Category Archives: Books

Escritoire by Sheila E. Murphy (Lavender Ink), The Severity of the Perfect Circle by H.L. Hix (BlazeVox)

Posted on August 8, 2025 by tearsinthefence
Escritoire by Sheila E. Murphy (Lavender Ink), The Severity of the Perfect Circle by H.L. Hix (BlazeVox)

Sheila Murphy’s poetry always managed to surprise this reader, with its unusual musicality and associative language, it’s mix of seemingly distanced but also emotionally charged and possibly autobiographical or confessional content. Escritoire is no exception, although I detect a new playfulness and self-awareness at work.

The transfer of nouns to verbs is here – ‘I mood myself’ – and the sometimes disrupted syntax but there are simpler and more regular forms than in some of Murphy’s other publications. ‘Bloom’, for instance, is a reflection on knowing the names of flowers, of the narrator’s mother taking her to see hothouse flowers and of being bewitched by names; so much so that she ‘hear[s] the flower / more than see it’. The second half of the poem is a flowing, echoing list of plant names that induce a kind of calm acceptance: ‘I give in to what I hear.’

Elsewhere there is dialogue between moods: ‘I fret versus forget’; a grappling with unexplainable reasons for ‘The squall / The grappling / The merger’ which becomes a statement of survival technique:

     I would choose

     To resurrect

     Recoverable fragments

     From what is left

     And shall then thrive.      (‘Because Reasons’)

and momentary acceptance of the unexpected in poems such as ‘Stilton at the Hilton’, where a delayed flight facilitates time to relax and observe:

     Now’s our chance to accidentally

     split infinitives, split the groove

     with zilch to do but look out

     on the pavement lined with tattoos.

I love the fact it remains unsure if the tattoos are on humans or a metaphor for painted signs on the runway or sidewalk; or, of course, both.

Of course, there are poems about the light and desert in Arizona here, poems about love and loss, and about others who Murphy meets. In ‘Early Days’, the subject ‘youngs her way toward me / with an armload of new syllables and words / that I might grasp her meaning’, just as we at times must saturate ourselves in Murphy’s clever and engaging arrangements of words, grappling with ‘some abstract / and necessary effort / one of us must come to understand.’

At first glance, H.L. Hix’s poetry seems to operate with very different poetics. Hix always writes sequences of poetry and his work is underpinned by philosophy as much as creative writing.’ Loops’, the first of two sequences here, plays with defining and/or evidencing terms (such as ‘disappropriation’ and ‘necrognizance’) that are the author’s ‘own coinages’ whilst ‘Orbits’, the sequence that is the second half of The Severity of the Perfect Circle, is made up of texts that each respond ‘to a moment from an entry in Emily Apter and Barbara Cassin’s Dictionary of Untranslatables’.

If this seems abstract, distant and removed, it immediately becomes clear that this is not so. The opening poem, ‘acousticenity’ – which plays with the idea of ‘landscape as soundscape’ – presents a narrator obsessed by his neighbour’s trailer; whereas in ‘asent’ the narrator peers down from a dormer window, trying to see into ‘the house of [the] neighbor to the east, whose house is filled with newspapers.

Other invented terms are used to define obsessive and unusual behaviour, to facilitate poems full of ‘goat people’, ‘fences’, ‘postal carriers’, ‘dirt-blur’, porches, raccoons, and skunks. It is a charged and unsettling neighborhood that Hix – or Hix’s narrator – documents here.

‘Orbits’ consists of what it suggests, poems circling words that cannot be translated and therefore not defined. Although at times there are more abstract statements here, they are rooted by the persistent ‘I’ of the texts and the observations and engagement with the world surrounding these discourses of meaning:

     Every winter snow collects atop the line of mountains to the west. Every 
     afternoon clouds collect behind it.         (‘Anschaulichkeit’)

     I see this lamplit vase of flowers. I remember its sunlit sister.      (‘Gegenstand’)

Like all writers, Hix is grappling with language, meaning and communication, how ‘the implications of our phrases “make sense.”’ And committing to not silencing others. Ultimately, it seems, there is

     No way to understand others’ words except as my own, no way to 
     understand my own except by someone else’s.          (‘Istina’)

Here are two very different contemporary authors both of whose work is worth making our own.Rupert Loydell 8th August 2025

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Marginal Future by S.J. Litherland (Smokestack Books)

Posted on June 25, 2025 by tearsinthefence
Marginal Future by S.J. Litherland (Smokestack Books)

The subjects of S.J. Litherland’s new book are mainly her familiar ones: a Warwickshire childhood with a harsh father and memories of WW2, her adopted Durham (coal-mining elegies, local issues), other personally significant locations (especially her parents’ house in Mallorca), current affairs (Brexit and Covid here) and a poem ‘for Barry’ (MacSweeney). This 142-page chubster also makes plenty of room for paintings, gardening, her home and its surroundings, the weather, ageing and family. Less standardly, there are more of her distinctive poems about cricket and about her visits to the USSR. 

The variety of style, however, has a few surprises for Litherland-watchers. Lots of the pieces are in note-form, a mode which has carefully to balance that sense of the immediacy of the poet writing against fitfulness of rhythm and the risk of flatness. There’s a good bit of anthropomorphism and pathetic fallacy (‘a hard frost lays its cold lips/ to the bushes’; ‘the barge constrained by chains wanting to sail from/ moorings’). And a certain grandiosity, as in this about a football match:

            The performance waits to be opened like a book. Unlike a book
            it is not reliving the past. It flows with time. They are running
            in the invisible sea of time, choices weigh on their feet.
            Pressing on their heels the web of ghost moves:
            woven and unwoven, chosen and not chosen, […]

 It’s a grandiosity that can even get amplified towards mysticism:

            Through a locked door my children enter the past. […]
            When we trod the path in half light to the sunrise
            strewn on water, the sea knew we would one day enter
            the house of my mother and the coast would assent.

There’s a similar contrast between minor cliché (laughter bubbles, hearts race, ‘he lit up my life’, &c.) and sharp novelty of expression (‘rills of cold’, ‘calligraphic bat’). I did like ‘The dandelions have seized the lawn// with brazen lamps’ and ‘the long autumn/ in gold livery is losing threads’ which spark those gardening-and-weather topics that can be so difficult otherwise to make engrossing. At other times a fine line is drawn between paradox and confusion: ‘Illness is not a metaphor but a cloud at sea’ (where ‘a cloud at sea’ is being used here as a metaphor ‒ for illness) and in the same poem ‘words fall like grenades mining the future’ – grenades can apparently be used for mining, but it did jolt me at first. ‘We reap our harvest of CO2/ glued to our planet’ also conjured peculiar images. The poet says ‘I edit/ hand/ down/ the book unmarred by Errata’ [sic majuscula] but in a literal sense there are quite a few, especially diacritical ones: reguarded? ribbonned? prix fixé? a la mode? café litterateur? entente cordial? (Unless this last is a pun on the amount of drinking the British and Soviet poets are doing…).

If it comes down to personal preferences among all this variety, I was most gripped by the diaristic travel sequence about the Soviet Union, which switches back and forth between Summer 1987 and Winter 1991 and evidences the high prestige of poetry in Soviet society. Also by the poems of childhood, several hair-raising examples of which describe being repeatedly locked in the coal-shed ‘for her own good’. And the fine elegy for Max Levitas, Communist councillor and veteran of the Battle of Cable Street:

            He was part of that movement,
            that lifted itself, rearing like judgement.

Even if The Work of the Wind might perhaps always remain SJ Litherland’s best-known achievement, this collection does provide, for any new readers, a valuable introduction to her extensive interests and range. 

Guy Russell 25th June 2025

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The Autobiography of Death by Kim Hyesoon (And Other Stories)

Posted on June 23, 2025 by tearsinthefence
The Autobiography of Death by Kim Hyesoon (And Other Stories)

In this new book, one of a new poetry list from And Other Stories, Death gets to tell its side of the story, to narrate, and offer its opinion to those dead and stuck in a forty-nine day limbo before reincarnation occurs. This is a place of echoes and illusions, of desires, chaos and confusion, surprises, fear and learning.

There are, as our narrator points out and the dead come to realize, things the dead could have done to make both the life just ended and the next one better, for themselves and others, but ultimately there is also a statement about death’s omnipresence in humans:

     You are already born inside death.

            (‘Already DAY TWENTY EIGHT’)

and of despair and helplessness:

     Yourfatherinheaven.   Belovedbullshitfather.   Heasksforthechild.   Atnightthe

     snow    hiddendeepinheaven    fallsflakebyflakesecretly    like thewaymummy

     takesoffitsownbandages      we’reallnakechild      whenthe bandagescomeoff

     DoIpaint    the columnsofthehouseswiththechild’sblood?    Thehouseiscrying.

     Thehouseistrembling.    Yourfatherinheaven.    Belovedbullshitfather.    This

     child.  Thischild. (I write. I write like an abductor. This child this child.)

            (‘A Crow Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest DAY THIRTY EIGHT’)

When the bandages come off, be they spiritual, religious or emotional, we are all naked. Death knows this, yet is still moved by the upset, recognises in itself a sense of abduction, as they spirit the dead away.

Much of this sequence is elegaic and the whole ‘Autobiography’ was written in response to the children lost in the 2014 Sewol Ferry disaster. There is little consolation here, no afterlife or promises for the future. Grief and sorrow seem to remain for those in transition and Death can at times only summarise and explain:

     It’s cold, for you’ve come out from a warm body

     It’s bright, for you’ve come out from a dark body

     It’s lonely, for you’ve lost your shadow

            (‘Winter’s Smile DAY NINETEEN’)

Death here is not a spirit guide, nor a shaman accompanying the dead on a journey. Mostly Death is a commentator, often stating the obvious (to the dead not the reader) as it makes poetry out of the slow fading away and emptying out of past lives:

     World without a sound.   Untouchable,  flat world.   When death dawns,

     world turns into a hard mirror.  Faraway world of hope.

            (‘A Face DAY FORTY-THREE’)

     Now you have completely taken off your face

            (‘Moon Mask DAY FORTY-EIGHT’)

By day forty-nine the soul is ready to return to the world. Death offers some final observations and advice, with a litany of things that do not miss and have not missed the one about to be reborn, instructions not to go searching for one’s own body and a final ‘don’t’:

     Don’t miss you just because you’re not you and I’m the one who’s really you.

            (‘Don’t DAY FORTY-NINE’)

Death has a high opinion of itself yet the long poem ‘Face of Rhythm’, which follows the title sequence, offers a partial rebuttal to its self-proclaimed sovereignty. It is a childlike scream against hurt and suffering, a refusal to be overcome by pain, be that physical or emotional. It is about spiritual anguish and bodily woes, about illness, about being forsaken, about ‘wonder[ing] where my soul hides when I’m sick’ and asking cosmological questions:

     I wonder whether the souls of all the people on earth are connected as one.

This is intriguing work, set in rather small type (too small!), by a major South Korean contemporary poet. Its complex allusions and the strange world or after-world it is set in, are wonderfully conjured up in a musical translation by Don Mee Choi, and partially explained and discussed in a brief but illuminating interview with the poet and a ‘Translator’s Note’. It reminds us all that:

     Death is something that storms in from the outside. The universe inside is bigger.

            (‘Commute DAY ONE’)

Rupert Loydell 23rd June 2025

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Resistance by Colin Campbell Robinson (KFS Press)

Posted on June 19, 2025 by tearsinthefence
Resistance by Colin Campbell Robinson (KFS Press)

This new book of three poem sequences opens with a quote from René Char, who states that 

     History is a long succession of words

          leading to the same conclusions.

           To contradict them is our duty.

Colin Campbell Robinson sees contradiction as a form of resistance which offers clarity, whereas confusion creates collaboration (with the forces of occupation, the enemy). Although rooted in response to the written works of René Char and Yannis Ritsos, both of whom were part of resistance movements, and Josef Koudelka’s photographs of Prague in 1968, it is hard to see Robinson’s prose poem sequences here as more than abstractions.

The work here rambles through an empty city peopled by memories, ghosts who betray, hide, suffer and survive. ‘Everyone is a vagabond in their own home. / Everyone a wanderer lying in their bed.’ Times passes, indeed ‘Time is running out’ and the future is tentative as ‘The angels of tomorrow soar on fragile wings.’ It is a world of brief pleasures – pilsner or ‘a sip of slivovitz’ – failures, ruin and silence; a world where nothing is understood and ‘people stand about doing nothing’ and there is ‘no certainty’.

By inhabiting others’ experiences Robinson ends up in a no-man’s land of secondhand politics and emotions. This is not to belittle Ritsos’ or Char’s poems – both are great writers – nor to demand poems of personal emotion from Robinson, but the sense of distance here is too great: Robinson is a mirror, a reporter, whose words from the present describing the past cannot evoke the realities of oppression or revolutionary resistance. It all feels like a sanitised version, where blood and sweat, Molotov cocktails, sniper fire and the arrival of tanks and soldiers become fading photographs or ‘a rumbling that fades into the distance’.

At one point the final poem’s narrator attempts to pray, but the silence is too much; instead, we get ‘So many Cains, so many Abels, looking for God’s embrace, in the cold dawn, in the dying dusk’, and smashed firebombs provoking the rhetorical question ‘who dances before the Lord?’. The reference to the Psalms, and the text’s juxtaposition with a photo of ‘the oldest synagogue in Europe’ does little to evoke Prague’s ghetto, the story of the Golem, or the very physical act of occupation and dismantling of Prague’s Westernisation in 1968. It simply sends out vague arrows towards ideas Robinson could have made something of.

This book is a world of shorthand, of suggestive phrases and ideas meant to trigger a reader’s feelings: a sense of loss, of hopelessness, of squashed possibility, of mourning, of lost community and family. A dove is used to suggest ideas of peace; a church bell rings, signifying mourning, religion, time passing and perhaps contrasting with the empty city’s silence; ‘Coincidental meanings could collide and create new sense as they speed beyond light’. I’m all for constructing meaning out of experimental or opaque texts, but there is too much signification going on here, too much ‘space’ and ‘light’ and ‘silence’ and ‘blindness’, too many words pre-loaded with meaning, to allow new coincidences or associations to be made.

The poems here mostly feel like pastiche and, in the third sequence, a poetical tour guide to Prague. It made me go back to Ritsos, a favourite author anyway, to the experimental photos of Jiri Kolar, and to contemporaneous accounts of resistance and revolution in France, Greece and Prague. These show the reality, the brutality, of war; whilst the anarchic and utopian poetry of the likes of Adrian Mitchell or Julian Beck propose political, sexual and social revolutions. Robinson’s poetry offers ‘The night eternal dark like a book not written; like a slogan, empty’, but I would rather an attempted book or a revolutionary slogan than this author’s abstract ‘pain of intuition’.

Rupert Loydell 19th June 2025

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A Book of Sounds by Billy Mills (Shearsman Books)

Posted on May 17, 2025 by tearsinthefence
A Book of Sounds by Billy Mills (Shearsman Books)

          ‘… the drag

         of syntax

         each wave in its place

         and its time’ (‘long poem with no name’)

It would be tempting to see this as prescriptive—the ‘right place’ and ‘right time’ for every word, the way you have to craft that, to some plan, some form, some formal arrangement. But like many metaphors in Billy Mills’s work, it unstitches the facile interpretation. ‘everything flows / that is / this fragile world’ he writes later in the same poem, reformulating Heraclitus: the flow itself is fragile, less a river, more a chalk stream. There is simplicity here, but simplicity of balance, of vulnerable, active balance, like a tightrope walker or a gymnast. This takes some doing. 

The flipside of this is resilience, decay turning into growth, as in these concluding lines from ‘Four’:

         we live in earth

         and it in us

         reconstituting

         made over

An ecological poetry, but a poetry of ecology as economy, the processes of nature: photosynthesis, mycelia, the recycling labour of worms. This is the converse of the Romantic sublime: microscopic, underground perspectives, the nature we live off, and which lives off us. But thanks to us, it is a more and more unbalanced relationship:

         that all of this

         is of our doing

         & not

         & that we are not

         all of this

         that we would be

This is from a series of poems called ‘Uncertain Songs’ which takes up about a third of the volume. The way phrase ‘all of this’ works here is characteristic of the series (and by extension the whole book), it sets up and equivalence, a balance that is off-centred, a music carefully de-tuned. It sounds a note of irony in the ambiguity, though more of sadness than of anger.

Don’t get me (or Mills) wrong here—this isn’t nature poetry as commonly understood. The natural world does not provide a menu of luminous detail, but energy of certain vectors representing processes. Mills is influenced by Chinese poetry, particularly Basho—he’s written his own version of the ‘frog’ haiku—and the essence of the haiku is the encapsulation of a process or event in nature, a vector: pond-frog-splash. As little extraneous detail as possible, don’t distract, don’t be ‘pretty’ mistaking the ornament for beauty. The beauty is in the act. The more you try and describe the thrill of a swift screaming overhead, the less swift you end up with. An act of abstracting that is not ‘abstract’, a minimising process that isn’t ‘minimalism’. I could go on….

Here’s a stanza from another short series of poems titled ‘Away’:

         bird in the air

         air on the wing

         away        away

         nothing agrees

         but the wind

The second line here may look like an inversion of the first, but it isn’t. ‘air in the bird’ would be silly, after all. ‘air on the wing’ is the mechanics of flight, what allows the first line to happen. The repetition of ‘away’ might seem redundant, but hints at an exhortation, or maybe a joyous exclamation. This is the first of three places where the title word of the series appears, and it chimes with the Heraclitan theme of this and other poems. Nothing stays or stands.

The final two lines depend upon ‘agrees’ in its pivotal role. What does the wind agree with? Itself? The bird? Is the agreement a concurrence? An equivalence? All of the above, surely. 

Billy Mills is a slippery poet. To call someone slippery is usually an insult, of course, implying duplicity, at least. But here it’s nothing but a compliment: his poetry slips—by, through, over, under—and does so with integrity, intelligence and style.

Keith Jebb 17th May 2025

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There’s Everything to Play For: The Poetry of Peter Finch by Andrew Taylor (Seren Books)

Posted on April 29, 2025 by tearsinthefence
There’s Everything to Play For: The Poetry of Peter Finch by Andrew Taylor (Seren Books)

When I reviewed Peter Finch’s Collected Poems One and Collected Poems Two back in 2022, I could not help but discuss Finch’s presence in the small press publishing world from the early 1980s, when I became part of that with my Stride magazine and imprint. Finch was an enabler, a facilitator, an encourager and contributor; he was everywhere you turned in the poetry world. In my earlier 2020 review of his book The Machineries of Joy, I noted that ‘Finch shows no sign of reining in his eccentricities’ and titled that review ‘A Life-time of Astonishment’, which referred to Finch’s lifetime, not mine, although I continue to be astonished by the poet’s work.

Having edited those Collected Poems, Andrew Taylor has gone on to now publish a hybrid biography and critical study of Finch, thankfully concentrating on the latter as a way to facilitate the former. So, only events, activities and associations which have fed in to and influenced Finch’s editing, writing, performing and publishing, are mentioned; there is no nonsense here about the colour of wallpaper, girlfriends or the makes of cars purchased. It is all about poetry and his relationship to it.

Early on, Finch embraced underground, countercultural publishing and stuck with it. In a similar manner he situated his work within the very different, often warring, areas of sound-experiment, comedy, performance art, visual poetry and the mainstream. He was never a weirdy-beardy mumbling in the corner, never an arselicker or cringing academic, never a self-centred ego-tripper, but he could get funding, submit to and persuade both avant-garde and major publishers, talk poetics and critical theory, sweet talk and upset others, as required, and hold his own against those who dismissed his output. 

His knowledge of the history of sound and performance writing was second-to-none, and he frequented the boundaries where it blurred into improvisation, out-jazz, or speaking in tongues. He learnt Welsh and critiqued England’s colonial inclinations towards its neighbour; he used psychogeography, flânerie and landscape writing to document Cardiff and its environs; he shared and taught and challenged both would-be and experienced writers; and he kept up with contemporary issues of digital poetics, AI, sampling and remix. (Taylor suggests this is not new: ‘Finch’s use of technology has always been present in the work.’)

Taylor surmises that Finch’s poetry has changed, perhaps even mellowed, over time (something I might dispute), suggesting that ‘a typical late-period Finch poem’ contains ‘nostalgic reflection, usually focussed on a key memory’ where ‘the level of detail is remarkable’ and resists ‘resorting to the bland anecdotal which is so commonplace in mainstream poetry’. Elsewhere he suggests that ‘Peter Finch has always been seen as “other”‘ and is ‘[n]otoriously difficult to categorise’, this difficulty perhaps leading to an element of critical indifference and mainstream rejection. 

And yet Finch was a poet who charmed those who met him and/or heard him read. His stage presence was of a friendly eccentric, not an arty-farty weirdo. As this book at times make clear, he could do provocation and rebellion when required, but mostly he wanted to get his work read and listened to and found numerous ways to do so. Finch understood rhyme, syncopation, and rhythm, knew how to keep an audience amused, shocked and entertained. He was part of international networks of writers and artists, an avid reader, listener and consumer of new and newly-discovered writers. He read to understand what language could and might do, whether as decomposed text on the page, political manifesto, comic absurdism, surreal chant or seemingly personal confession.

Taylor gets all this. His 200 page book is as thorough, reasoned and generous as Finch’s own books. His critical engagement with Finch’s writing is astute but highly readable, as are his contextual discussions where he notes influences, mentors, examples and inspirations. As Taylor notes at the close of the book, ‘Though nothing is assured, what we can be certain of is that Peter Finch will continue to write poetry, innovate, walk Wales and push language to extremes.’ I really do hope so.

Rupert Loydell 29th April 2025

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For All That’s Lost by David Miller (Knives, Forks and Spoons Press)

Posted on April 8, 2025 by tearsinthefence
For All That’s Lost by David Miller (Knives, Forks and Spoons Press)

Fragmented images repeated in forms that circle without repeating exactly, variations forming ripples emanating from a central loss and finding a variety of means to muse on what it is that has been lost. David Miller’s For All That’s Lostcombines poems, prose poems and paintings, both recent and past, to create a collage of responses to loss:

            Fragmented images building a narrative rather than merely interrupting or illustrating it.

            Dispersed narrative.

            Unfolding, regenerating narrative. 

At the heart of the more recent material is the loss of his late wife Dodo (the philosopher Doreen Maitre) in 2022, and, therefore, we are once again in the space inhabited by 2024’s What Is and Might Be and then Otherwise some of which ‘explicitly or implicitly involved mourning as well as reflection and contemplation in the wake of that loss’.

I wrote of (close), another recent volume which is haunted by grief, that Miller “examines words and phrases as if they are displayed on a rotating stand enabling us to view them from a myriad of different perspectives”. This minimalist style of writing in which each word holds a weight of meaning in a precisely positioned place on the page was intuited by Miller from the American poet and mystic Robert Lax. In this collection, Lax also contributes a telling phrase in paraphrase – ‘Black is everything that black can be’. 

Black is both the terrifying place where For All That’s Now Lost ends:

                                    Black

            waters and black sky …

            lights spiralling

            in the darkness –

            and I am not the one at the wheel.

and the beginning of ‘Again: Black ink in the Palace of Bees’ where, as Frances Presley explains he moves in this series of ‘poems-in-pictures’ “from a wash of black ink, through widening strips of gold and amber, containing fragments, possibly cells or seeds, until there is a containing border of deep pink”.

This pilgrimage in paint resonates with the exploration of spirituality – another exploration shared with Lax – that takes us back “to the Gospels and Acts”:

            A tree. An angel.

            A nativity. A cruc-

            Ifixion. A

            resurrection.

As musician, painter, poet and writer, Miller is a polymath and, while recognising the potential for ideas to be sparked or explored more deeply through an interplay or interweaving of disciplines, he also acknowledges the limits of such play and weaving in the awareness that they do not become one and the same when brought into relation:

            poetry isn’t painting

            poetry isn’t music …

            nor is poetry … is it

            anthropology?

            no nor religion

            yet each might learn

            from each other

            possibly

            in some instances

            but not become the other

This is the hope of all the playful intertwining of genres and styles, of disciplines and narratives, of losses and gaps, fragments and forms, that characterises and shapes Miller’s works and collections. He utilises ‘concision, elision, contrast and paradox to open up meanings as one opens up Matryoshka Dolls’ and does so in the hope that each might learn one from the other, even in the midst of loss – especially in the time of loss – when the one that is lost is walking alongside and ‘what surpasses death / is transgressive’.

Jonathan Evens 8th April 2025

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The Salvation Engine by Rupert M. Loydell (Analogue Flashback)

Posted on April 1, 2025 by tearsinthefence
The Salvation Engine by Rupert M. Loydell (Analogue Flashback)

Recent reports on abuse scandals linked to the Church of England bring unfortunate reminders of an earlier scandal, Sheffield’s the Nine O’clock Service (NOS). The central instigator of the NOS, Chris Brain, is shortly to stand trial on one charge of rape and 33 counts of indecent assault relating to 11 women.

Rupert Loydell was brought up attending a Baptist Church and experienced a fairly traditional nonconformist faith. Although he has become sceptical of dogma and conviction, he continues to explore the motivations for belief both in his poetry and his writing on culture. In The Salvation Engine he grapples with the frightful mix of personality cults, religious populism, liturgical experiment, rave culture, and lack of safeguarding and accountability, which allowed abuse and manipulation to thrive in NOS.

Like Ed Gillett in Party Lines: Dance Music and the Making of Modern Britain, the voices which speak in The Salvation Engine acknowledge “the NOS’s profound appeal: spiritual uplift and utopianism, all set to transportive music”. So, in ‘Touching Distance’ (as, too, in poems such as ‘Deeply Sorry’ and ‘Shining Brightly’) we move from positive to negative experiences:

from

                                                Existential dilemmas

were welcome in the cathedral, prompting

blinding displays of apocalyptic gospel,

tectonic shifts of techno-ambient hymns,

congregations high from dancing lights. 

to

                                                thundercrash

            riffs trigger flashbacks tonight, along with

            detailed disclosures of wild behaviour.

            A cataclysm of murderous noise lubricates

            conversations about emerging dark manias,

            slow-burning psychosexual abuse. 

‘A Gleeful Leaving’ and ‘Rap Messiah’ focus on the dangers posed by charismatic spiritual gurus who are allowed to operate without constraints or accountability:

                                    The burden of safeguarding

was put aside, one ticket admitted you

to hurt children, young women and men,

archival footage and mixed-media collage.

For the guru:

            Hell is being shut inside an alien heaven

unable to even compose a goodbye note.

Today he will be all by himself in paradise.

For the victims:

            I am in a dilemma with regard to narrative,

            am alienated from my own story. Sometimes

            I just sink into the day, numb and sobbing.

There is anger and frustration expressed at repeating patterns of abuse:

            Haven’t we been here before,

            watching the embers of megalomania and reason blow away?

            The spell is broken. Lucidity hits. We’ve been treated like dirt.

and there is a degree of hope explored among those who were victims:

            Storm clouds and strong winds prevail,

            I expect to find misunderstanding,

            befuddled glances and wary responses,

            limited versions of ourselves, the dark

            side of liturgy and religious process.

            Come on. Across the border we go.

Loydell’s main way of writing poetry in recent years has been to assemble phrases into a poem; phrases which come from a range of sources to create poems ‘that offer more questions than answers’. As a result, we should not simply equate the narrator’s voice in his poems with the author’s voice and need to remember that those who were involved in NOS do not speak about the experience with one voice either, but from multiple perspectives. This collection is deliberately polyphonic as a result.

With this collection, as with all his work, Loydell wants to challenge his readers to think about what language is and how ‘it is used around and indeed against us’, as ‘language is how we think about and construct the world’. After all, that is how the leaders of NOS created a space in which abuse could occur:

            You imaged God as a packet of razor blades,

            useful for noble and honourable purposes

            but using metaphors, parables and similes

            to round us up and convince us.

Jonathan Evens 1st April 2025

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Dreamt by Ghosts by Chris McCabe (Tenement Press)

Posted on March 2, 2025 by tearsinthefence
Dreamt by Ghosts by Chris McCabe (Tenement Press)

Subtitled Notes on Dreams, Coincidences, & Weird Culture, Chris McCabe’s hefty book is a compendium of journal entries, concrete typewriter poems, critical observations and dream diary. Gradually, over 346 pages, a web of associative meaning and links evolves (as indeed it would with such a large grouping of anything [that’s not a criticism]).

I’m not good at being told other people’s dreams, in fact it’s one of those situations I hate, I am just not interested in what anyone’s subconscious throws up. Breakfast with those who insist on telling me about their imaginary nocturnal adventures is my idea of hell. However, I will make an exception for McCabe as this book is as outward looking as inward looking, his dreams as literary and as mediated as his poems and prose. 

In a similar way to his dreams being put to purpose, McCabe’s discourses are too. He doesn’t simply present examples of absences and hauntings, he ponders and contextualises them, discusses them in the light of his reading and listening: Ballard, Poe, Hideo Nakata, Plath, Kafka, Borges, Ginsberg, Stephen King, Barry McSweeney and John Cale are all here, animating otherwise frozen moments and experiences.

Really, this is a book about time and memory, about the slow-motion experiences of lockdown, of acquaintances, friends, relatives, about death and absence, about language and poetry. Although the book is populated by ghosts they are mostly not literal: ‘a ghost is a bruise mark waiting to heal’. The bruise is grief and loss, McCabe is fascinated by them: ‘I’ve often wondered what it must be like to face death and come back: the body as transcendent matter, a kind of collop of spirit, pulling itself towards the light.’

Even without this experience, McCabe (and his friend James) are ‘alert to the mysteries of this moment of accelerating time’. The opposite, too, of course: moments of stasis and boredom. Dreamt by Ghosts is a book of experiential time, of Mark Fisher’s Hauntology (which is specifically referenced in a postscript), where the present is infused by the historical past, possible or imagined pasts, and the unknown future, all (mis)informed by the deluge of (mis)information now available to us. 

Throw in the likes of Simon Reynold’s idea of Retromania with its suggestion of shorter and shorter loops of nostalgic revisiting and appropriation, and the idea of paying attention to the present as a form of cultural resistance, a way of persisting in being alive, and you may arrive at the bricolage of life in a similar manner to McCabe.

Yet even as he re-presents his chosen texts, he is aware that ‘There is no getting back to the past, even if the present seeks it out like a reversed telescope’, because even as I write the present becomes both what was the future and the past. Thus, we all live in ‘the city of imagination’ that McCabe writes about, a city inhabited by what and who we once knew and what we hope for, a city produced by ‘the rhizomatic nature of our minds’, just as Dreamt by Ghosts only becomes a coherent book when allowed to be incoherent fragments willed into a temporary whole by both editor and reader.

McCabe’s work is new to me and is intriguing in its complexity, its associative impositions and authorial assumptions. It is both playful and rich in meaning, using the confessional and private to evidence the public, perhaps even a communal, subconscious not always evident in our individual, digitised world.

Rupert Loydell 2nd March 2025

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Conjurors by Julian Orde (Carcanet Press)

Posted on February 27, 2025 by tearsinthefence
Conjurors by Julian Orde (Carcanet Press)

One of the virtues of the ground-breaking Apocalypse anthology brought out by Carcanet in 2020 (edited by James Keery) was as a trove of forgotten poets from the previously neglected period of the mid-20th century. Keery proved particularly adept at unearthing women writers eclipsed by the more celebrated male names both of figures primarily associated with the 1940s and those who moved on from an earlier Dylan Thomas-inflected style to other ways of working in the 50s and 60s (eg. Larkin, Davie). Compared to the earlier modernist generation, which saw female poets such as HD and Mina Loy published and applauded alongside their male counterparts, there was a falling off of this comparatively more inclusive landscape during the 30s and 40s. Apart from the notable exceptions of Lynette Roberts and Kathleen Raine (both of whom featured in the anthology), the list of women poets from this period whose work is still read and in print was remarkably slim prior to the publication of Apocalypse.

Julian Orde was outstanding among these new and re-discoveries. Her agile, exuberant poems – charged with ‘visionary modernism’ in Keery’s sense and touched by the period Apocalyptic style but never enslaved by it – culminated in an excerpt from an intriguing longer poem called ‘Conjurors’, which homes in on the emergence of a butterfly from its cocoon (‘she walks like a boat on the beach/Dragging her drying sails’) with the defamilarising eye for telling detail of great nature writing (the Annie Dillard of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek sprung to this reviewer’s mind). Now Keery has made good on the promise of those four beguiling poems by collating a substantial volume of Orde’s work, published last year by Carcanet as Conjurors. The editorial task must have been challenging as Orde never published a book in her lifetime, and her oeuvre was scattered across three decades’ worth of little magazines and journals. But this only accounts for around twenty poems – the other 60 Keery includes are previously unpublished works from papers left after Orde’s death in 1974.

Reading this astonishing body of lost poetry is like finding a mislaid jigsaw-piece that fills a key gap in the complex puzzle of 20th century literary history, making the intermittent picture of British modernist poetry a little clearer. Particularly in terms of poetry written by women, Orde seems a missing link between the work of Lynette Roberts (although hers is more allied to a Neo-Romantic/Apocalyptic manner than Roberts’) and the 60s poetry of Rosemary Tonks, who she resembles in her playful incorporation of surrealism into phonetically rich lyric forms, and from Tonks onward to Maggie O’Sullivan and Denise Riley. I was going to say that the neglect Orde’s work has suffered seems surprising given her connections with other prominent poets of the period but in fact perhaps it was these very associations that impeded her from establishing her own voice, given the reputational damage the entire Forties generation endured in subsequent decades. We could also mention the belittling perspective of being known more as a girlfriend and muse rather than as a serious poet in her own right. Having just been reading Kate Zambreno’s Heroines – a feminist revaluation of the “mad wives” of modernism (Vivienne Eliot, Zelda Fitzgerald, Jane Bowles) and the ways their lives and own writings were side-lined by their illustrious husbands – I am intrigued to track how the same phenomenon applies all too regularly to later 20th century writers.

The Carcanet Conjurors is a wonderful edition, including an informative introduction and compelling essay by Keery on the poet’s life and work in its context, and some letters from the 1940’s. The fact that Orde was a girlfriend of WS Graham’s, had a brief affair with Dylan Thomas, and John Laurie, the actor who played Fraser in Dad’s Army) should not define our recognition of her. Nor did she define herself by her poetry: she went on to work (with varying degrees of success) as an actress, a scriptwriter, a playwright, and an advertising copywriter. The figure who shines through Keery’s essay, however, is her long-standing friend and correspondent David Wright, who more than anyone else was able to see the lasting importance of Orde’s poems and is himself another key poet of the period who deserves rediscovery.

Oliver Dixon 27th February 2025

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