Category Archives: English Poetry

Selected Poems by Gill McEvoy (The Hedgehog Poetry Press)

Posted on February 12, 2024 by tearsinthefence
Selected Poems by Gill McEvoy (The Hedgehog Poetry Press)

The collection begins with a poem called ‘Dairy-Room in the Old Farmhouse’ – an evocative title. However, although the narrator is sampling a ‘slick of yellow cream’ there is little sweetness here. The opening lines are chilling, for the narrator feels ‘pinioned’ by silence ‘as if snakes had risen from its shelves/to turn you into stone’. The next poem ‘Catching the Turkey-Pluckers Bus’, conveys weariness, drudgery and an overhanging sense of death for there are ‘stains of blood’ and feathers trapped in the folds of the workers’ overalls. In the plucking shed itself the routine ‘goes on’ in ‘a flour/of feather and dust’ and the first of several ghosts in this collection rise up soundlessly – ‘the white plumed creatures/that we knew as geese.’

‘In the Butcher’s Shop’ gives us graphic descriptions of a place where dripping blood is like the rain that ‘plops’ against the window glass and bacon is ‘pink as skin’. An image that will stay with me is the ‘smell of sawn bone’ which, like gravel, sticks in the narrator’s throat. Even more shockingly explicit is this how-to instruction in ‘Skinning Rabbits’:

            The steps exact. First, cut off the feet,

            make an incision in the belly,

            peel back the skin – like stripping a tangerine –

            slip out the hind legs,

            ease it over the buttocks,

            up the spine, around the head,

            down the front legs.

            Discard.

            Then gut and clean.

A brutal but practical method. But what illuminates this poem is the tenderness and poignancy in the lines that follow as the skinned bodies ‘lay as innocent and pink/as babies after baths. /I could have hugged them up in big warm towels/and sung to them. // I knew I’d never eat them.

Precise, detailed, clear-eyed writing about a way of life for those who farm the land, such as the one  who can show affection for thirteen years to a pig and her ‘prolific litters’ and still have the necessary detachment, when she has outlived her usefulness, to turn her into bacon and ham, albeit remembering the pleasure of feeling her ‘bristly back’ that he loved to stroke and scratch. (‘Pig’).

I find these eight poems in the earliest part of the collection particularly strong and memorable for their mixture of brutality and compassion. But the next group, which considers the author’s family members with their foibles and idiosyncrasies, is also compelling. My favourite, although it is quite painful to read, is ‘Sunday Lunch’ where the woman in the narrative spends ‘all morning, from the very early hours,’ cooking a delicious lunch for her husband only to have it spurned and her efforts cursed because his inattention to time has caused the food to spoil. ‘In the Garden I Search for You’, a poem that is beautiful in its nostalgia, brings us another ghost, that of the mother ‘pale as the ghost swift moths that dip and rise/rise and dip/over the evening-primrose bed’. 

It is hard to select poems for comment out of Gill McEvoy’s Selected Poems. There is such choice. Two that stand out particularly, for me, are ‘Jade Plant’ and ‘Football, Kuala Lumpur’. Both share the motif of rain but in contrasting ways. In the former poem there is drought, the ‘earth is parched and shrinking’ and a strict hosepipe ban is in place in Britain. The only living thing that is flourishing is a jade plant on a windowsill above the sink. ‘Every leaf’, says the narrator, ‘a reservoir of hoarded wealth’. In Kuala Lumpur the scene is contrasting for ‘Rain loves this place, loves the way/ the open hands of city trees receive it.’ A thousand frogs and barefoot boys with footballs rejoice in ‘floods of water, /spray and steam flying’ and there is laughter from the children and ‘chortling’ from the frogs ‘that leap and spring/in their own games/on every pavement’s edge.’

I deliberately used the word ‘rejoice’ to describe the mood of this poem and although there is sadness and bloodshed throughout the collection and death is ever present, I feel the essence of the book is one of joy, or at least of wonder. A Selected Poems is a special achievement – a distillation of the author’s choice of their most significant poems. I am very glad to read and share these. 

Mandy Pannett 12th February 2024

Leave a comment

Posted in Books, English Poetry and tagged , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Pine Island by Lucy Sheerman (Shearsman Books)

Posted on February 4, 2024 by tearsinthefence
Pine Island by Lucy Sheerman (Shearsman Books)

Pine Island, apparently inspired by a writing exercise, is described as ‘a correspondence, or possibly a litany’ and comprises an intermittent series of letters, written, but never sent, to ‘a person who does or does not exist’. All the letters begin with a date and place and are addressed to ‘Dearest’. The book itself is inscribed ‘for you dearest’.

A tantalising and totally enthralling one-way correspondence. The effect is hypnotic as the reader touches the fringes of the changing seasons and moods. This narrator has a need to write, to let ‘secrets’ slip out, to write into the void. ‘The instinct to confide these hurts is overwhelming,’ she says, compelled to confess her ‘frail hopes and fears.’

Memories, with their deceptions and yearnings, form the basis of the letter/poems. ‘What moments should I hold on to?’ she asks, ‘I am standing in a bowl of light, surrounded by the chorus of birds and the sense of distance. You would not hear me calling from here and sometimes I don’t know what I would say if you could.’ 

There is a motif of birds in Pine Island. Thoughts and words are described as ‘winged’, they ‘flutter but do not move…It is a kind of seeking, this letter I write each day, trying to piece ideas together, which won’t be held.’

A thread of narrative runs through these letters – elusive and enigmatic references to the writer’s outer life – complexities involving her mother, her sister, her children. I found the passages that talk about her troubled eldest son quite painful to read, the way he is described as ‘spinning through the rooms of the house. Seeking something he could destroy … Once I would have held him and waited for the anger to subside. Gingerbread man, still running, even when gripped in the jaws of the fox… He cannot bear my touch, flinches at my approach.’ Heartbreaking, but the narrator is not asking for pity. 

Then there are the operations the fear of cutting, the dread of knives, mastectomies undergone by both the narrator and her sister. Throughout, there is blood and ‘the precision of fear pinning you into place’, the ‘fear of cutting, the dread of knives.’ 

But it is the narrator’s inner life that is so skilfully depicted by Lucy Sheerman in Pine Island and which enhances the sensation of mystery and unreality. ‘All this story will be a dream soon,’ says the narrator, ‘and you, dear reader, a fellow sleeper.’ There is silence at the heart of the book which allows the writer to make ‘a border all around me but it is filled with gaps. Light and sound seep through.’ And there are shadows too, but ‘so slight as to be imperceptible… I am clinging to the walls of this house.’ 

Silence, shadows, fear – it is all an alternative to thinking about mortality which ‘weaves around your ankles like an affectionate cat. It’s even there in the sound of the birds.’ 

These birds, as already mentioned, become a symbol, a recurring motif. Especially so are the wild geese which the narrator sees with an artist friend at Kettle’s Yard – a sight that haunts them like an augury of ‘painful, disorienting hope.’ 

Here are some of the many mentions of geese in Pine Island:

‘Now each time I hear the sound of geese I take it as a kind of sign.’

‘Ungainly geese cross the Backs … It’s a bitter day, snapping from sunshine back to shade; curls of cold seep into sleeves and collar.’ 

‘I hear a solitary goose on the river, lost.’

‘Geese on the wing, it is winter breaking apart.’

‘I never imagined I would be gripped by a sense of horror at the augury of birds. It’s not as if the knowledge would have changed what followed, the playing out of a story you belong to, like a nightmare you wait to wake from …There’s a severing that must happen’.

Pine Island is mesmerising. No review can do it justice. Lucy Sheerman is, without doubt, a writer who knows her craft. She compares it to catching rabbits: ‘I only have to wait long enough and I can lure language into an open sack.’

Mandy Pannett 4th February 2024

Leave a comment

Posted in Books, English Poetry, Letters and tagged , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Joe Hill Makes His Way Into The Castle by Katy Evans-Bush (CB Editions)

Posted on February 3, 2024 by tearsinthefence
Joe Hill Makes His Way Into The Castle by Katy Evans-Bush (CB Editions)

Katy Evans-Bush has several previous poetry books and pamphlets out, but they are very different to this new volume, produced during lockdown when – lonely and uninspired – Evans-Bush returned to a favourite poet from her teenage years, the countercultural anarchist poet Kenneth Patchen. As well as re-engaging with his poetry, Evans-Bush cut out phrases, mixed them up and used a handful to riff on for a whole new series of poems: a kind of Dada-esque starting point that was quickly subsumed, overwritten and processed into her own work.

Having said that, Bush-Evans seems quietly paranoid about acknowledging her inspirational material: there’s a long list of ‘Source Notes’, listing the individual Patchen poems she took phrases from at the end of the book. For me, this is totally unnecessary, since each poem is titled ‘From lines by Kenneth Patchen #(1-51)’ and the phrases are adapted, recontextualised or reworked into new texts. 

Like Patchen’s own writing, these poems are by turns emotional, confessional, political or declamatory; sometimes relying on simplistic stories, emotion and opinions:

     What are these stories? Are they for self justification,

     & only when we think we’re caught? Is this really

     the best we can do?     [‘From lines by Kenneth Patchen #38’]

The poems are best when they look out at the world rather than inside, to what the poet is missing or feeling, whether that is sorry for herself or angry at what’s going on:

     No no no Oh we here are living out our

     little pretend lives drinking our beer feeling

     bored or annoyed no no the pandemic the

     three-storey lockdowns with wine and jig-

     saws and too much Amazon piss off you

    old men with your paranoid answers no

     don’t you come to me chatting your facile

     self-satis     [#34]

What is said is totally understandable, and I imagine fairly representative of how many of us were feeling, but it doesn’t make for great poetry. Better is #37, also self-reflective but more structured and orderly, considered:

     You’d be a ghost too

                                        Worn to a stub

     Expectoplasm

                                        A thing of the past

     Don’t touch a thing

                                        Oh wait it can’t

     It’s a Zen thing

                                        About opening up

     Examining yourself

Evans-Bush understands, however, that ‘there’s always another viewpoint’ [#15] and that

     The origin of this, and this, about which we know nothing,

     becomes its own folkloric meaning & open to interpretation,

     thus nothing.       [#14]

That ‘nothing’ hovers around the edges of lockdown depression:

     It wasn’t much of a summer. You could as well

     write the biography of the northern rain as sit

     on a deck chair in a sweeping expanse.      [#13]

but there is also some gentle wit, often at the expense of the narrator:

    The whisky wraps its duplicitous arms around me;

     I always pull at a party and this one’s just the whisky

     & Robert Burns & me.

and by #44 even the author is ‘So tired of all this pathos, this emotion, all these / particulars’.

However, in her ‘Preface’, Evans-Bush quite rightly suggests that the world now (or as the book went to print) is even darker than it was back in lockdown, and that her worries about ‘the material beginning to feel dated were misplaced.’ Instead, she now sees the book as ‘like a map’ as well as ‘being like a diary, or a phone’. (The latter is a reference to #29 where the narrator speaks directly to Patchen through an [imaginary] tin can and string telephone.)

A map is a good thing. It suggests finding a way, but also allows for the fact it is only one possible way of offering directions and locations, only one way of understanding landscape and place, only one set of symbols and shorthand. So, your reading of this book may be different, less melancholy than mine; you may concentrate on the revolutionary zeal and optimistic declamations scattered throughout the text. Either way, this is a fascinating project, a brilliant way of engaging with Patchen’s poetry, and the legacy of Joe Hill. The penultimate poem, #50, notes that ‘We find / out by being & then it’s too late’, but we also find out by engaging with being as it happens, as we go through life. And trying to find the truth, perhaps even having a private revolution:

     & we all know, everybody knows, that

     truth is always what they don’t say. So

     shut up, sing up, kiddos. What a revolution.

Marc Bolan (a kiddo who sang up) quite rightly stated that ‘You can’t fool the children of the revolution’ and although the 60s dream turned into a 1970s hangover and never bore the utopia hoped for, lockdown and politicians’ antics since, seem to me to slowly, ever so slowly, be provoking dissent and a desire for change. Evans-Bush is a voice to listen to, as indeed is Patchen’s; and thanks are due to CB Editions for publishing this persuasive, personal, original and revolutionary collection.

Rupert Loydell 3rd February 2024

Leave a comment

Posted in Books, English Poetry and tagged , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Miniskirts in the Waste Land by Pratibha Castle (The Hedgehog Poetry Press)

Posted on January 2, 2024 by tearsinthefence
Miniskirts in the Waste Land by Pratibha Castle (The Hedgehog Poetry Press)

There is much to enjoy in this engaging and intriguing pamphlet. Personally, I appreciate the metonymic quality whereby associations conjured up by ‘Miniskirts’ on one hand and ‘The Waste Land’ on the other, interact. 

To begin with The Waste Land. There are direct references to Eliot’s poem which the narrator reads at school, and which gets her ‘in the gut’. Quotations from the text seem to relate directly to her situation with references to ‘them pills I took/to bring it off’ and ‘hurry up, it’s time’. Tarot cards, like knickers, are checked for ‘propitious signs’.

But there is more than a poetry text here. The mythical wasteland overshadows the narrator throughout her own quest for peace, love and identity, and the unhealing wound of the fisher king is ever present in the many allusions to blood. Poppies, in the title poem, stain ‘like spotting blood’, the narrator is fearful of losing her grip on the ‘Octopus Ride’, losing ‘the blood clot/that might have been you’, grapes eaten in pregnancy are ‘bruised clots’ (‘The Quickening’) in the same way that baby beetroot with bruised leaves swell ‘in the dark/like clotted blood.’ (‘St. Jude of the Lost Cause’). Even CND signs and graffiti painted on street walls is a reminder of the bleeding Jesus hearts of the convent days. (‘My Saviour’).

This is the ever-present backcloth to the ‘Miniskirts’ poems which take the reader in the rapid pace of short lines from Notting Hill to India. Settings are vividly depicted not least in the flow of place names: Portobello, Maida Vale, Holland Park, Goa and Mahatma Gandhi Road. Sensory details are bright and evocative – there are songs and shouts, bric-a-brac and cheap perfumes. A wealth of details that bring time and place to life.

Yet, in images of both countries, there is squalor and decay and an overarching sense of menace and violence. Sunlight splinters a window, in the market there is a ‘carnage’ of ‘jaundiced’ cabbages and a ‘tulip, crushed’. (‘Reflections’). This is bed-sit land where ‘flies from black bags’ spill out into the mould of gutters.

And always there is loneliness and a search for identity which, like questions asked in the wasteland or an artichoke being stripped, reveal ‘mucky secrets’ with ‘each peeled off self/more naked than the last’. (‘Artichokes’).

All the poems in Pratibha Castle’s beautifully constructed book could be seen as questions needed to heal a wounded self, a wounded land. Are they the right questions? Are there answers? There is tenderness in ‘Raat Ki Rani (Queen of the Night) where love is ‘weighty as peace’ and these lines from the first verse do suggest a resolution, a sense of healing:

‘He beckons her to the bed

where his body curls,

a question mark,

on the scarlet quilt,

an invitation she accepts,

entering the current

of his caring as if into

Arabian Ocean spray’

Mandy Pannett 2nd January 2024

Leave a comment

Posted in Books, English Poetry and tagged , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

A Handsel: New and Collected Poems by Liz Lochhead (Polygon)

Posted on December 9, 2023 by tearsinthefence
A Handsel: New and Collected Poems by Liz Lochhead (Polygon)

At some point when I was at university back in the 1980s I saw Liz Lochhead read her poems. I’ve always assumed it was at college itself, but my writing lecturer, who I have recently been in touch with again, has no memory of it. Anyway, one poem that I have always remembered utilised the names of artists for paint colours. The line ‘Avoid the Van Gogh, you’ll not get it off’ was the one that stuck in my mind. Over the years I’ve tried to find a copy and failed. There’s nothing online, neither text nor performance video (Lochhead’s Scottish accent really helps the poem), and the poem was absent from both the different Selecteds I picked up over the years; and, of course, not knowing what it was called didn’t help.

Thankfully, ‘Vymura: The Shade Card Poem’ is present and correct in A Handsel, a handsome and impressive new book from Polygon. It would be unfair to claim the poem as Lochhead’s best, but it is just as funny as I remember. Here’s the third verse:

     She said, ‘Fellow next door just sanded his floor
     and rollered on Roualt and Rothko.
     His hall, och it’s Pollock an he
     did his lounge in soft Hockney
      with his corner picked out in Kokoshka.

Those near- and sometimes forced- rhymes are exquisite. 

Whilst it’s unfair to represent Lochhead’s work with such a lighthearted performance piece, however cleverly written, it does highlight the down-to-earth and accessible nature of the poetry here. There are poems about friendship, relationships and the everyday; poems for friends, sometimes famous ones (Edwin Morgan, Carol Ann Duffy and Jackie Kay); as well as poems for occasions such as weddings, birthdays and anniversaries.

She is also good at capturing moments, in strong simple phrases and images. Here is the fifth poem, of nine, in a sequence about the construction of a new library at St. Andrews:

     Listen,
     chilly birdsong,
     sprinkling icewater
     over the garden, a tap
     turning on and off again.
     Library silence.

I’m less enamoured with the dialect poems in this volume, and the versions from The Grimm Sisters, which seem very much of their time: the 1980s when feminist retellings were de rigeur. The title poem from Dreaming Frankenstein is much better, a triptych that not only allows the creature to speak but turns into a lustful declaration in ‘Smirnoff for Karloff’:

     Sure, you can smoke in bed.
     It’s a free country.
     Let me pour you a stiff drink.
     You’re shivering.
     Well, you know, what they say, if you
     can’t take the cold then get outta 
     the icebox. What’s that?
     Smirnoff?
     Well, you know, Mr Karloff,
     I used to think an aphrodisiac was some
     kinda confused Tibetan mountain goat
     with a freak-out hair-do until I
     met my monster and my monster
     met his maker.
     Oh yeah.

     That’s who been sleeping in my bed.
     Some old surprise. Oh goody.
     Long time no see.
     Ain’t going to let nothing come between
     My monster and me.

This made me laugh out loud. Feistiness is a common factor throughout the book, Lochhead is upfront about sex, lust, love and society, and how she feels about it all. But not everything is slapstick or fun & games, there are gentle, inquisitive and romantic poems here, political diatribes, human observation and comment.

None of it, however, is mannered or ‘poetic’ in the bad sense. Lochhead uses everyday language without any false metaphors or allusions. It’s down to earth, sometimes messy, poetry, although when the work seems to be too confessional, Lochhead is always ready to undermine it with a pun or self-deflating reference. The closing poem, ‘In Praise of Old Vinyl’ (one of my favourites), is a case in point, where the narrator revisits her record collection:

               Old vinyl . . . old vinyl
               Nostalgia’s everything it used to be
               When you’re half-pissed and playing that old LP

Over three-plus pages we get namechecks or quotations from ‘Dusty and Joni and Nico and Emmylou / Dylan, Van-the-man and Rhymin’ Simon too . . .’ along with Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits and Elvis Costello, not to mention glam rockers and earlier jazzers and stars from the Sixties. But as the reverie continues and spirals out of control, with the speaker turning into a bohemian hippy, she pulls the rug out from herself, misquoting Paul Simon: ‘Mama, please don’t take my Parlophone away.’

The poet, who sometimes inhabits a character called ‘The Dirty Diva’, is on full throttle throughout, roaring through 460 pages at top speed. Maybe it’s me, but she seems to have been somewhat forgotten as a poet, and she shouldn’t be. Her quirky, individual and accessible voice deserves more acclaim and attention, and I hope this wonderful volume will help.

Rupert Loydell 9th December 2023


Leave a comment

Posted in Books, English Poetry and tagged , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Uneasy Pieces by Nancy Campbell (Guillemot Press)

Posted on December 3, 2023 by tearsinthefence
Uneasy Pieces by Nancy Campbell (Guillemot Press)

Guillemot Press, the publisher of Uneasy Pieces, describes the work as ‘a score composed in uncanny spaces and around silence.’  I find this a perfect description of the way the pieces are orchestrated with subtle rhythms, recurring motifs and a sense of the implicit and understated conveyed in fragments, pauses and a sense of the half remembered.

The idea of a musical score is enhanced by the structure. There is a Prelude and a Coda, twelve numbered and named pieces of different lengths, and several passages which are set out with the typographical symbol denoting a paragraph but which I prefer to interpret as intervals. Some of the pieces suggest a thematic sequence, others appear non-consecutive, linear only in layout. 

The poems in Uneasy Pieces are written in the form of prose. There are small, incomplete narratives within each one – vignettes, snapshots, moments caught and held in time. What I find most compelling about the collection is the strangeness of it all – a pervading atmosphere of silence, shadows and the unknown. The Prelude sets the tone with its title ‘Somnus’ – the personification of Sleep, brother of Death and the son of Night. We are in the darkness of the Underworld where the sun can never enter. Somnus, says Ovid, had 1000 sons, the Somnia – shapes who appear in dreams mimicking many forms, human, beastlike or inanimate. Later in the collection the sons of Somnus reappear briefly, mentioned as a possible ‘shorthand for multitudes’ which ‘proliferate as meanings do in dreams.’

An uncanny, scary atmosphere. But what I think is the most mysterious element in the poems is the passage about ‘Blots’ which seem to be ‘secret signs’ inscribed by the pen, hints and suggestions open, like dreams, to countless interpretations. Then there is the concept of ‘Mise en abyme’ – an infinitely recurring sequence of mirroring. In ‘Uneasy Pieces’, the narrator says, there are ‘letters within letters with each of my messages to you folded inside the previous one until the words get so small it would be better to say nothing at all.’

Uneasy Pieces is a melodious, lyrical collection of poems, inspiring in their craft and cadences. One example that appeals to me concerns ‘the artisan of light’ whose role is ‘to bluff the passing hours, to cast doubt upon edges … to diffuse truth … the room grows dustier when dust cannot be seen, the room grows older as shadows sag into corners, for what is  a shadow if not the dirt left to us as light thins and what is filth but the torn and cast-off skin of things.’

Juxtapositions are frequently unexpected and startling. In the middle of a list of Christmas images – mulled wine and chandeliers, snow angels and mistletoe – we are suddenly presented with hares that ‘hang upside down from hooks in the butcher’s. Snowfall, which ‘sometimes looks purple, yellow, blue like the bruise upon the arm you cannot move’, reveals ‘the pale architecture of Liege’ when it’s seen ‘through dirty windows at dawn.’ The third poem ‘Michel’ concerns someone whose name ‘means red heart in another language’. This same Michel, we are told, has had ‘someone else’s heart inside him for eleven years.’

I love the whole collection of Uneasy Pieces with each individual poem perfectly crafted like a cameo. They belong together, each ‘movement’ enhancing the whole, but if I had to choose one piece as most memorable, I would select ‘Unorthodox’, the sixth poem in the sequence, for its tender depiction of gradual loss of memory. An earlier reference to two volumes of the Oxford Shorter Dictionary that the protagonist would stand on and ‘solve any problem’ that life presented, becomes extra poignant when, at the end of the poem, everything is packed away in boxes and given away as no longer useful or wanted. Included are ‘both volumes of the Shorter English’.

Uneasy Pieces by Nancy Campbell is beautifully produced by Guillemot Press. A small book but one to treasure.

Mandy Pannett 3rd December 2023

1 Comment

Posted in Books, English Poetry and tagged , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

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

Leave a comment

Posted in American Poetry, Books, Criticism, English Poetry and tagged , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

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

1 Comment

Posted in Books, English Poetry and tagged , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

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



1 Comment

Posted in Books, English Poetry and tagged , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

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

2 Comments

Posted in Books, English Poetry and tagged , , , . Bookmark the permalink.
← Older Posts
Newer Posts →