer (with the last line How to take up a life and walk away).

The style of these poems is international rather than Scottish. English and American poetry lie behind these metrical, often expansive poems, with their sense of vowel as well as consonant (Scottish poetry is typically more consonantal) and their open intelligence.

All the subjects relate to sight in some way, the thesis of Watt’s PhD being that all poetry depends on wanting to see something that one cannot see. Within the whole the poems are separate, often unusual: there’s the highly entertaining, longish, rhymed surd The Rough Guide to Wonderland, in which
your one friend’s a grin without a cat

and      

                         Confidence is
the best way to escape this horror show.

In the end the speaker dismisses the spectres as

You’re nothing but a pack of words.

Further variety of subject comes from the poem on The Ain Sakhri Lovers, the 11,000 year old small stone carving. All that you’d expect to be considered – the first lust in art – is stated without mincing, then comes the conclusion on partial sight:
   A couple. It hopes it will be stronger with four lungs,
   that through four retinas, life might seem clear.

There’s the secret, sisterly poem Swallow, about the meaning of the swallow as a tattoo:

Always ready to flit / … the songbird / will help her survive long distance.

To turn to the title poem, this is the one that makes me feel there is something international about Nuala Watt. Something more than parochial. It transcends the shape of poems, is short and complex, and contains one of her most memorable among memorable lines:
   I wish I could appoint a lawyer for winter.

Should I state an interest? Along with many in the Scottish poetry community, I have seen Nuala grow through the more than 15 years since she was one of the student poets in the Open Mic at a pub in St Andrews. She is admired universally, for her overcoming of health problems including partial sight. Is it going to be difficult for people to admire her work as well?

The poetry comes straight from the person. It has honesty, direction, academic strength, and cheer. This small black and white pamphlet is the debut of an important writer.

 

Richard Livermore. The Secret of the Crocodile’s Smile.

In some ways comparable and in some ways a contrast, Richard Livermore’s new book, one of many from his pen, is very true to his own life vision, although that is an older and more pessimistic one. His work also is international rather than Scottish. Although he has lived here for decades, Livermore’s sound draws little from other Scottish writing, and he has developed his own style of mainly short, often very short poems so there is a sense of drawing to a conclusion over time in his present book.

Like Nuala Watt’s, the book is apparently short and simple, though its 36 pages contain much more verse, often three or more poems to a page, with some 20- or 30-line poems here and there which seem longer than they are.

The book begins with an 8-page introduction by Ian Macfadyen of London, who discusses the context of Livermore’s poetry, his background interests in politics, protest, and anarchism, tied in with his philosophical interests in art, mythology, the gods, and the meaning of existence, and it has to be added, a certain pessimism of outlook based on the relentless logic of his philosophy.

The poems hang together. They are not party pieces or competition fodder. They are an individual’s truth.

Over time these short poems have become more and more winnowed, and they often need a double-take. He loves rhyme and doesn’t pretend not to. Here is Smilidon Fatalis:

he has come to this
syrupy tar-pit to drown
and hear the slurp of it
sucking him down.

And here is Fragment shored against my ruin:

Once upon a time was ours
until the faster flying hours
took it from us.

Or Ipso facto:

There is a shadow
— not everyone sees it –

goes under the African elephant’s foot.

The majority of the poems could be described as longer short poems. There are a number of parables or thesis concerning animals – crocs, horses, leopard etc with high mythical content.

Composing into the night posits Livermore’s dry pessimism about the world.

I’ll never hit that note again,
that former optimistic strain
eludes me…
a goodbye word that’s in the throes
of conflicts I care nothing for…

And yet Livermore does care about conflicts. He writes and publishes essays on them, notably in his online magazine Ol’ Chanty, q.v. He just doesn’t see an end to them, and people often don’t. Sometimes they take refuge in religion, but Livermore is having none of that, except when he talks of ‘the gods’ as in “Why the gods love us” a self-referent poem (we make it needful / for them to exist). Basically these are ‘take it or leave it” poems which will delight some people and may leave others cold. But for the author, it is all in the doing.
In accordance with his poetic convictions, Richard Livermore is a rather shy writer who does not go out as much as perhaps he could among the literary community, and consequently is not so well known there. Apart from like-minded anarchistic types such as Jeremy Reed, Livermore’s links are mainly through the internet, and to such writers the internet is a lifeline. What we are supposed to be interested in is writing, after all.

 

A Note on Reviewing

Both the above poets are friends of mine. I don’t believe in “objectivity” or in pretending that one does not know the poets one reviews. (One often doesn’t, but even the blurbs on the backs of books are introductions.)

I don’t think we can be “objective” about anything. I have a place (which is Scotland). I have a view (which includes England, America and everywhere else that produced English language poetry). Friendships give me a better insight, they are a short cut to research, that’s all.

In reviews, I say what the books make me think about, and I think that is what a reviewer ought to do. Of course, reviewers who don’t think about anything will start slagging off authors for not writing the way the reviewer thinks they should. I think that’s rubbish. Do they want everyone to write the same way about the same things?

Criticism means placing a text (ie the content of a book) in the context of one’s literary view. That’s what I try to do.

Coming soon: Silent Whistle-Blower by Goro Takano, published by BlazeVOX, New York. Books may be sent for review to: Sally Evans, 93 Main Street, Callander, Scotland FK17 8BQ

 

 

 

 

Light and music, illustration and texts

IN THIS POST  Kairos Press: Morelle Smith; Cultured Llama: Gordon Meade and Douglas Robertson; Altaire: The Antigone Poems;  Rack Press: Four New Booklets

Morelle Smith, Every Shade of Blue. Kairos Press, Fountainhall, Galashiels

An outstanding book by poet and travel writer Morelle Smith, whose every book is both poetic and different. This one is to my mind her best. The book is in memory of her close companion John Renbourne the musician, with whom she travelled to gigs throughout Scotland, England, Europe and America. Earlier in 2015, John died suddenly, and in this book published at the end of that year, Morelle puts together a number of travel notes and essays which must have been already part written, creating a coherent spiritual memoir of the life of two artists, in words, in music, in appreciation of visual beauty and painting, and a world seen as a background to their artistic experiences.

Simple driving, travel and hotel adventures are interspersed with philosophical and spiritual digressions and essays, all blending into the narrative and stemming from it. Morelle and John sitting at either end of a long table in a castle in France, he composing music and she writing. An incident on a Northumberland beach when car keys were lost against falling darkness and an incoming tide. They were found, and John was the right person to have lost them with and found them with, because he would have laughed, he would have known what to do, and because he laughed too when they were found. A sudden confession of her diverse, largely feminist literary influences, “the last writer I read and really liked” then detailing Stevie Smith, Rosamond Lehmann, Anais Nin, Janet Frame, but also she says, she could “squeeze in” Camus, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Herman Hesse, Neil Gunn, Henry Miller, and, well, others. Scattered through the book, many snapshot photos of John, and a few of Morelle’s own poems in context.

I love a book that goes its own way and refuses to follow convention. It is much more likely thus to have real structure and freshness, immediacy and literary value, and this is one of these books.

Gordon Meade and Douglas Robertson. Les Animots: A Human Bestiary. 68 species described with black and white drawings. Cultured Llama Publishing, 2015

The Antigone Poems. Poems by Marie Slaight. Drawings by Terrence Tasker. Australia, Altaire, 2014

Despite the second of these books being a 2014 publication, both were sent for review at the same time and they seem to match in kind and intention. Both are in equal part the production of an artist and a poet. The Antigone Poems were written in Canada and illustrated in Australia, while Les Animots began with Gordon Meade’s poems, written mainly in Scotland, and were illustrated by Douglas Robertson in Hampshire. In both cases the involvement of the artist came from friendship and interest in the work – not from any official pairing of artist and writer by nanny arts organisations.

The Antigone book goes back a long way. The full page dramatic drawings, mainly of theatre masks, were completed by 1992 when the artist Terrence Tasker died, while the poetry was written between 1972 and 1981. That’s quite an achievement for spinning out the composition of what is basically a minimalist “short long poem.” It’s a handsome large paperback on good art paper with plenty of white space, and it’s heartening to see that someone cared enough about it over time and in the face of relative lack of notice, to turn it into a book. People working in and for poetry really do care about poems that come their way.

Much the same operates with Les Animots, except that the poet and the artist were friends in Dundee, both hailing from Scotland, and Gordon Meade’s poems, published in various books and journals over the last some years, had closed in more and more on the theme of animals, and his dry, witty style was becoming well known, at any rate in Scotland. Meanwhile, Meade had migrated to Essex to work, and his meeting up with Robertson in the South led to this collaboration. Meade has now seen sense and returned to Fife, while Robertson has also become known for his collaborative work with another Scottish poet, Donald S Murray.

Robertson’s style here, which look as if it is pencilled, suits the stark understatement of the poems very well. There is a chill in some of the poems, like the Dingo, which ends:

just the other day

a family was, thirty years too late
for them, found innocent of the murder
of their daughter in the bush.

The illustrator responds to this with humour, sometimes a black humour like the dead moles strung on barbed wire a page or two later in the book.

Meade is fastidious about the layout of his poems, and the double page opening is handled well in the positioning of many of these illustrations

Gordon Meade’s animal poems stand up to re-reading and are worthy of being put together in a good looking book. From the first lines of the first poem,

Snake is rattling
And that in itself
Should be taken as a warning

to the conclusion of the last, about Kingfisher, the work is assured, engaging and complete. Well done to Cultured Llama of Medway for what I know has been a determined and committed production.

It is a pity we have such a stultified publishing infrastructure that an attractive and basically saleable book like this one cannot be published in substantial numbers in a highly visible edition.

 

Rack Press: John Greening, Nebamun’s Tomb; Martina Evans, Watch; Andrew McCulloch, Strange, Such Strength; Eve Grubin, The House of our First Loving. All 2016

Well known for its innovative, short-length, up to the minute pamphlets, Rack Press has a lively list of some forty poets, including these four. They are gender balanced and arguably slightly Londoncentric (though only slightly is better than some publishers manage). This time, none of the poets is particularly young or “new”.

There are too many accolade notices on most poetry blurbs, and with pamphlets it is particularly important to be concise. Readers might have five minutes to consider buying the booklet. Why distract them with quotes from John Fuller or Bernard O’Donoghue? We know the quotes are  going to be complimentary, it’s as though a publisher needs someone else to corroborate his/her choice. If we are to get anywhere with the public for lesser known poets, we need readers to be encouraged to make up their own minds: not “Buy this because Mark Doty approves of it.” If they happen not to know of Mark Doty they’ll be even further flummoxed.

Simply designed with modest runs of 150 copies, they are a good buy at £5 each and perhaps buyers will trust Rack Press enough to buy them all. Then they’ll find they have favourites. Mine (of these 4) is John Greening’s Nebamun’s Tomb. Perhaps this is hard on the others because John Greening is easily the most considerable and most published of these writers. He has (in the credits) the best publications list and awards list and the least extravagant claims from supporters.  Additionally his work here has a theme, which is somewhere we are definitely going in poetry.  His poems are highly re-readable. They don’t tell you enough, but get you interested in old Salt and the Egyptian relics in the British Museum. It’s a sequence of 11 shortish, vari-form and image-filled poems, linking London and Egypt. It is, imo, the best title and has the best subject matter of the four.

A problem of producing booklets in batches of four is that they will be compared with each other, and generally, poets are not “comparable”,  they are extremely individualistic. Or should be. Too much insistence on fashion, on schools, on competitions, makes them less so. By their fruits ye shall know them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

KPA Reviews: Livermore on Prynne

Poems by J H Prynne. Bloodaxe , 2015. £25
I feel I must open this review with a confession. I have read J. H. Prynne’s Poems from beginning to end – 670pp – and have hardly understood a word I was reading. On the other hand, I found, while reading them, that they were a stimulating influence on my own writing. How to describe this apparent contradiction. Well, I think it has something to do with the techniques Prynne uses to break up the normal usages of English by employing words in such a way that, while the grammatical structure of sentences is always scrupulously preserved, the syntax itself (the relationship between this grammar and the wider meanings of sentences and paragraphs) seems to beggar all logic. This can be liberating, as it seems to suggest the possibility of freeing poetry itself from the trammels of logic and the need to make sense. Experimental poetry has been moving in this direction since the Surrealists, and more recently since Frank O’Hara, John Ashberry, Charles Olsen, Robert Creeley and Tom Raworth. I myself have used many of the methods developed by these poets, but Prynne seems to take them to a different level entirely, relentlessly developing these a-syntactical techniques to the point where one could almost begin to describe him as a ‘one-trick horse’. What will become of a poetry which continues to evolve in this direction remains an open question. Is it the future of poetry? Or is it just an exploration of one of its many possible byways? Personally, I do not like the idea of poetry being reduced to an affair of competing dogmatic schools in which what’s at stake is ‘the future of Poetry’ – with a capital P – as if poetry was not really poetries embodying the idea of difference, but was constantly moving ‘onwards and upwards’ in accordance with some predetermined evolutionary plan. That narrative is, I believe, an exhausted one. Finnegan’s Wake was not the future of the novel when it was written, but it was nonetheless a highly original one-off job which brilliantly explored one of the novels myriad possibilities and brought it to splendid fruition. The same I feel is true of Poems by J. H. Prynne. There remains always the possibility that such experiments, however magnificent they are in themselves, may be evolutionary dead-ends, though that, of course, is not for us to say, since it will depend on how future poets respond to such work. Does poetry move in one direction only? Or does it enjoy baffling our linear expectations by constantly stepping sideways and even backwards on occasion. However, that’s a ball I prefer to leave in the court of the reader.

Prynne is an extraordinarily erudite poet with a rich vocabulary and a great deal of especially scientific literacy. I personally could not hope to emulate him, but such erudition does lend itself to his mode of writing, allowing him a great deal of scope to go off at all kinds of tangents and develop it. After a while, however, the whole process did become rather much of a muchness. One thing you cannot say is that he is a ‘page-turner’. There seems to be something unrelieved about it all in the end. It was sometimes like wading through dough. Often, I wanted the methods to change and the pace to speed up just to bring an element of relief to the writing, but it doggedly persists and at the same time seems to get into your system, altering your own poetic DNA in the process. Here is an example taken at random.

“All the fun of the pit gets well and then better,

sand spun off as yet to bind promises to top up

one clock via another, either to both, sky-divers

like swallows gorging their young. In staple pairs

all so sudden with a tumult, written for nothing

to skip a beat, break open the shells, dexter risen

forward, new zonal application as leaf by shaded

leaf glows with wanting itself so.”

There is some interesting verbal play here – such as in the words “sky-divers like swallows gorging (swallowing?) their young.” I could have quoted at random from any part of the book and come up with a similar quote making no more sense than the one I’ve just quoted. But is making sense the be-all and end-all of poetry? The fact that Prynne held my attention right to the end suggests that something else was going on, some patterning along subterranean pathways, which might have liberating effects on the art of writing poetry itself, which is, perhaps, too prone to stay within its own safe parameters and not allow itself to move too far beyond them. Is it not just conceivable, after all, that poetry needs the Prynnes of this world, and that without them it stultifies? Whatever the answer to that may be, there is no doubt in my mind that Prynne himself is an invigorating presence, without which poetry itself might become too timid to break through its own self-imposed boundaries and move into new territory.

Richard Livermore

KPA Reviews and Notices

Sister Site to  Keep Poems Alive International

We are starting this project with a review of J H Prynne from Richard Livermore, in Edinburgh, who writes intelligent essays in his website Ol’ Chanty – Chanticleer Magazine Online, and elsewhere. Generally I want to review good and interesting poetry books (or books by poets), emphasising those that probably won’t get major media attention. Prynne is an exception. The Reviews and Notices posts will appear monthly or more often, depending on flow and readability.  Unlike with the poems, Reviews and Notices have to be of current publications ie normally 2016.

The first review post will appear after this initial information post.

Unsigned reviews and notices are by Sally Evans. If you would like to contribute occasional reviews, please get in touch with me by email for discussion. I will need to know you are not the publisher, author or whatever.

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