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.

New books for review or notice may be sent to Sally Evans at Poetry Scotland, 91-93 Main Street, Callander, Scotland, FK17 8BQ.

Poems for Keep Poems Alive International: please send your poems by email with publication details. First publication must be at least 3 years ago and you must hold the copyright.

The email address for both sites is sallyevans 35 at gmail dot com.