Launching Simon Smith

The first of the 2014 Shearsman events at Swedenborg Hall in London included Simon Smith reading from his recently published collection 11781 W. Sunset Boulevard. This is a fast-moving world which ranges from L.A. to Dartford in Kent, from Paradise Cove to Gravesend. One of the epigraphs to the first section, the American poems in which Simon Smith goes in search of Paul Blackburn and the ‘pure products / of the dream factory’, simply gives us ‘A crazy little place called ‘Be There Now’’ and as one is zoomed across a continent this seems very apt. One of the things I liked about these poems was, however, that impression I got of the sense of ‘Now’ being placed within a context of both ‘Then’ and a future which can loom with ominous dislocation. The click and shift of sounds and humour are underwritten with an urgency which has moments of leisure to savour ‘the taste of almonds as Time drops below the sun’.

The second half of this collection is titled Gravesend and it takes us on the North Kent railway line from Charing Cross to Chatham and beyond…and beyond. In a world of captions and key-words which present themselves as a mirror of everyday narrowness Smith gives us ‘Deposits’:

Refrigeration and containment

Not that far to the jail at Sheppey

Nationalise the debt for helicopter money

No time to think—extruded plexi-glass,

Or a few details from my own personal experience

Is History in real time not sampled

The exchange of containers from ro-ros to lorries,

The male located in the female.

The reference here to acrylic glass is both precise and illuminating since laser cut panels have been used over the last ten years to redirect sunlight into a light pipe or tubular skylight in order to spread it into a room. In this sequence of poems details of personal human experience shed light upon the poet’s perception of History and, as if in memory of the time when he threw a large clock through the window of Barnwood House in order to do a runner from the lunatic asylum in Gloucester, the poet and composer Ivor Gurney now ‘plots his great escape from Dartford Asylum’.

On the back of this volume Jeremy Noel-Tod has written ‘All the digital landfill of one London poet’s life is here, not to mention a book-stopping tribute to Cy Twombly. Line by line, Smith is one of the most exciting poets writing in England: if it weren’t for the sweet Thames and the Little Chefs, he might pass for an American.’

Ian Brinton 22^nd January 2014