Category Archives: English Poetry

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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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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Summer to Summer Looking by Gill McEvoy (Cinnamon Press)

Posted on March 28, 2025 by tearsinthefence
Summer to Summer Looking by Gill McEvoy (Cinnamon Press)

It is always a joy to read Gill McEvoy’s discerning poems with their perceptions and insights and microcosmic observations. In this pamphlet, Summer to Summer Looking we see the narrator’s clarity of attentiveness that can wait and watch for the special moment when one can hear ‘the thinnest trill’ of the dipper and notice in its flight ‘the bright moon / of its small breast’ that shines like snow. )’The Bird by the River’). Elsewhere, the ‘crowned heads’ of two crested grebes are held in the air ‘like hieroglyphics’ (‘At Stover’) while an ‘October Forecast’ lists a season of ‘sharp stars, huge moons’ but also of ‘slow moving wasps and bluebottles’.

Throughout the poems in ‘Summer to Summer Looking’ there is a keen awareness of changes in climate patterns.  ‘Drought’ is a particularly vivid and horrifying poem with the sun rising ‘from its blood-streaked bed’ in a ‘blinding sky’ as it burns and scorches the earth and ‘flames take hold of dried-out edges.’ Birds and plants in a later winter season mistake milder weather for signs of spring although, ominously, ‘snow is forecast’. (February Afternoon’)

The quality that appeals to me most of all in Gill McEvoy’s poetry is an impression of transcendence, a symbolism that lies beneath the everyday. One of the most beautiful poems is ‘To Watch a Cloud is Consoling. Always’ where the narrator on her sickbed has been ‘sent’ a cloud as a special gift and observes it shift from being the shape of ‘a grey horse resting in a field’ to becoming a cloud again, ‘as such shapes do’. Yet this gift, this cloud, this grey horse does not disappear. In some way the narrator feels it is ever present.

‘Haunting the Pool by the Bridge’ is a more sombre poem in that it depicts the futile search for the kingfisher’s ‘un-nerving shock of blue’ which would be ‘the longed-for vision’ to ‘fill our hearts with radiance.’ On this occasion it is not to be, but there is hope and a ‘kind of glory’ in the later poem ‘Dealing with the Straying Sheep at the Holiday Cottage’ where someone, possibly a child, has gone out ‘in the dark alone’ to rescue a sheep and afterwards walked about the kitchen in wet bare feet leaving, as a sign of passage, ‘shining prints of night-dew’. 

Mandy Pannett 28th 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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Tears in the Fence 81 is out!

Posted on February 18, 2025 by tearsinthefence
Tears in the Fence 81 is out!

Tears in the Fence 81 is now available at https://tearsinthefence.com/pay-it-forward/and features poetry, multilingual poetry, prose poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction by Alicia Byrne Keane, Lesley Burt, Kate Noakes, Lucy Ingrams, Jane Wheeler, Florence Ng, Angela Howarth Martinot, Kasia Flisiuk, Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani, Norman Jope, Frances Presley, Jessica Tillings, Steve Ely, Ian Seed, L. Kiew, Michael Henry, Catherine Fletcher, Bel Wallace, Holly Winter-Hughes, Tristan Moss, Paul A. Green,  Julian Dobson, David Sahner, Jess Bauldry, Mandy Pannett, Andrew Duncan, Blossom Hibbert, Keith Jebb, Paul Stephenson, Poonam Jain, Greg Bright, Helena Steel, Michael Loveday, Charles Green, Penny Hope, Charles Hadfield, Luke Emmett, C. P. Nield, Hannah Linden, Richard Foreman, Ilse Pedler and Charles Wilkinson.

The critical section consists of the Editorial by David Caddy, Gerald Killingworth’s Tears in the Fence 2024 Festival Address, Andrew Duncan on Allen Fisher, Barbara Bridger on Carol Watts, Guy Russell on Guillaume Apollinaire, Emily Moore on Gayl Jones, Robert Sheppard on Philip Terry, David Pollard on Alina Stefanescu, Barbara Bridger on Aneta Kamińska, Frances Presley on Hazel Smith, Steve Spence on Norman Jope, Charles Wilkinson, Michael Lee Rattigan on Anthony Seidman, Joanna Nissel on Ilse Pedler, Bob Cooper on Lesley Burt, Steve Spence on John Phillips, John Brantingham on Judy Kronenfeld, Morag Kiziewicz’s Electric Blue 16, David Caddy’s Afterword and Notes on Contributors.

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Cut Up (Vanguard Editions), Dream Into Play (Poetry Salzburg) by Richard Skinner

Posted on January 31, 2025 by tearsinthefence
Cut Up (Vanguard Editions), Dream Into Play (Poetry Salzburg) by Richard Skinner

It’s easy to forget how much fun poetry can be, how fluid and malleable language is as a medium. Caught up in university life, the mechanics of teaching, timetables and academic research it can be hard to find space to play, even as I constantly urge students to trust the process and enjoy finding out what language can do.

Richard Skinner’s two books are a kick up the backside for me, hugely enjoyable gatherings of collaged and other processual poems. I received Cut Up first, which uses a wide range of song lyrics which have been mixed-up with others and rearranged into new forms. Some read as a kind of conversation, others as a metatextual commentary on themselves, some are melancholic or impassioned, a few political; many are laugh-out-loud funny.

When my first years and I discuss the history and use of collage and cut-up, I often stress how they should think about what they are using rather than treat it as a chance procedure, and that I expect the end result to be more than X + Y, that is that something new (let’s call it Z) should be produced, rather than the source material being obvious. Skinner’s poems in Cut Up prove me wrong, taking the opposite approach: each proudly declares their sources and anyone who knows the songs involved will recognise which lines are from which. In fact, they are the written equivalents of the video song mashups popular a few years back, where listeners/readers can marvel at the odd combinations and the unexpected musical and textual results.

I actually prefer the second book I got, Dream Into Play, which includes collaged poems alongside list poems, puns, prose poems, texts constructed using Oulipean processes and other verbal dexterity. The final poem, ‘Life in a Onetime’ is apparently the author’s own favourite poem, a subtle hijacking of a Talking Heads song, which circles the same scene again and again, using images of water imagery and of being lost, until it’s elegiac conclusion, the narrator adrift and alone:

     This isn’t the same ocean
     flowing as a beautiful highway
     that comes into this house
     behind me where there is
     the wheel of a lifetime
     that is ever flowing
     I let the dissolving days go
     You ask me where I am
     What to hold on to

Elsewhere there are ekphrastic poems in response to art by Leonora Carrington and The Deerhunter, ‘two poems after Andrea Gibellini’ (the ‘after’ is not expanded upon), a version of ‘Caedmon’s Hymn’, imagistic short lyrical poems, and a couple of brilliant list poems based on Milan Kundera book titles, where said titles slowly mutate into more and more ridiculous versions of themselves. So ‘The Book of Laughing and Forgetting’ is immediately changed to ‘The Bore of Layering and Format’, and travels through variations such as ‘The Bubble of Line and Friction’ and ‘The Bump of Lithium and Frost’ before arriving at its final line, where we are offered ‘The Bypass of Lolly and Fund’. ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ is subjected to similar lexical abuse and is just as funny.

Although it may appear I am simply engaging with these texts as comical asides, I am not. They may foreground intervention and reversioning, but the results bear rereading and encourage their own critical and theoretical response. In ‘A Patch of Birds’, a brief pastoral poem, we are told the birds ‘sing / This is not / the real world‘, but apart from the Magritte-inspired debate about whether it is the world or simply words on a page describing the world, I want to say it is real, for we make and experience the world through language, make experience, observation and thought in words. Skinner is adept at encouraging us to see and think anew.

Rupert Loydell 31st January 2025

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Origin Myths by Duncan Wu (Shearsman Books)

Posted on January 25, 2025 by tearsinthefence
Origin Myths by Duncan Wu (Shearsman Books)

North Virginia, near the Potomac. The book’s narrator is ‘living rough’, ‘crafting wood’ in a forest cabin ‘beneath the ridge’. Alone apart from a dog, he’s bathing in the creek, dozing in the heat, carving images of snakes into the doorframes, and above all walking in the woods. He gathers gemstones. He survives gales, storms and cold. He identifies the local flora (‘golden seal, mayapple, pipsissewa, bloodroot’). He sees lynx, deer, foxes, treefrogs and snakes.

But also, prone since childhood to ‘dervish visions’ and mystical voices, he sees ‘dream-beasts’. He discerns ‘the feral ground/ pulsing with stones shivered by their own genius’. A snake tells him, ‘You think of Paradise lost […] yet the dream, the dream/ is everywhere.’ A fox says 

           “Trees recall the time before our time,
          remember the tribes that farmed this soil,
          that walk here still.”

In the forest, he spectrally encounters these ‘first people’, who ‘cured animal skins’, ‘carved arrowheads’, and whom he senses as ‘both peaceable and defiant’. But he’s also afflicted with darker visions of their destruction by ‘the white folk’ who ‘turned these woods into slaughterhouse and pyre’ in order to take the land:

          There was no witness that saw what transpired,
          so if that land-claim was misbegotten
          none could judge – but then none enquired. 

In this now-haunted landscape, the book becomes increasingly death-driven, with several powerfully savage poems:

          The head swung in darkness, eye-bolted
          to a chain wrapped round a branch, blue tongue
          wailing

until the narrator, via an Ovidian pun, 

wooden slivers in the wounds, subtly curved,
          pushing down through the skull, deep down, into
          the trunk

metamorphoses into an oak-tree.

This Romantic pastiche with Gothic flourishes (‘the beast is father of the man’) is buttressed by its formal choices. The quatrain dominates: about half the poems are loose Bowlesian or Shakespearean sonnets, with many others in heroic stanzas, plus a dozen or so in loose blank verse. But odd things are happening in the prosody as well as the subject-matter. Some concluding couplets feel like they were written by Wordsworth’s dog:

whenever the frogs possess me with rhythm
          I’m remade by their musical vision.

Or a jaunty light-versifier:

          On issues like this you must be precisional:
          hold on life can be mighty provisional.

Or with sententiae that look suspiciously parodic:

          The self-judging mind is prone to laxity
          when it’s confronted by reality.

Meanwhile the register runs from archaic (‘emperies’) to neologistic (‘frenzilicious’). There are high-flown apostrophes (‘o creature from the/ world before the flood, were you sister of/ Jörmungandr’) and also street-talk (‘badass gullywasher,/ no-shit cyclone’). Line-breaks split not just articles from nouns and auxiliary from main verbs, but even a bipartite placename. The supposed shack is built both ‘three centuries’ ago and by a Civil War veteran. 

A trail of internal geographical clues, as well as the epitext, join these literary giveaways to expose the cantrip. The shop-fronted wilderness is actually high-end wooded suburbia, the rough cabin a stylish spread, the lyrical isolation a well-frequented country park, and the narrator-poet certainly not the titular poet, who is in fact an eminent professor in a prestigious Washington DC university, his own origin being one of the myths. The reveal undercuts the ostensibly ultra-serious performance in a manner that makes the book considerably more interesting but more troubling. For instance, the afterword’s concern with the history and current treatment of native Americans feels genuine. But what can now be trusted after such audacious self-sabotage? I suppose Romanticism always was a mythologizing ideology. I suppose a contemporary epigone has to wink a bit. Well, it’s worth reading to make up your own mind. 

Guy Russell 25th January 2025

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Spoke Reflector by Ed Tapper (Cutty Dyer Press)

Posted on December 4, 2024 by tearsinthefence
Spoke Reflector by Ed Tapper (Cutty Dyer Press)

This is Ed Tapper’s second collection from Cutty Dyer Press and follows on in its exploration of the local environment as well as forays into wider regions. Tapper is a master of wordplay and many of the poems in this substantial volume are generated by observation related to language. He is as entertaining on the page as he is on the stage and he manages to combine the right mix of ‘madness and accessibility’ in his work which is often fuelled by an ongoing flow of wit and linguistic comedy. He also has a serious interest in the visual arts, an aspect which is represented in some of the poems here, as well as a melancholy streak which provides a useful counterpoint to what might otherwise be an ‘excess’ of controlled craziness. There’s a pattern developing in the cover art, titles and typography which is both visual and to do with objects, it would seem, where ambiguity and ‘coming at things from a tangent’ seem to be key concepts.

     In ‘Summer Reverie (for Spencer Shute)’ Tapper amalgamates his recurring wordplay into a sort of pastiche which references earlier styles while managing to feel very contemporary. Here are the opening stanzas:

          Had an awake dream

          A kind of blokey Blakey reverie

          Of Albion and stuff

          Like Spenser and Donne and

          Like what Spencer done 

          Anyway

          I was barking at jackdaws

          That lined the field

          In solemn troops saying

          ‘We did visit all your battles

          On this green earth finding

          Your flesh at intervals regular

          Most yielding to our beaks’

                  Then cackle and fly off always

     A lot of Tapper’s poetry relates to Plymouth and its surroundings, which are spectacularly visual, and to the local characters inhabiting the scene though there is also plenty of material focussed on travel to other countries. His work certainly has a lot of ‘out and aboutness’ to it which provides an interesting contrast to the linguistic inventiveness of his formal devices. These are poems which can breathe and expand as well as entertain.

     A good example of Ed Tapper’s art poems is ‘The Sea at L’Estaque by Paul Cezanne 1878 ‘where we have an excellent description of a painting by a painter/poet of a favourite painter. For a fan of Cezanne’s work, as I am, this is a masterful engagement which really attempts to get to grips with what it is about the painter’s work that made it so special and so important. ‘We are not allowed into the village / We are not allowed to suspend out disbelief / And enter the illusion of the picture plane.’ Tapper’s commentary here relates to the ‘monumental’ nature of Cezanne’s picture building where perspective is overturned and where the flat surface of the canvas is seen as such and is determined by brushstroke and architectural design which is much more than simple decoration or graphic depiction. It’s hard to discuss visual art, especially painting which combines a degree of representation with a more ‘abstract’ feel, involved in the process, via language, yet we have no other recourse if we are to comment at all and Tapper’s words here are exceptionally perceptive: 

‘There is no attempt to deceive the eye / No atmospheric perspective / Or tonal recession / No heavenly play of light on water / Or dramatic sunset / There is no drama here / Just bare facts.’ The final part of the poem which deals with the broken friendship between Cezanne and the novelist Emile Zola after the latter effectively accused the painter of egoism could have been sentimental and too conclusive but this is beautifully avoided with the succinct yet perfect lines: ‘Cezanne never spoke to him again / But he still speaks to me’. Wonderful.

     There’s a sort of theatrical improvisation to Tapper’s poetry, particularly those poems fuelled by an energetic wordplay, which belies the factor of construction, as these poems all feel well thought through to the point of delivery, despite an apparent ‘looseness.’ This may have something to do with his previous experience as a theatrical set-designer but also, I suspect, it’s because of a relatively late entry into the world of poetry.

     ‘The Salt Lake of Tuz Gul’ which suggests a holiday in Turkey also echoes with rhythms which resonate with both Edward Lear and Coleridge (his ‘Mariner’) and has a sort of mini-epic feel to it. Tapper is good at suggesting links between the visual arts and literature and his ‘mock Shakespeare’ poem ‘The House of William Shakespeare’ is another playful example of this which signs off with the wonderfully comic ‘Yours sincerely / Ed Tapper / A knave and a fool.’

     In the opening poem ‘Sing Birdman’ – a reference I think to a local Plymouth character who inhabits the centre of the city, we have the following:

          In the Brechtian disco

          It’s suddenly all gone a bit Kubrickian

          Forget all about Bertolt Brecht.

          The dark is lit with a hundred little black monoliths

          The Brecht Sect Zarathustra

          In a Tik Tok idiolect thus sprecht

          ‘Here comes The Birdman’

          Entrance stage right

          Well deux ex machina Birdman

          Go on sing in their delight

          Get selfie with The Birdman

          Hold my pen while I take flight

          Now I’m The Birdman

          I’ll be The Birdman

          I’m flying over the rooftops

          In the black space convolute

          I’ve completely disappeared 

          Into the mirrorball night.

Here we have cinematic echoes, both comic (Mary Poppins, perhaps) and epic (Kubrick) which also imply a dazzling entertainment (mirrorball).

     There’s a lot more I could say about this impressive second collection which is bursting with a variety of themes and approaches but I’m going to suggest that the reader explore further in his or her own time. I’ve given a hint of the range of material here and it will be interesting to see where Tapper goes next in his explorations of sound, geography and art.

Steve Spence 4th December 2024

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