Broken Glossa by Stephen Bett (Chax Press)

Posted on November 12, 2023 by tearsinthefence
Broken Glossa by Stephen Bett (Chax Press)

I’ve taken some time to get a handle on this new ‘alphabet book of post-avant glosa’ from Canadian poet Stephen Bett. Is the title a pun on ‘broken glass’ or is ‘broken’ to do with postmodern poetics and Betts’ deconstruction or re-invention of the glosa, which the blurb glosses [sic] as ‘a Renaissance Spanish Court form’? Both, and much else I suspect.

Bett’s version of the glosa is a kind of summary, critical reading of, biographical note and dialogue with, indeed a gloss on, the poets he has chosen to engage with. Each poem has a poet’s name followed by a colon and a phrase as a title, each includes quotations or adapted quotations from the poem, a response, and sections picking up on details (friends, attitudes, actions, diction, etc.) from the poets’ own work, as well as Betts’ own writing. They are at times funny, disrespectful, worshipful, undermining, critical or a kind of pastiche; sometimes all of these at once. Footnotes help explain or locate some of the references, and in one poem – about John Wieners – allegedly contains the poem (it doesn’t).

The book is a bit like being taken by Betts to a party. It’s good to see some mutual friends and acquaintances but difficult to get to know the strangers there, despite the introductions. On one level these poems seem insular, a kind of in-joke for those in the know. So, I mostly enjoyed the poems about, from or referencing Rae Armantrout, Charles Bernstein, Ted Berrigan, Paul Blackburn, Clark Coolidge, Robert Creeley, William Everson, Jackson Mac Low, Frank O’Hara, Charles Olson, Tom Pickard, Jeremy Prynne, Tom Raworth, Gary Snyder, Jonathan Williams, Derek Beaulieu and Guy Birchard, whose work I am familiar with; and had enough to get by on with Tom Clark, Ed Dorn, Hank Lazer, Ron Padgett, Peter Schjeldahl (whom I mostly know as an art critic), Jack Spicer, Lewis Walsh, Paul Violi, Philip Whalen and Jennifer Bartlett.

Why am I writing a list? Well, in a way this is a book that places Bett within a list or network of reading, fellow poets, influences and friends, and I want to do the same. It’s also to point out (although I am not going to list them) how many other poets here I know absolutely nothing about, and how few women there are here. I don’t want to get PC or self-righteous, but this is a book dominated by males: out of 67 poets here only six are women, which isn’t really on in 2023. At least make an effort Mr. Betts!

The poems themselves are convoluted, associative and tangential, often jocular, sometimes knowing and familiar. What, for instance should a reader make of ‘incidentally Pip, you never unzipped my appendicized letter’ in the Philip Lamantia poem which is mostly an exercise in surrealist and alchemical references. I’m assuming there is a sexual pun here, because elsewhere in the poem we are told that ‘psychic automatism lifts up its skirt’ and about ‘randy laddies’ with ‘cum stains on teeth’. However, I’m unsure is Betts is flirting, feeling rejected or just teasing?

To return to my party metaphor, I don’t mind being a wallflower and drinking quietly by myself, or hiding in the kitchen for a deep conversation with someone else who doesn’t know many others, but when everyone seems to be speaking a different language and playing non-party music, it’s weird. My ultimate take, however, is that it’s Betts talking strangely, not the poets who are his subjects; I don’t recognise his version of Tom Raworth, Robert Creeley, Tom Pickard et al, or their writing. The numerous footnotes suggest that the author knows he needs to explain what he has written, although sometimes they do the opposite and present yet another layer of elliptical allusion, whilst others seem like a namedrop or chance to include himself in the text. 

I so wanted to like this book, because there are so many important poets (canonically and personally) included, and also because I have enjoyed Bett’s other books, but I confess I don’t. Michael Rothenberg, on the back cover, mentions ‘lament, exultation, beat improvisation, pop incantation, mantric visitation’, and Orchid Tierney claims the work is not ‘just poems but dialogues, chants, and jokes with the poets on whom they riff.’ This may be true, or may be Betts’ intention, but ultimately Jeffrey Cyphers Wright is closer to summarising when he points out that Betts ‘riffs from an insider’s perspective’. Since I am not a member of the Beats or New York School, let alone a ‘Zen Cowboy’, I am somewhat lost in what Rothenberg calls’ the continuous song of the cosmic and eternal muse, reborn in Broken Glosa.’

Rupert Loydell 12th November 2023

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Neptune’s Projects by Rishi Dastidar (Nine Arches Press)

Posted on November 2, 2023 by tearsinthefence
Neptune’s Projects by Rishi Dastidar (Nine Arches Press)

I should have listened to George, who told me – after my rant about how wonderful Rishi Dastidar’s previous books Saffron Jack and Ticker Tape were – that I would tire of them pretty quickly, just as he had. Needless to say, I ignored him, and have returned to those two titles, but (and it’s a big but) this new book is mostly unsubtle, preachy and simply trying too hard.

I am no climate change denier and I am all for a bit of punning and topical discussion in poetry, but I really don’t need smartarse reinventions of mythology where Neptune is at a loss what to do with the human race who are destroying the planet. And if I see the word ‘anthropocene’ again I am going to scream.

What is a reader to do with the banalities of poems like this, reproduced here in its entirety?

     The waves speak happinness

     be the sea lion of your life |         | applaud your delight at being

This is worthy of Rupi Kaur herself! (And I haven’t even mentioned the misspelling of happiness.)

Elsewhere, there are kelpies, mermaids, seasalter cocktails, shipwreck champagne and wave after wave after wave of heavy-handed poems with a message. Unfortunately it’s a message that most of us have already heard and one that those who haven’t won’t come across because they don’t buy or read small press poetry books, or indeed any poetry book.

Dastidar knows this though. The book’s epigraph, from a song by the band Wilco reads ‘But I know you’re not listening / Oh I know you’re not listening’. The whole exercise seems one of authorial masochism (saddo masochism?), driven by content and an urge to persuade and explain rather than any sense of poetry or language. May I suggest that poetry is rarely the best place for protest, and that those concerned about human extinction (the Earth will be just fine without us) might take direct action rather than write poetry?

There is one section of Neptune’s Projects that shows some of the author’s previous flair for writing witty and topical poetry, which is a sequence entitled ‘Pretanic’. Here, Poldar turns his attention to the state of Britain, its politicians and the effect Brexit has had on us. ‘Tight Little Island’ discusses how we have ‘shipwreck[ed] our ambition’, whilst the brief three-line poem ‘Impossible Nation’ informs us that

     The one thing they fail
     to teach you at Eton is:
     don’t play with matches.

which made me laugh out loud, as did the next poem’s closing lines, which informs us that ‘You can’t be / weaned off glory, you know.’ (‘Imperial cosmic sickness’) The standout poem in the sequence is ‘The Brexit Book of the Dead’ which lashes out at everything it can: nostalgia, pride, sovereignty, war and ‘the imperial lorry /park formerly known as Kent’. 

This satire works for me, as it scoops up The Dambusters, the ‘History distortion field’ attached to Britain’s past, ‘Empire 2.0’, and ‘The Overblown Age’ that sees ‘the fifth horseman slowly flatten[ing] his horse into a burger for a delivery.’ What to do when the apocalypse comes? Not write well-meant poetry, obviously. Dastidar’s provocative suggestion, his seemingly bored shrug, is another brief satirical poem:

     Eating popcorn at the apocalypse

     Well, the cinemas are closed,
     so what else are we to do?

George was – damn it – partially right, but I hope Dastidar will take time to give himself distance from whatever his next book’s subject is and stay away from unsubtle polemic. When he is having fun with language, and takes potshots at everyone and everything, he is much more likely to hit his target, and the poetry is more innovative and readable. Rishi, don’t be a sea lion, be a poet, a wordsmith; help me prove George wrong.

Rupert Loydell 2nd November 2023

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Selected Early Poems by Chris Torrance edited by Ian Brinton (Shearsman Books)

Posted on October 31, 2023 by tearsinthefence
Selected Early Poems by Chris Torrance edited by Ian Brinton (Shearsman Books)

The British Poetry Revival is a complex, not easily-defined thing; an ever-expanding umbrella term, it now seems to include not only the UK equivalent of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, intent on political and linguistic deconstruction and experiment, but also a bunch of pseudo-romantic lyricists, tapping into occult and earth mystery obsessions on the back of the Beats and hippies; and everything inbetween. New centres of activity and lines of influence constantly emerge, are made visible or invented: London, Cambridge, Brighton, Essex University, Newcastle, Oxford, Hebden Bridge, Liverpool and Cardiff are linked by poetic ley lines which cut through arts centres, bookshops, pubs and anywhere with a photocopier or duplicator. Especially pubs.

Chris Torrance can be linked to a number of places and people. Based in Carshalton, Surrey, Torrance became friends with Lee Harwood, one of the more lyrical poets attached to linguistically innovative poetry, and had books published by Iain Sinclair’s Albion Village Press, providing a context for earth magic, conspiracy and mystery. After moving to South Wales via Bristol, Torrance was part of Cabaret 246 which orbited Peter Finch’s Oriel shop in Cardiff and involved the likes of (Chris)Topher Mills and Ifor Thomas. Cabaret 246 – via Finch’s sound poetry interests and antics – performed at the London Musician’s Collective and had links to Bob Cobbing et al. Allen Fisher seems to have known him (he wrote an elegy and some drawings i.m.), which provides links to Fluxus in Britain (Fluxshoe) and more science-based experimental writing; Andrew Crozier published him, providing a Cambridge connection.

Of course, most poets have this kind of web of associations, contacts, friendships and influences. Andrew Duncan is especially good at teasing some of them out in his critical books, whilst Ian Brinton explores some of them in his introduction to this newly published selection of Torrance’s early work. Brinton also offers some more influential and perhaps surprising links: Prynne ‘alert[ing] readers to the connection between Hölderlin and Torrance’, a review essay by John Freeman, and Torrance’s love of Charles Olson. So far so good.

Phil Maillard’s ‘Preface’ however, takes a different tack, noting Torrance’s exciting encounters with ‘a volatile Mob of nascent artists, writers and musicians’ and reporting ‘validation’ of being a writer by ‘The Carshalton Steam Laundry Vision’, when ‘his vocation was revealed to him’: ‘”I’m going to be a poet.” It wasn’t a “vision”; it was a powerful voice that had to be obeyed (“I accepted it completely”).’ Maillard goes on to write, apparently with a straight face, that ‘Torrance, though serious minded and precise on one level, had magical feelings about his own life’ and notes a later ‘tendency towards psychedelia and a broader spirituality becoming more evident.’ 

Ignoring the later sprawling multi-book project of The Magic Door, Selected Early Poems shows a documentary approach to the confessional, poems mostly consisting of straightforward arrangements of events and emotional responses, interspersed with observations such as:

     cars whoosh by in the street
     outside                      the wind
               blows again                a clock
               strikes                          a candle burns   (‘Poem Marked by an Exegesis’)

or banal haiku:

     Two old beggars sit
               with their pipes by a warm fire
     cracking their toes                                 (‘Winter Haiku’)

Am I missing the symbolism or importance of such events? And what am I to do with the whining and generalisations of ‘I Am So Lonely’?

     I am so lonely
     no-one is with me
     no-one is with me

     I can eat, then
     sleep the tired night through
     and resume my work in the morning

     but now I am so lonely, I am so
     lonely, I am so lonely

whose narrator eventually finds solace in the mosquitoes, who

                          sing, lonely, lonely, lonely

     join in the sexual dance, join in the swarm
     around the tall chimney in autumn twilight
     & the love will be found in the swarm even
     the love will be found in the swarm

There is little evidence of Olson’s depth and inventiveness here, little open form or use of the page as a compositional field, no intensity akin to Maximus. Torrance’s poems here are as mundane as the likes of a hundred other forgotten poets, full of forced epiphanies squeezed from the everyday around the author, full of emotional angst, ‘opaque mood[s]’ and ‘the dark hail of self’. Unfortunately for the reader, visions, connections, conviction and self-assurance are no guarantee of good or interesting poetry, and this attempt to shoehorn Torrance into some kind of alternative canon is undeserved.

Rupert Loydell 31st October 2023



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Noah by Penelope Shuttle (Broken Sleep Books)

Posted on October 26, 2023 by tearsinthefence
Noah by Penelope Shuttle (Broken Sleep Books)

Noah is a fascinating slim collection of poems birthed out of Old English dictionaries that belonged to Penelope Shuttle’s husband Peter Redgrove and a medieval mystery play about Noah’s Ark. The poems describe ‘Captain Noah’s’ engagement with the animals he rescues from the deluge God sends, and which he packs into a wooden ark, although there are occasional sideways visits to Cornwall, archaeology and mythological creatures such as the phoenix.

The sequence starts in a fairly traditional manner, retelling the story as Noah collects the beasts, makes speeches and directs things, but by the end of the second poem, ‘Lady Eve’, there is temporal disruption as Shuttle notes ‘the Ark wasn’t always a toy’ and then compares the boat to the USS Gerald Ford, the largest aircraft carrier in the world. The same kind of slippage occurs in the next poem, ‘deluge’ where the loaded ark goes ‘sailing past all dangers’, which turn out to be historical, yet post-Biblical times, in nature.

Elsewhere, animals are the narrators of poems, whilst others describe and report what the animals are thinking and doing, or re-present ‘Noah’s notes’. Meanwhile, in ‘firebird’ the phoenix swaggers up the gangplank after a dialogue with Noah that makes me think of Pete & Dud, as does ‘Noah and God: a conversation’ a few pages later. Elsewhere the authenticity of the story is undercut as Shuttle notes that 

     the pseudo-archaeologists have been searching

     for the Ark since 339 C.E.

     even though there’s no sign of a flood

     in the geological record (‘Archa Noah’)

and as ‘Noah Theatre’ comes to an end, after the narrative is explained at length, when Shuttle tells us that Noah takes his wife 

                          away on a mere promise from god

     who has never spoken a word to her,

     taken into exile because of a stupid hunch her old man had about the weather.

Other poems re-interpret the story in light of both contemporaneous and later stories, nothing that ‘Noah’s Wyf’ is not named in the traditional Scriptures but is in an excluded text, where she is Emzara. There are also poems about animals no longer known to us, poems that make use of other texts, including some in Old English, and poems written aslant to the story, my favourite being ‘although the text of the play is lost’, which is assembled from records of payment in Hull for ‘acting and equipment’.

In the final poem, ‘exodus’, all the animals exit from the ark ‘in a noisy joyous rout, failing to thank Noah for saving their lives, more intent on ‘claim[ing] what is theirs’, which is ‘our earth / the queen of planets’. Shuttle suggests however, that in this day and age our world may now be ‘ a charred warning’ to any aliens ‘nudging through our galaxy’.

The book ends with some brief footnotes about source material, and also a fascinating short text, ‘Behind the Poem’, previously written for the Poetry Society, where Shuttle talks about ‘reading various poems translated from the Anglo-Saxon, and pootling about through some Old English poems and tracts’, in addition to explaining her writing and drafting process. I like the osmosis that has allowed different vocabularies and ideas into these poems, just as I agree with her assessment of bible stories being magic and rich, ‘mystical, not theology.’ 

This is a delightful, original and playful reversioning, one where Emzara ‘want[s] another ark’

     with a drawing room

     and a fernery

     no smelly animals

     and the complete absence of Noah (‘That she hadde a shipe hirself allone’)

and Noah, ‘on his five-hundredth birthday’, prays to the doubting animals:

     pray for me Lord Lion

     pray for us Holy Ghost Koala

Amen to that.

Rupert Loydell 26th October 2023

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And And And by Cole Swensen (Shearsman Books)

Posted on October 24, 2023 by tearsinthefence
And And And by Cole Swensen (Shearsman Books)

Cole Swensen’s marvellous books have always been distinctive, each exploring a theme or concept, each adopting a form (or number of forms) best suited to their subjects, which have included art, hands, parks, garden design, views from a train, death, absence, memory and time. This new book is about poetry, about how language wanders, evokes, digresses and slips from both author’s and reader’s grasp; how language informs, perhaps rules and creates, our lives.

And And And mostly consists of prose poems, short lyrical texts at the top of each page, sometimes in brief sequences, sometimes circling back to earlier poems and ideas. The poems are inquisitive, exploratory, witty and impetuous, darting at language and words from all angles, never settling in one place, shifting and changing like the murmuration Swensen uses in ‘Language in Motion’ where she is thinking ‘of written language as a wave of migrating elements, swarming in different combinations through books, poems, newspapers, telegrams, etc.’, an idea she returns to a few pages later:

     Thinking of how alliteration and other consonant-based
     sound relationships stretch a text outward, ushering readers
     onward, through the poem and beyond, while vowel-based
     relationships, all forms of rhyme, off-rhyme, slant-rhyme
     assonance, etc. pull the text back in on itself, thus pulling
     readers back into the poem, sending them ricocheting around
     within it […]
               (from ‘Murmuration Again’ [force justified in original])

Swensen is well aware that nothing is fixed or final, that everything needs redefining. In her poem of the same name she asks ‘Can it be said that all definitions need constant adaptation, extension and reconsideration?’ I suspect so. In fact the whole book starts with the idea of ‘nuance’, likening it to a ship ‘slipping out of fog, and oddly more visible than a vessel less veiled.’ (‘The Ship’) She observes that for the watcher, the ship is ‘the shape of memory itself’, appears to remember itself, yet even as it becomes self-aware, the thought is deflected and the ship keeps coming towards us.

Fascinated by how language works, Swensen scratches away at the linguistic itches she finds, informed by her own reading, writing and creative practice, at one point revealing where she found her book’s title: in ‘And’ she is ‘Thinking about Deleuze & Guattari’s writings on and as a non-subordinating conjunction, allowing elements to be connected while also retaining complete relational equity and autonomy.’

This isn’t a book of academic philosophical linguistic discourse though; mostly it is rooted in the everyday. Yes, there are abstract questions, but they are linked to how we, or writers, use language, how we make or might make poems and texts, but other poems are rooted in the body and the world around us. ‘Thumb’ is about the physical odd finger, the animal-ness of the digit; ‘Clouds’ and ‘Wind’ discuss response, transience and the possibilities of form; ‘Shadows’ prompts discussion of translation and how writing may be ‘the shadow of that which cannot be said’.

My favourite poem in the book is ‘Connote’, which proposes an idea then explores it:

     I wonder if you can use words in such a way that only their
     connotations, and not their detonations, get activated. To
     connotate as one might cogitate or contemplate—a state
     chosen for its particular relation to thought—so that it’s not
     the definition (always restrictive) of the word that comes into
     play, but its fields of association, its overtones and undertones,
     those always expansive, radiating zones of suggestion and
     implication. […]
          (force justified in original)

In the second section of the poem, Swensen argues against herself, noting that adopting her proposed idea ‘might lead to a greatly restricted vocabulary’. This is a tactic several poems adopt, for instance noting that when we adopt the idea of fragmentation in poems, that still implies it is a fragment of something whole. This is slippery, open-ended discussion, although there are occasional declamations. I am especially keen on the notion that ‘There’s something about poetry that is always and necessarily anonymous, the one mode in which the stroke of the I serves only to sever’, although that may be a response to my students’ current assertions that poetry is about self-expression and emotion.

I could write more. Each time I dip into this book there is something new and thought-provoking, sometimes revelatory, other times quiet reflection: on why watching rain is soothing, about attention, landscape, wind, detective novels, ‘The privatization of memory’. It is a book of poetry and of poetics, a book of questions, possible answers, reflections and language, a way – as it says in ‘Winds’ – of ‘keeping every other possible option always in mind.’ It is challenging, informative and quietly provocative. And lots of other things too.

Rupert Loydell 24th October 2023

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The Tall Golden Minute by Linda Saunders (Tremaen Press)

Posted on October 23, 2023 by tearsinthefence
The Tall Golden Minute by Linda Saunders (Tremaen Press)

The Tall Golden Minute by Linda Saunders’ is an enchanting collection – a pleasure to hold and to read.

Throughout, there is a sense of the in-between and the underlying. ‘His Distance’ is an example of this as the narrator, observing a man asleep on a train, is aware of ‘another rhythm’ beneath the train’s ‘rumble and sway’, an encompassing rhythm that is like ‘summer migrant’ birds or the wind ‘breathing softly’ in the trees. ‘Spirit Guide’ is set in the subtle passage of time ‘Between twilight and dusk’ while ‘The Skeleton Houses’ focuses on traces left from the past and traces left for the future. All things seem to be trembling ‘in the moment’s balance/on an edge, / the between of summer and winter.’ (‘Almost’).

There are many encounters in The Tall Golden Minute, either face to face between people or between an observer and the observed. The passenger on the train in the first poem is ‘both grand and vulnerable’ as he takes the reserved seat for himself, opens his laptop, plugs in his phone and then proceeds to fall asleep for the whole journey, possibly ‘all the way to the terminus, and beyond.’ Keith the joiner, in ‘Handyman’ has a ‘new-moon-on-its-back’ grin as he mends the door and ‘zippers the wind’. My favourite of the encounters occurs in ‘The Everlasting Flower’ where the narrator writes with affection about a couple on the bus, a young man with a blue rose tattoo on the back of his hand and his girl who is ‘as composed/as a field of ripe grain on a still day.’ The final lines of the poem are tender and poignant:

Before they’re lost to my sight, a wind

lifts her hair in farewell. I imagine

how long the rose will last; how it may

float like a dream still over the mottles

and corded veins of an old man’s hand.

Nature, in all its rich intricacies, is wonderfully described in the collection. Linda Saunders has the gift of perception for ‘the dance of seeds and birds’. (‘Now in the Dale’). Like the artist depicted in ‘Ancient Spring’, an outline is enough to reveal ‘a bird/perched on a high twig or in flight/through space’ while a few marks with a pencil create ‘a spatter of small leaves’. Rain falling on the birch tree after a month of drought is a blessing that, to the poet’s ear, creates a note on each leaf. ‘If only I could transcribe such music’, she says. (‘Bliss’).

Several of the loveliest and most fascinating poems in The Tall Golden Minute muse upon time as a ‘thought search’ and a ‘kind of listening’. The title poem introduces the theme quite early on with a description of the church clock which, ‘for all time’, has its hands set ‘at midnight or noon’ while the Roman numerals around the face are painted ‘bright gold’. In ‘Swale Time’ the narrator has mislaid her watch, somewhere, somehow, it ‘just slipped/into mystery, hidden in spacetime,/insouciant.’ Now time-free she can lose herself in the blue of speedwell, the sandpipers probing between stones ‘for insect morsels’, a black rabbit on the path. A ‘keyhole of darkness’ perhaps, but memory is at the heart of this poetry, it ‘shimmers the happenstance of event/and feeling, like the shift of light through water.’ There is ‘always something’, says the narrator of ‘Astonishing’, something ‘about the light.’

There is a word that recurs in the poems – more than just a word, a constant and underlying theme – and that is ‘gift’. All manner of things are given – the barn owl’s wings, the swiftness of feet and freedom from lockdown for someone who has ‘not touched/anybody for six weeks’, the butterfly that flickers ‘dark/light dark/light flash-fast here-and-there/ low over grass, leafage, rock roses’. 

The Tall Golden Minute is a gift of poetry. Linda Saunders gives the gift of her words to the reader, listener, bystander. ‘Everything attends’, she says, – sultry air, the tree/spellbound – to this one quickness.’ (‘Gift’).

Mandy Pannett 23rd October 2023

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a painter and a poet conversations in colour by Alice Mumford and Sue Leigh (Sansom & Co.)

Posted on October 12, 2023 by tearsinthefence
a painter and a poet conversations in colour by Alice Mumford and Sue Leigh (Sansom & Co.)

Alice Mumford’s paintings, mostly still lives, but often with windows or open doors leading out to the landscape, are exquisite, glowing exercises in form, colour and perception. The obvious comparison for me is Bonnard, with some underpinning from Cezanne and Matisse. This is meant as high praise by the way, not as an implication of copying or pastiche; Mumford has her own way of subtly delineating the forms of table and chairs, jugs, flowers, bowls and fruit, and of making colour sing. The air around her subjects is saturated in colour, heavy and hazy with the effects of light, distinct from the patterns of tablecloths, shadows and wallpaper.

Sue Leigh is a new poet to me. Here, she mentions how she came across Mumford’s work and requested permission to use a painting for a book cover, and how later on they met and became friends. This book is the result of a decision to formalise and make public some of the discussions they have had around writing and painting, similarities and difference, process and context. Quite rightly, Leigh points out in her ‘introduction’ that ‘[c]ollaboration does not seem quite the right word, noting that they ‘would be working alongside each other rather than with each other.’ The interaction, responses to each other’s work, continued after the specific period at Mumford’s house in Cornwall, and became this book, which is also a catalogue accompanying an exhibition in a St Ives gallery.

The specific pages of ‘conversations’ starts by discussing how poems and pictures begin. I like the fact that neither poet nor artist mention inspiration, instead they talk in terms of preparation and rituals, thinking and organising and then a constant editing of both paint and language. Although Leigh talks about ‘paying attention’ and ‘intense listening’, she unfortunately still mystifies the process, declaring that she ‘cannot say where poems come from’, which to me is a denial of both authorial responsibility and of language: poems (on the page) are quite clearly constructed with words, just as paintings are made with paint.

Mumford picks up on Leigh’s mention of ‘the physical experience of writing’ which is interesting, the fact that (in Mumford’s words) ‘[w]e hold so many things in our body’. She talks of physically limbering up and getting ‘the body to remember’, but also of painting being a ‘conversation – with myself, with my mother, a close confidante, the past, dead artists’. This, it seems, is at odds with Leigh who states she doesn’t think she ‘is aware of anyone else when I write’, a feeling I can certainly empathise with. 

Even better for my understanding of creativity is Mumford’s declaration that:

     [w]e need to allow the chaos, not to overwork or attempt to pin things down. There 
     should be imaginative space for the viewer. So the viewer becomes a participant. 
     […] I think that things that are just out of reach are more comprehensible.’ 

For me, this describes writing as much as painting; this is how poetry works, by metaphor, allusion, hint and spaces for ideas and the unspoken. Also, Leigh’s comments further on, that so much shaping of a poetry collection is ‘intuitive as you work and it is only later that you see the connections.’ That is the author becomes reader and intepreter as they start to understand what they have made.

Honesty compels me to say that most of the poetry in this collection adds little to the reproductions of the paintings. All too often, they try and make specific what is left open in the images, or the reductive banality of ‘jasmine and blue haiku’:

     white petals fallen
     on a blue cloth have made
     a paisley pattern

which anyone who has paid attention to the painting has already seen. And whilst I do like straightforward language, I also expect new ways of describing things: surely Bonnard deserves more than ‘lemony-yellow’?

Criticisms aside this is an interesting collaborative project and publication. The actual documented conversation between painter and poet is especially intriguing, and I’d like to see that developed more, and more in-depth discussion of ekphrasis, the visual elements of poems, texture; how poems move beyond narrative and description in the same way that Mumford’s wonderful paintings are so much more than just pictures of things.

Rupert Loydell 12th October 2023


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Nine by David Harsent (Guillemot Press)

Posted on October 10, 2023 by tearsinthefence
Nine by David Harsent (Guillemot Press)

There is a long history of incomplete texts in poetry. From the fragments of Sappho to Ken Smith’s Burned Books, via Tom Phillip’s A Humument and Antonin Artaud’s demented scribbles and spells, authors have created works with missing, deleted, amended or changed parts. Nine claims to be ‘a reconstruction of certain passages from a notebook found among the writer’s effects’, although we are never told who that writer is, only that ‘[s]ome pages had been damaged, removed, or scored out.’ It also notes that the gaps in the text are as per the original. 

I mostly know David Harsent’s work through a couple of his early books of poems, his sequence about Mr. Punch (which seems to be out of print) and his recent versions of Yannis Ritsos poems. This book feels very different: stream(s) of consciousness, sexual and religious undertones and witchery, along with several mentions of specific, named works of art. It is incantatory, dense but lyrical, allusionistic and at times obscure and full of signs, symbols and digressions.

The poem starts with the notebook’s narrator remembering ‘the riddle of how she came to me at the tideline’, her ‘sudden arrival’, but quickly moves to one of many sections about and mentions of ‘The Fool’, here a ‘riddler     jester’ cackling at ‘nine white gulls on a flawless sky’. Then there is a passage about a witch’s stone, worn smooth, followed by the first of many notes regarding damaged and missing pages, then a brief consideration – reported as spoken by the unnamed ‘her’ – regarding the ‘women at the foot of the cross’. 

The obsession with representations of women continues throughout this long work. The abstract consideration of

     – the female form     (a charcoal sketch)    is a pattern of
     flow      is rhythmic     (first from life later from memory)
     the way self shadows self               the way line develops
     harmonies    the way light returns shape to shape    (up

changes into specific memories and misrememberings before becoming an image ‘set behind glass’, which links to mentions of paintings by Klimt, Sickert featuring women, but also to visual memories of landscapes and the sea, Dürer’s Melancholia and Holbein’s Dead Christ (both titles’ lack of italicisation appears to have escaped the proofreader’s notice) and possibly Malevich’s minimalist black square painting. Literature is in the mix too: Kristeva and Dostoevsky are mentioned in one section.

Death is a character, The Fool is a constant, as is the questioning of the representation of women: sex object, fetishised other, witch, object of devotion and desire and the dangerously clichéd whore/goddess duality. Fragments of narrative appear and fade away, moments of anger, silence, dreams and love; expressions of loss and mourning; children’s voices and the sounds of nature. Although we are told ‘the story of herself is simply told’ it is not, not here anyway; it resists the suggestion that it ‘goes into hiding in plain view’. This is a story of fogs and mists, misunderstandings and slippages between worlds. Of inclinations, assumptions and suggestions; rituals and self-sacrifice, emotional unrest and ‘passion’s overload’; questions and few answers. It all, suggests the text, leads to ‘fire-in-flood     and carnage    cities falling’, a world where ‘every doorway gives onto a boneyard’. And the final line is even darker, shockingly so, but I will let you read that for yourself.

I did wonder if the whole book is inspired by art, but I don’t think so. Nine is a ‘magical’ number in mathematics, there were nine muses, cats have nine lives, and in Norse mythology the tree of Yggdrasil not only supported nine worlds, but Odin was also hung on it for nine days. There are nine hares – often associated with witches – drawn on the cover of this book and in one of the illustrations; and I’m sure there are more connections and suggestions. But poems don’t need decoding in this way, it is enough to be challenged and entertained, seduced by the language and made to think. 

Nine is another beautifully designed hardback book from Guillemot, although it’s a shame that the 8 pages of illustrations (visual suggestions of the found notebook) are clustered together and printed on different paper rather than spread out throughout the text. I also found the text’s justification strange, as a handwritten notebook would not work in this way; I’d rather have had a ragged right-hand edge of text. But these are minor quibbles, Harsent has produced a distinctive and otherworldly long poem that reads as not only out-of-time but also contemporary, rooted in a mythical pagan past.

Rupert Loydell 10th October 2023


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Men Who Repeat Themselves by Mark Russell (erbacce-press)

Posted on October 6, 2023 by tearsinthefence
Men Who Repeat Themselves by Mark Russell (erbacce-press)

The prose poem, they say, was invented in rebellion against the strictness and monoculture of the alexandrine. For some writers since, it’s become a way of avoiding the (perceived) vexations of all poetic lines: the ostentation, the page-strutting, the self-importance they exude from all that adjacent white space. But can the prose poem be too free? Should something restrain all those liberated sentences? Silliman tried using nothing but interrogatives; Peter Reading tried exact word-count; Jarnot keeps to the single full stop. Mark Russell’s innovative contribution is his template, which goes like this: ‘Men {rest of title}. About war, they say, there is nothing new to {phrase 1}. It is as common to {phrase 2}, as it is to {phrase 3}. It is the {phrase 4} and by equal turns, the {phrase 5} that may {phrase 6}. A man {phrase 7} may {phrase 8} or {phrase 9}. Two men {repeat phrase 7} may {phrase 10} or {phrase 11}.

For instance: 

            Men in Rome
            About war, they say, there is  nothing  new to
            defend.   It is as common  to respect  a  city’s
            capitulation, as it is to bomb the place to hell.
            It is the old jokes that never die, and by equal 
            turns  the  perennial  tyrannies  returning each
            spring,  that may fill an atheist  with a soul  in 
            which he doesn’t believe.   A man who shoots 
            a pregnant  woman  in the back  may have his 
            finger on the trigger,  or the camera.  Two men 
            who shoot  a pregnant woman in the back may 
            do it for the  glory of  the  fatherland,  or for a 
            line of coke and a fur coat. 

It’s not a story-template like, say, Queneau’s Exercises de Style and (unlike Mark Russell’s recent witty contributions to the magazine) these pieces aren’t narratives. This voice is expository, though it avoids being imperious since the first sentence attributes authority elsewhere (‘they say’), and the rest deploy alloisis and the potential subjunctive. Surprise and humour are created because the balanced propositions of classical rhetoric (‘as […] as’, ‘by equal turns’, ‘or’) with their poise and air of reasonableness get undercut by the actual content: 

                                                     It is the bacteria
            in  the  blankets,  and by equal  turns,  the 
            remedies  of the  local  healers,  that  may
            cause us to  wage  a pitiless   campaign of 
            abuse against the donut store management.

After all, if you’ve gone so far as to evade the pomposity of the poetic line, I guess you can’t just replace it with the bombast of the ‘straight’ declarative sentence. 

The danger with any template is that over 126 pages it could become repetitive (as the book’s title warns). And so the mesarchia here gets tweaked and shaken about, just like long-form metre does. The standout touch, though, is how those repeated words ‘men’ and ‘war’ at each poem’s beginning balance (or enhance) the playful tone with some thematic seriousness. Even as the subject-matter meshes out, the complicity of war and masculinity in all its forms remains the key thread –

                                                                Two
                 men  who  live in  a  caravan park 
                 may be collaborating on a manual 
                 deriding the 16th century retention
                 of  the  longbow,  or   legionnaires 
                 lying low for the winter. 

– while around it is wrapped a show-and-tell of the violent pressures, moral difficulties and sheer weirdnesses of modern male lives. The template activates the multifarious blokes with possibilities and alternatives, and the subject/tone stabilisers keep it all on the knife-edge between comedy and grimness. Whew. No wonder I read it so avidly. From the recognition that the book’s already received, I’m clearly not the only man (I mean, ‘person’) impressed at its originality and verve.

Guy Russell (no relation) 6th October 2023

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The Wind and the Rain by Anthony Wilson (Blue Diode Press)

Posted on September 23, 2023 by tearsinthefence
The Wind and the Rain by Anthony Wilson (Blue Diode Press)

This is a sustained and flowing group of lyrical poems, many elegies for the author’s mother, despair and upset leavened with occasional glimpses of humour, and consistent clarity of observation and expression. It is also a book flooded with images of rain, used for scene-setting, metaphor, simile and as a link between poems.

It is not, however, a wet book . I generally struggle with poems that offer confessional outpourings and focus on feelings, but Wilson keeps an emotional distance from himself, and indulges in some wonderfully smartarse self-deprecation. In fact the second poem does this and warns the uninterested reader away:

     Like the poet
     who asked me at a party

     if she should have heard of me
     if you need to know what these poems

     are about
     you aren’t really interested.               (‘To My Rain’)

whilst others, such as ‘To the Wife of a Famous Poet’,  offer a vitriolic response:

     When you accosted me
     at the conference

     and shouted my name
     (though I stood one pace from your mouth)

     into the air,
     declaring it a

     useless 
     name for a poet,

     what poisonous motivations
     thickened in your veins

Elsewhere there is both that outside looking at oneself and also a sense of bewilderment:

     During my creativity lecture
     in which not one soul

     had heard of Joni Mitchell
     it was raining         (‘With Hey, Ho, the Wind and the Rain’)

As a lecturer at a different university, this is a feeling I know all too well (in fact I once had a whole student group of lyric writers who hadn’t heard of Joni), but here of course the rain is not only physical but stands for grief. Life goes on but, but, but…  the rain, death and grief, are ever-present as the same four-part poem points out elsewhere (these are isolated excerpts; the dots are mine):

     When the rain came looking for me 
     I hid.

•

     The rain is keeping us prisoner.
     It takes even longer to die

•

     When I began writing
     about rain

     forty-seven poems ago
     I’d no idea

     it would take over
     my life.

The rain is ever present, seemingly even foreshadowing itself to ‘a lost child / wandering the zoo’ but also ‘a kind of memory / cleansing the roads’ (‘The Small Rain’). And just as water flows and evaporates away, absenting itself, death does the same to those we love, absence precipitating (rain again!) loss and grief: in an empty kitchen / we go on crying // because we go on / loving you.’ (‘Now and Not Yet’)

Elsewhere, there are often amusing, sometimes personal, anecdotes about the mother/son relationship, explorations of spiritual faith, doubt and the nature of prayer, and recollections and versions of events and conversations that happened despite and during the loss and grief: friends, relatives and the everyday crowding in on coming to terms with death. And here are those moments of humour I mentioned, even at the start of a serious poem like ‘Now and Not Yet’, already quoted above:

     We are in Tesco in Exeter
     waiting for a funeral.

     These dried pink and rubber things
     are scrambled eggs salmon and a bagel.

It is this clever use of the domestic and everyday, rooted in specifics, that makes Wilson’s ability to share what seems to be true stand out from the crowd of mawkish and self-obsessed books that also deal with grief. Under all the gentleness, Wilson is a survivor:

     It is still raining.
     I am still dancing.

     I am all
     memory.                   (‘With Hey, Ho, the Wind and the Rain’)

Even as these memories disturb and upset, even as he wonders about the possibility of an afterlife he is questioning and commenting:

     If there is one

     please God
     go easy on the rainbows. (‘It Raineth’)

Although Wilson suggests that ‘Either everything’s a poem / or nothing is’ and elsewhere that he is ‘tired of putting things into lines’ and ‘just wants to rest’, I am glad that he wrote this wonderful collection first. It is far, far more than things put in lines.

Rupert Loydell 23rd September 2023

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