Doubleplusungood

Review: Reed, Schmidt, Joseph, Jess-Cooke, Pugh

Jeremy Reed, West End Survival Kit, Waterloo, £10, ISBN 9781906742072
Michael Schmidt, Collected Poems, Smith/Doorstop, £18.95, ISBN 9781902382005
Jenny Joseph, Nothing like Love, Enitharmon, £9.99, ISBN 9781904634843
Carolyn Jess-Cooke, Inroads, Seren, £7.99, ISBN 9781854115119
Sheenagh Pugh, Later Selected Poems, Seren, £9.99, ISBN 9781854114976

Any poet worth their salt, as Michael Donaghy once noted, “tries to tell the truth by working truly.” Not by conforming to reified concepts of ‘fact’ or ‘actuality’, of course (but this is what actually happened!), but by being true to themselves, the reader, and the world they construct within a poem, however surreal or fantastical. The linguistic sense of a poem is a measure of this, ensuring that, rather than a private act, poems become a shared communication of recognisable truth, whether literal or imaginative. In short: you give a good poem a shove, and it always bounces back.

The poems in Jeremy Reed’s latest collection certainly depict a recognisable, albeit often futuristic world. But do they ring true? West End Survival Kit contains memorable images and the sort of off-kilter description that defined his early volumes, but also much purposeless repetition, lack of rhythmical invention and, unusually for a poet known for subversive attitudes, dichotomised gender stereotypes. The male subjects here may be anonymous, but they wear “charcoal pinstripe Sisley suit[s]”, “chill with GQ”, and drive sports cars which routinely appear, whether as objects, images or metaphors. Take trophy girlfriend “Sheila”, a “Chinese babe” who sports “a jacket sewn with loud logos // like a sticker-plastered racing car”. Reed’s intention may be a laudable criticism of a certain rich, fast-living, yet infantile segment of society (most of the poems feature brand-conscious, apathetic couples), but without wry humour or the inclusion of more sophisticated characters, such observations remain vague and wearyingly dystopian, however intriguing.

The problem remains in Reed’s over-productiveness. West End Survival Kit consists of over fifty poems, and appears two years after his last volume. There is much to provoke in its vibrant, disconcerting prophesying: “the clouds building / like a schema for World War 4”, or an ‘Interplanetary Executive’ whose “corporate logo’s a DNA strand”. But with few exceptions, these flashes of intensity pepper a collection that sounds the same note over and over; describing capitalist excess, boredom, and spiritual bankruptcy in tercet after tercet of growing fatigue. In the end, this book seems akin to the “canvas stash bag” at the centre of its title poem: curious in its gathering of familiar consumer detritus, but not enough to maintain the reader’s interest.

Unlike Reed, Michael Schmidt’s Collected Poems brings together four decades of work, yet only runs to some two hundred pages. This no doubt has to do with Schmidt’s activities as literary editor, publisher, critic and teacher; his founding of Carcanet Press and the journal PN Review, among other achievements, having earned him an OBE. But one suspects it is also due to deliberative writing methods. A poem such as ‘The Judas Fish’ exemplifies this: its blend of ornate description, everyday idiom, biblical allusion and telling imagery put to the service of a questing mind:

Looking out, indeed, there’s not much to see,

no diver, no near fish, nothing to possess,
though there is a strange possessiveness
in water, as in sunlight, determining the shadows.

Just as the eerie fish has “a Judas eye trained” on the poet, Schmidt’s work looks to uncover the elemental forces beneath surface facades, locating him within the Modernist tradition of Eliot, Pound and Yeats.

The central preoccupations of Schmidt’s poems are uncertainty, indecisiveness, and the mistakes that can follow. This is evident in rhythmical, incantatory forms (“If we swam out and never came back in, / Lapping against the deep end just the pulse / of water, is it water?”) but also dream-like, childhood reminisces: “I, to whom the knowledge had been given, // […] remember how a knot of pains / swelled my hand” (‘Wasps’ Nest’). No surprise that water – in its physical potential and metaphorical implications – often provides a manifestation of such themes: its movements mirroring the poet’s emotions; murky depths both appealing and threatening. But it is the book-length sequence at the heart of this Collected, The Love of Strangers, which is most memorable and original. As the narrator regresses from adulthood to childhood, we are given portraits, impressions, and memories of an eclectic mix of writers, artists, and loved ones; a sustained tribute to those who Schmidt holds dear, whether personally or artistically, and a work which only a poet-critic of such broad tastes and enthusiasms could have produced.

Jenny Joseph’s Nothing like Love is another collection with a wide compass. Her first since 2006’s Extreme of Things, it mixes early love lyrics with new work in what the blurb describes as an “entirely fresh combination”, which makes billing it a new book slightly odd. In any case, there seem to be two Josephs: one who is a writer of sprightly, elegant, but often clichéd lyric poems; the other who is an observant, imaginative chronicler of human experience. Several poems positioned recto-verso illustrate this: while ‘Great Sun’ exercises hackneyed imagery, ‘Here Lies Treasure: Here Be Monsters’ is a bracing reflection on love, desire and possession. Similarly, ‘Lady Love’s energetic rhythms disguise a poem of little depth, though ‘The Unlooked-For Season’ adopts plain description in pursuit of subtler effects. Nothing like Love is a mixed success, then, but this reader is not exactly its intended audience. Admirers of Joseph’s celebrated poem ‘Warning’ will, I suspect, find much to enjoy here.

Almost any poetry reader – indeed, any reader – would be pushed not to find something to enjoy in Sheenagh Pugh’s Later Selected Poems. The companion volume to her 1990 Selected Poems, it contains work from five collections published since, and is testament to the muscular, plainspoken style Pugh has developed, capable of addressing myriad subject matters in diverse manners. Life, love, death and all the usual suspects are here, of course – though typically revivified – but so too are censorship, fan fiction, HTML, cartoon characters, and renowned anthropologist Owen Beattie; even the extra in a film, seen “waving his farewells / to the extras on shore, / among whom, // with a rather distinctive hat, / by some continuity cock-up / he also stands.” Pugh’s poems are full of subtle details and double takes: mundanity may often be the order of our days, but if we pay close attention, surprise lurks just out of sight. It is this marrying of the world’s bustle and growing complexity with a miniaturist’s eye for detail that makes Pugh such an accomplished poet; as adept at longer, discursive pieces as following, say, the brief lives of “flakes of ash scudding seawards”: “the wind full / of waste paper, // brief wordless messages, / fluttering out unread.” Because, level-headedly, she speaks of and to our modern, manifold world, Pugh’s is a voice worth listening to.

So too with Carolyn Jess-Cooke, a young poet whose often contemporary subjects – YouTube, hidden-camera TV, jet lag, the fish counter at the local supermarket – are, in the best poems from her debut Inroads, made surprisingly profound through a mixture of woozy shifts in focus, startling imagery, and a freewheeling use of the vernacular. In such a lavishly varied and adventurous collection, it seems a shame to single out one poem in particular for praise. But I kept returning to opener ‘Accent’, where the local and global intermingle, yet “the picked-up place-music” of home lends shifting roots to cling to:

Home? Or everywhere? Like combing coral
or sand and snow globes, or a wave-shaped petal
from Sydney’s Manly Cove
my voice fossils places. The way sound chases
itself in tunnels and halls, the way senses
fold memory into five

is an accent’s suitcase aesthetic. Listen.

As this and the bulk of Inroads suggest, Jess-Cooke is a poet of both achievement and promise; whose future work will be worth looking out for, but who also deserves to be read and enjoyed now.



this piece was first published in Poetry Review

Review: John McCullough's The Frost Fairs

John McCullough's debut collection introduces a writer acutely aware of poetry's transformative power, its ability to question assumptions and subtly shift perspective. His musical work offers up an array of voices – speaking statues, spoons in a drawer, men sent to bed for a year "trialling pills for weightless conditions" – sometimes playing for laughs, but always thoughtful and touching. It also adopts various styles: from the sensuous lyricism of "The Light of Venus", which views love through the lens of astrophysics, to the witty chit-chat of "The Long Mile", drawing on Thom Gunn's brilliant "Night Taxi" in its cab driver persona while veering into weirder territory. Gunn can often seem the presiding influence here: sharp yet compassionate, formal yet nimble, the poems glitter with slang and modern culture while maintaining an engaging seriousness. Energy and abundance aside, though, it is the dark, quietly attentive poems that impress most, like the fallen jackdaw in one poem, "its neck twisted as though broken / from straining to see the incredible."


first published in The Guardian, Saturday 13 August 2011

Home

Home

Only there, the afternoons could suddenly pause…
Carol Ann Duffy, ‘Stafford Afternoons’


I try to imagine it differently, coming back to this town,
its streets the same except for shops unemptied,
a book store not bought out by Waterstones,

or the Ancient High House not leaning forwards,
its bulging Elizabethan plaster and timberwork.
But as the train shuttles down the West Coast mainline

and I shift my head to gaze into the gloaming outside –
a paperback of Acrimony on the table to pass the time;
the girl opposite eyeing it with suspicion or interest –

I’m woken by the town’s lit-up landmark; that castle
built from wood, then stone, then again and again
until it was left in the ruins that remain and its stock

of earthworks. The station’s empty in pools of orange
light. This, I think to myself, won’t be the last time
I wander bleary-eyed past the silence of the Bird in Hand,

a bunch of kids skittering their BMXs round McDonalds
or the small miracle of a bargain shop where, for years,
everything’s been ‘Going Going Going’

though, for a second there, I almost considered turning off
to Joxer Brady’s, even The Coach, but every time I just
drag my heels past, onto the waiting shadow of the night bus.



poem by Ben Wilkinson; first published in Poetry London (No.61, October 2008)

Review: Alan Buckley's Shiver

Alan Buckley
SHIVER
21pp. tall-lighthouse. Paperback, £5.
978 1 904551 61 4

So here’s the thing: I actually got hold of a copy of Shiver, Alan Buckley’s debut pamphlet of poems, not so long after it deservedly grabbed the PBS Pamphlet Choice back in 2009. They say a week’s a short time in politics, and the same can go for poetry: so much stuff is published these days, half the time you can barely keep up, and that’s just with the kind of thing you enjoy, never mind the whole broad canvas. (Or at least I can’t anyway, and sincerely hope / suspect I’m not the only one). Marketing exacerbates this, of course: sure some of the best poetry comes from those imprints that are part of a much bigger commercial enterprise, but in the media fuss that can sometimes surround the big players’ literary stars (relatively speaking, like; this is poetry after all), you can often end up missing out on something very special put out by the smaller indies. As an occasional reviewer, this can be doubly frustrating: by the time you find out about / get around to properly reading this great little book that came out a year ago, the time has most likely passed when you could have defiantly sung its praises in a magazine or paper.

Which is pretty much what I want to do here with Buckley’s Shiver. Because really, for me, Buckley just gets what poetry is about, and puts it into practice again and again over the course of a short pamphlet with undeniable invention and prowess. Here’s a poet who knows that you have to beguile and entertain the reader before you can lay on the heavy stuff; that any form of address, perhaps especially poetry, has to make the reader or listener want to invest time and thought in what’s being said, rather than making the fatal mistake of simply expecting such attention. Take the opening poem here, “Flaming June”, a precise little sonnet that we could admire simply for its technical accomplishments. But these only earn their keep, as form and technique should, given that they’re put to the service of the poem’s minutely observed story: a narrow boat’s passage through a canal lock which manages to transform that fairly pedestrian happening into a Dante-like journey into another, altogether darker, realm. We can forgive Buckley his more flashy literary effects – the boat like a “semi-colon”, for instance - given the wonderful, otherworldly eeriness the poem invokes: “the feral river” that “charges the weir // then bursts back into view, dark and foaming”, or the anonymous man who “strolls past us, a limited god”. By the time he “spins the sluice wheels” and, as the poem closes, “gently, we descend”, Buckley has taken us into the quotidian and on into somewhere unnervingly unfamiliar, readying us for what’s to come.

There’s some real risk-taking and ambition in the poems that follow. Not “risk” as some might define it, in the sense of testing the reader’s patience to breaking point with indecipherable self-indulgence and syntactic glossolalia, but risk as in the risk of mundanity, of attempting to transform the everyday into something new and surprising, or the risk of attempting to write deftly on sometimes uncomfortable topics. “Anusol©”, as its rather unfortunate title suggests, attempts the latter with admirable tightrope-walking finesse, taking that particular medicinal cream and the broader idea of discomfort to interrogate our social mores with a welcome dash of subtle humour: “I saw the tube where I’d left it, perched on the edge / of the tub: that blunt, un-English name, the manufacturer – / Canadian – unaware of our sensitivities”. The poem launches into its unforgiving analysis:

Please understand:

we are born uncomfortable. We must apologise for these
bodies that block up our narrow streets, that brush
and bump in Underground trains. We have smoked them

brown as kippers, stuffed them with pig fat until they drip,
soaked them in cheap gin; and yet they persist, refuse
to go away. We wish they would show some decency […]

That distinctly Larkin-like first-person plural “we” speaks of a poet who is either naïve in their assumptions, arrogant in their assumed communal voice, or of one who is unafraid to communicate a collective feeling given the hard-thinking manifestly on show in their writing. Buckley is the latter. Sentimentalists and others might see this as a matter of opinion given their restrictive allegiance to the wholly subjective, but the way to work out which category any writer falls into here is the broad truth of the claims made, and which English reader can claim not to feel the truth of that link between our broader sense of “decency” and our often uncomfortable relationship with the carnal and corporeal? We like to think of the bodily, and by extension, physical intimacy, as something inherently private, something that inevitably takes place “behind closed doors”, but what Buckley reveals here is how such ingrained attitudes might come to short-circuit our relationship with the physical entirely; wanting to be left in a detached, most likely digital, world with “only our monkey-house minds / for company.”

Elsewhere, some of the poems in Shiver are a pleasure to read simply for their unshowy, natural and conversational lyricism; their subtle music a welcome change from some of the rolling linguistic firework displays other contemporary poets favour. The romantic trysts in “His knowledge of astronomy is limited”, for example, are beautifully yet unsentimentally described, worth quoting here at length:

Once, he imagined it like this:
a hillside, miles from the nearest
town, the ground hard and brisk
with frost; the night sky clear,
blue-black as the bottle of ink
on his desk. Two people
beneath a rough wool blanket,
hot from the reckless rush of sex;
the wood pulsing orange-red,
dying down towards charcoal,
eager sparks flicked out and up
into the cool, still air.

Delicate yet robust and rhythmically paced, with rhyme sparingly deployed to evocative effect and alliterative sound pockets that barely register until you read back, this is consummate writing. That Buckley, as already proven, is also a whip-smart, hard-thinking writer is enough to make his work worth reading. But, fairly, you might want other reasons, in which case you can look to other poems in Shiver – a pamphlet of only twenty that ends up feeling more substantial than some full collections – for evidence of an emotional integrity and frankness, as well as a gift for the choice metaphor to augment a poem’s arguments. Take “Your news”, which skirts deftly in and around the difficult matter of breast cancer, and somehow comes off: incorporating clever imagery (which I won’t spoil here) and, believe it, grim humour before jumping to particle physics via a half-recalled intimacy. It’s probably one of the lesser poems in the pamphlet for its necessary flatness and slightness, and yet still it invites, resonates, impresses, and connects wholly disparate things in a memorable way. So too with “Peaches”, a fruity little sonnet dripping with luscious vowel sounds, that somehow manages to survive the fecund ambiguity of its extended metaphor to leave us in a brief existential conundrum, borne solely of tinned fruit.

In short, Shiver is a pamphlet to savour. You might not quite shudder while reading it, but if it doesn’t jolt you or stop you in your tracks at least a few times, I’d probably check for a pulse. For here is a restless intelligence, alloyed to a keen eye and a precise yet capacious style that can’t help but take the everyday and find in it the unfamiliar and extraordinary. Real poetry, basically. Don’t expect to wait long for this poet to be snapped up by a major publisher, for what promises to be a very impressive debut collection.

(ix) 02:50: Newtyle

Remember that poem right at the end of Don Paterson’s God’s Gift to Women (1997)? The last in the book’s muddled sequence of poems that take their titles from the defunct Dundee-Newtyle railway line, it comes a handful of blank pages – actual blank pages, just to be clear, not the blank-page poems Paterson has a proclivity for – after the notes, isn’t listed in the contents, and got up the noses of a fair few critics with its mid-parentheses, mid-sentence, ostentatious ending. Really, though, nothing can disguise its intrinsic revelatory weight and significance, how ever much the poet seems at pains to undermine any naïve, earnest hunt for intellectual or spiritual meaning: the white page of its printing likened to snow, which in turn becomes a deity’s “shredded evidence”, falling from the skies.

Well, for those who haven’t spotted this already, you might want to check the copyright page of Landing Light (2003), Paterson’s equally acclaimed follow-up volume (if one discounts the magnificent “spiritual portrait” of his Machado versions, The Eyes (1999).) Here, for those who, as “A Talking Book” puts it, “drag each sentence through their fine-toothed combs, / all set to prove the Great Beast lies at slumber / in the ISBN or the barcode number”, is the follow-up quatrain, just below that italicised bit about not lending, selling, copying, rebinding, or reading choice pages out to random passers-by like a grade-A nutter.

I’m not quite sure what I make of it, but despite its apparent sincerity and lyrical solemnity, it seems like Paterson is joshing here, specifically with the kind of person who he half-expects would a) notice this kind of thing in the first place & b) bother to link the two quatrains up and pore over ’em for a while (i.e. me), and what he/she might make of it all. I get the feeling that a part of Paterson reckons – and maybe on the whole, he’s not totally wide of the mark – that many a literary scholar lacks the requisite sense of humour when it comes to scrutinising poems to understand his point here, which is that, essentially, if you look hard enough into anything, you can in turn, if you like, see pretty much anything you want reflected back – maybe, say, your own straight-laced critical brilliance if you’re so inclined. But make no mistake, the poem suggests, you’re wasting your time, since such an approach does great poetry no service whatsoever. You might just as well apply your dazzling exegesis to the dullest of shopping lists and look forward to much the same result.

So the poem’s a bit of a joke, perhaps, but a joke that makes a serious point. Whether the forgivably naïve gusto and application of the serious undergrad, or the wasteful idiocy of brilliant minds who really should know better, looking for meaning as something already resident within any text, the poem suggests, is just plain wrong. The journey, the road, the natural process of reading for what the text might meaningfully generate, is where the interesting stuff happens; not at the oasis, a mirage of intrinsic transcendental meaning, where the tortuous, minutely scrutinised road meets its imaginary end.

This is, then, a defence of poetry as something which means – in that reified and wholly false sense – nothing at all, yet at the same time, far from meaning whatever you want it to mean, is charged with huge transformative power and an unrivalled sense of possibility. Though if you feel like asking why Paterson didn't just damn well say that, you might not be getting this.

Review: Siân Hughes's The Missing

Siân Hughes’s The Missing is a short collection of, typically, short poems; a fact that belies this debut’s exactitude, hard-won emotional truths, and long road to completion. It is some thirteen years since Hughes’s vignette “Secret Lives”, appearing here in book form for the first time, first graced London’s tube trains as part of the Poems on the Underground project (and winner of a TLS competition), depicting a familiar suburban world of complex relationships with magical panache; where dressing gowns meet in the middle of the night to “head for a club they know / where the dress code is relaxed midweek, / and the music is strictly soul.” As much of The Missing demonstrates, Hughes has a real talent for capturing such fleeting, subtly significant incidents: a blend of delicate suggestion, invention and colourful wit characterizes her best poems, expressed in unobtrusive, idiomatic language. “The Girl Upstairs”, for example, treads the line between personal happiness and polite society’s expectations with conversational ease. Elsewhere, “The Stairs” provides a familiar snapshot of the difficulties of modern, often fragmented, young families, describing a party “where the children have taken the seats / in the living room”, and “no one consoles / the woman in a low-cut dress sitting outside the bathroom.”

Around midway through, however, the overall tone of the book changes: a shift from the playful, albeit tense feel of these earlier poems, to the brave and compelling pieces of the latter half. The focus here is parenting, particularly its many unforeseeable difficulties, with a number of poems addressing time spent in and out of hospital. These are as affecting and effective for their evocative, yet rarely merely decorative, description (“Fireworks on Ward 4C”), as for their arresting and deft use of speech patterns (in “Mengy Babies”, a distressed mother is found crying: “‘I kept phoning and telling them, something’s gone wrong.’”). But it is in a provocative elegy, “The Send-Off”, that Hughes’s writing seems most urgently committed. A haunting, touching address to the poet’s lost child, diagnosed with Down’s Syndrome before birth, it is difficult to examine the poem in typical critical terms: honest, and devoid of any agenda as it is. Along with many of the poems in The Missing, it memorably reveals the work of a writer capable of addressing emotionally difficult subjects with exceptional clarity and feeling.


first published in the Times Literary Supplement

Difficulty, Academia, and the Young

V: I’ve been quite disappointed recently at how polarized the poetry world can be. When I’m in London speaking to young poets and people there, they like a range of poets — then I get back to Oxford, and talking to graduate students it can seem sometimes like the only poets taken seriously are Hill, Muldoon, Prynne — these are the serious poets.

CR: You can see why. There is a great difference between those poets, but they all have something in common — difficulty. If you’re a graduate student — this is professionalization again — you want to admire something that other people can’t read, where there is work for you. Those three poets represent an employment opportunity. They wouldn’t like Elizabeth Bishop because she is, relatively speaking, quite easy, although she isn’t really that easy — as you know. But there are so many local pleasures, and you persist. ‘Filling Station’ — how can anyone resist it? Well these people can. Because it’s witty, it’s lovely, and they understand it. It appears to offer them no opportunity … what critics want is a pommel horse they can pirouette around, which will continue to support them while they’re being brilliant themselves. Elizabeth Bishop — well, there’s no place for your brilliance, because the thing itself is brilliant. It’s made out of glass. It’s a piece of sculpture. Young people always like difficulty. You want to be outdistancing people. When I started doing a doctorate, it was on Coleridge’s philosophy — and the reason I did it was because I wanted to be able to say to people at a dinner party, ‘I think if you’d read Kant’s Critique der Reinen Vernunft, you’d know that … ’ I wanted to be able to silence people. It’s a terrible impulse. But of course in the end I couldn’t get through Kant, it was unintelligible. But that’s what I wanted to do — so I recognise this impulse in all these graduate students. I suffered through it myself once...

excerpt from Hard Raine: an interview
with Craig Raine by Vidyan Ravinthiran,
Horizon Review, September 2009