Category Archives: Irish Poetry

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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Tears in the Fence 80 is out!

Posted on August 15, 2024 by tearsinthefence
Tears in the Fence 80 is out!

Tears in the Fence 80 is now available at http://tearsinthefence.com/pay-it-forward and features poetry, prose poetry, translations and fiction by Joanna Nissel, Claire HM, Morag Kiziewicz, Geraldine Clarkson, Mary Michaels, Hanne Bramness translated by Anna Reckin, Jill Jones, John Freeman, Peter Dent, Cindy Botha, Lucy Hamilton, Michael Farrell, Rosie Garland, Tiffany Farr, Biljana Scott, Peter Larkin, Jane Wheeler, Robert Vas Dias, Kate Firth, Norman Jope, Steve Spence, Andrew Henon, Mark Goodwin, Randolph Healy, Jennifer K Dick, Lynne Wycherley, Eliza O’Toole, Nigel Jarrett, Danielle Hubbard, Vanessa Ackerman, Caroline Maldonado, Richard Foreman, Huw Gwynn-Jones, Kathleen McPhilemy, Charles Wilkinson, Rachel Spence, Valerie Bridge, Lesley Burt, Vivienne Freeman, Jonathan Catherall, Elizabeth Cook, Susanne Lansman, Beth Davyson, Mary McCollum, Evelyn Schlag translated by Karen Leeder, Andrew Duncan, Cathra Kelliher, David Punter and Kareem Tayyar.

The critical section consists of the Editorial by David Caddy, Andrew Duncan on Jeremy Reed, Jack Martell on Jack Martell on Laura Oldfield Ford, David Annwn on Randolph Healey, David Caddy on Emily Dickinson’s Letters and Natural Magic, Gemma Garcia on Beatriz Hausner, Steve Spence on Ian Seed, Mandy Pannett on Séan Street, Norman Jope on Sicilian Poetry, Rosa Parker-Cochran on Ken Edwards, Joanna Nissel on Elvire Roberts, Rachel Spence, Steve Spence on Alasdair Paterson, Elaine Randell on Brian Marley, Steve Spence on Fran Lock. Morag Kiziewicz’s Electric Blue 15 and Notes on Contributors.

This year’s annual Tears in the Fence Festival at the Stourpaine Village Hall, Stourpaine is on 20th to 22nd September in celebration of our fortieth anniversary and eighty issues. It is also a fundraiser for the journal. More details at https://tearsinthefence.com/2024-festival/

David Caddy 15th August 2024

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Birds in November by Daragh Breen (Shearsman Books)

Posted on February 22, 2024 by tearsinthefence
Birds in November by Daragh Breen (Shearsman Books)

Daragh Breen can’t help but look upwards. His eyes go to ‘Christ’s feet / nailed and fastened to the cross’; to the skies and their many ‘winged creatures’; or further still, to the moon and stars and the whole solar system beyond. When Breen stays closer to ground, he is mostly in the company of those equally ‘moon-minded’ – wolves. But as the poems unfold, it becomes clear that his looking upwards and outwards is often also a looking inwards and backwards. Birds in November is haunted by death, memory, solitude. There is a pervading sense of abandonment, or perhaps a desire for it. 

            a lit trawler

            alone in the night

            as the Universe extinguishes

            all the source of light

            along the decaying bough of its spine

There are ghosts and disappearances everywhere, and the reader is often thrown into such liminal space:

            Boxed by the white glare of the lift

            in the dark realm

            of a multi-storey car park basement,

This is only more eerie given the near total absence of people (replaced by badgers, bees, and birds – all prone to disappearing). But this absence; the frequent lack of subjectivity; the mere handful of instances of the first personal pronoun; the empty environs; none of these makes this a book of poems in which the self is absent, or others deserted. Rather, the book appears in part to be a non-egoistic search for that very self by perpetual half-light (there is a constant candle-flicker). In trying to find to find it and sometimes to lose it, Breen finds others, memories of others, shadows, or nothing at all. Just ‘a lingering smell of smoke’. 

But Breen’s attention is also on the world and its other inhabitants. The book charts his search for purchase through encounters with wild animals, pets, and vanishing crows. Breen constantly contrasts and elides a series of opposites that in review sound trivial – heaven and earth, light and dark, life and death, real and unreal – in ways that are decidedly not. The treatment is more oblique than it looks. In places, it is too indirect and obscure, in others, not enough. But, aside from the occasional clunk, it is very deft work that rewards careful reading.

One of the stronger and more straightforward passages of the book is the titular sequence.  The writing is precise and imagistic, but in the context of the whole can be read many ways. The second section reads:

            Above a damp field

            a ghosting of birds

            against the low winter sky,

            seen and then unseen,

            tilting out of sight

            before teasing themselves

            back from some other world.

            They have been flitting in

            and out of existence

            all morning,

            silently returning

            in dribs and drabs,

            unwilling to stay too long

            in this grey realm.

In a more complicated vein, the opening piece (‘Navigatio’) reinterprets the tale of Brendan the Navigator, an Irish Abbot who allegedly undertook an epic voyage to find the Garden of Eden in the 6th century. He travelled alone at sea for seven years. Breen digs up another Irishman of extreme solitude. He recasts the tale in new light; the result is solemn and lonesome. It initiates Breen’s search for a hold on the world, his grieving for it, and his companionship with its creatures.

            the voice of the ice-fields humming their own lament

            was finally heard, as something seemed to have finally

            broken deep within.

And in the following passage:

            the wind taunts the shoreline

            with an intensity that suggests that if it

            were to suddenly stop, and all was shocked still,

            then every single thing would disappear.

Brendan is not the only lonely company Breen keeps. He also mentions by name Gagarin, Armstrong, and Woolf. Woolf is relevant for obvious reasons, but all three are appropriate company for the same reason as Brendan. Two walked in worlds of their own; the other gave voice to the worry that we all might. Reading Birds, one occasionally gets the impression that Breen feels he does too. David Bradshaw, in his introduction to The Waves, describes the novel as having a ‘profound sense of separation, even solipsism’ whilst at the same time invoking a kind of collective consciousness. Though stylistically very different, the two writers are of a piece in feeling the allure of solipsism and sharp pangs of grief. 

In Breen’s case, this grief is most keenly felt in ‘Libretto’, which opens with a tragic refrain from Dido’s Lament. The poem ends:

            telling us how their mother

            had endlessly listened to Kathleen Ferrier

            for months after their father died,

            singing along through clenched tears

            as the Heavens rained sparrows about her

            where she sat,

            and that they couldn’t get close to her

            because of all the birds.

            Everything denied flight,

            Everything laid in frail earth.

Birds in November is direct and at times difficult. It strikes cool at first and is occasionally too laboured. The book moves mostly in sequence and relies heavily on motif; it is tricky to take piece by piece and it is surprisingly easy to miss what is in plain sight. But there is much compassion, and it is not all sober.  In any case, Breen’s pithy writing and haunting imagery are well worth any patience they ask for. 

Samuel Bowerman 22nd February 2024

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The Fox the Whale and the Wardrobe by Dónall Dempsey (Dempsey & Windle)

Posted on April 2, 2023 by tearsinthefence
The Fox the Whale and the Wardrobe by Dónall Dempsey (Dempsey & Windle)

An intriguing title leads the reader into a kaleidoscopic and scintillating poetry collection by Dónall Dempsey. There is a great variety of wit and humour in these poems. ‘My Molecules are Revolting’ uses dialogue as a device to illustrate the repartee between the Universe and a couple of molecules that currently inhabit the narrator’s body while they wait for ‘the Big Bang/of Death’ and the chance of belonging to a more interesting formation in the future.

An amusing concept but it is always Death that hovers in the background. In the title poem there is the nightmarish texture of an aunt’s fox-fur stole which has ‘beady eyes alive with death.’ Every item of clothing in the dark wardrobe is ‘rotten now/eaten by time.’ Everything once belonging to loved ones is dead.  ‘I cry for the death of summer,’ says the narrator. ‘I cry for the death of them all.’

     Concern for the environment is a key feature throughout the collection. ‘Regeneration’ imagines the transformation of furniture back into its existence in the forest. Even the floor uproots itself while books shed their words ‘becoming/leaves on these trees.’ ‘The Tales Told by Birds’ creates a shocking impact. Humour, in the description of a world now empty of humans, is both surreal and cartoonish as ‘a dinosaur takes/the moving stairs/a pterodactyl hunts for bargains’ but the reality is that humans have nearly destroyed the earth and they themselves only survive ‘in the stories that birds tell/to frighten their little hatchlings.’

     ‘Words loved him/and would do anything/he said.’ This is Dónall Dempsey’s description of his uncle, but I think it would apply equally well to the poet himself, his love of life and living things, his sense of joy. A robin that has flown into a church is not just hopping from pew to pew but is ‘a miracle/ made real/its sheer joy of being’ as it dances on the altar and becomes the music of Hayden. Reflected ‘in the gold/of the tabernacle’ it is ‘the secret/prayer/of the moment.’ (‘The Emperor of Now’).

     The poem ‘Taking Back the Moment’ continues this sense of the here and now– its transience, its uniqueness. Memories, which are seemingly ‘lost for ever,’ trapped like sunbeams in a room, are dragged back by the narrator from a past which is sluggish as ‘a giant in a palace/made of years’ so that, as he says, he can ‘take the moment and flee/far far/into the future/where nothing can touch me.’ A haven of sorts, a sanctuary for the ‘one perfect moment’ caught in flight like ‘birds/writing themselves —unwriting themselves/across a page of sky.’

     There is much to be enjoyed in this collection – delightful, original love poems, a feast of epigraphs and literary references, poems that take a topic and turn it on its head. But I’ll end this review by mentioning two poems that particularly appeal to me.

     First is the lyrical, descriptive ‘…In Forgetful Snow’ which is inspired by a quotation from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land: ‘Winter kept us warm, covering/Earth in forgetful snow.’ Here the snow falls heavily on what appears to be a graveyard with stone carved angels guarding the dead. T            his snowfall erases everything – time, memory, ‘the world’ – replacing it with ‘silence’ disturbed only by the croak of a raven ‘as land and sky become one.’  Everything, ‘even the horizon,’ says the observer, ‘is being filled in.’

     But my favourite of all the poems is ‘Nugae’ which I assume is Latin for ‘Ramblings’. Here torrential rain falls on both Catullus in 55 BC and on the narrator in AD 2020.  The humour in these lines is enchanting:

Vivamus … atque amemus!

he tells his rain.

We should live … we should love!

I tell mine.

And then the realisation:

His then and my now

almost one and the same

and the glimpse of a moment, a small epiphany: 

…in that instant

we both catch a glimpse

of the other time

falling like rain.

Mandy Pannett 2nd April 2023

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Darkness Between Stars by John F. Deane & James Harpur (The Irish Pages Press)

Posted on January 11, 2023 by tearsinthefence
Darkness Between Stars by John F. Deane & James Harpur (The Irish Pages Press)

The authors’ own Introduction to this beautifully produced hardback book notes that Deane and Harpur 

   have known each other for many years and shared readings, 
   discussions and introduced each other’s work, finding friendship
   and mutual encouragement in discovering that [they] were both 
   fascinated not only by the life of poetry but also by the divine, 
   the sacred, ‘God’.

It is this fascination, and the writing out of it, which underpins this ‘joint selection’ of poems: although there are poems about a wide range of subjects, they are, the authors suggest, ‘poems in search of God’, poems which ‘bear witness to […] probings into the ineffable’.

This raises two issues. Firstly, I hoped for more of a poetic conversation, and not a selection of poems by each author, the one followed by the other; perhaps even new work, produced in collaboration or as a direct response to the other’s work. Secondly, an issue the authors are all too clearly aware of, that faith rooted in specific religion is somewhat out of fashion, as is the idea (put forward in the Introduction) that poetry ‘springs from our argument with God, or the absence of God.’ 

I find the idea of poetry somehow being inspired by the divine or a muse, somewhat antiquated, as I do ‘the search for meaning, for certainties’, which the authors suggest (again in their Introduction) has never been more important, particularly as a result of Covid, but also generally. I am not alone, however, in accepting the notion of truths, plural, rather than Truth, isolate and declamatory. Recent developments in the sciences, engineering, the arts, psychology and sociology have shown us how much knowledge is tentative and of its time, rather than fixed, final and certain.

It would be wrong to suggest that Deane and Harpur are in any way dogmatic, evangelical or theologically certain: both write poems that question and consider, even when addressing the divine directly, both doubt and debate. Although Harpur’s poem ‘from St Symeon Stylites’ is about and perhaps spoken by St. Symeon, we might consider the poet’s voice too, admitting that 

   Most days I think I’m split in two, 
   A spirit yearning for the light
   And a body of delinquent appetites.

That phrase, ‘delinquent appetites’ seems to be both enticing and full of self-disgust, and although the poem is full of lonely, resistant prayer it ends up with a doubting question: ‘Sometimes I wonder if I pray / To keep the Lord away?’

Deane often explores his belief and doubt through revisions of the Gospel stories. ‘Words of the Unknown Soldier’ notes, in very un-soldier-like language,  how ‘he stumped us, this Jesus of yours, with his / walking on water, fandango, entrechat, glissade’, whilst the lengthy sonnet sequence ‘According to Lydia’ brings a feminine point-of-view to bear on key moments, finally countering imagined ‘onslaughts of foolishness’ with the beatitudinal ‘blessed is the one who does not lose faith in me.’

Mostly, however, both authors choose to see or encounter the divine reflected or present in the physical world around them. Bones, birds, star clusters, woods and corn circles are all cause to stop and consider man’s place in the grand scheme of things. In fact, man’s relationship to the natural world, and even more specifically the ‘Christian failure to incorporate the reality of evolution and its consequences’ is what Deane suggests has ‘alienated thinking people’ from ‘”traditional” religious tenets and activities.’

‘Poetry, God and the Imagination: a Dialogue’, actually a 2018 email correspondence, ends the book, and in many ways it is the best part, offering up a frank and thoughtful discussion to the reader. Deane’s Catholicism, or at least his Catholic upbringing, is very much on show as he suggests that ‘To accept evolution is inevitably to deny the doctrine of “original sin” and even that of the “Immaculate Conception”. I don’t know about the latter as that veers off into ridiculous discussions about human purity, virginity and sexlessness, but the former was always explained to me, by the Baptist church I attended as a child, as a matter of relationship to God, not a physical genetic inheritance!

The discussion is wide-ranging, covering the spiritual, the poetic and writerly,  as well as religious institutions and mystical theology. Surprisingly, Deane turns out to be ‘a devoted follower’ of Teilhard de Chardin, the author of a cosmic theology informed by both evolution and philosophy, whilst Harpur prefers ‘a multi-construct Christ figure’ although he admits to mostly trying to focus on his ‘own interior silence’.

Both seem to agree that religion is ‘rooted in mystery, epiphany and personal experience’ and rather worrying that ‘that’s what it shared with poetry.’ Or should, because Deane is adamant that ‘too much contemporary poetry […] seems vapid and imitative, saying nothing and saying it well.’ In the same way, he notes that ‘it has always amazed me how the churches got it wrong’, although later he redirects the discussion because ‘we are not going to get too far with the theological and rational surveying of the world and poetry.’

Later on there are mentions of Simone Weil, Richard Rohr, Yeats and Hopkins, but the main drift of the conversation seems to be towards a critique of poetry that society thinks can be measured in financial terms, and then a suggestion that the mystical, inspired or ineffable is a counter to this. Whilst I agree that Western neoliberal capitalism and the measuring of anything only in terms of profit, potential or otherwise, is wrong, poetry has always had more cultural than financial value. I do not, however, want creative writing made mystical. Language is what we use to think and talk to each other, it is how we process the world; when we recognise how fluid and full of possibility it is, we can create anew. Whilst much of the poetry here is beautifully worked, thoughtful and intriguing, it does not in the main evidence what many of us would think of as a ‘radical approach’ which Deane suggests is needed. The re-mystification and obscuration of poetry and how it can or might be written does no-one any favours.

Rupert Loydell 11th January 2023


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Tears in the Fence 76 is out!

Posted on October 14, 2022 by tearsinthefence
Tears in the Fence 76 is out!

Tears in the Fence 76, 208 pp, is now available at http://tearsinthefence.com/pay-it-forward and features poetry, prose poetry, multilingual poetry, fiction and flash fiction by David Annwn, Charles Wilkinson, Lydia Harris, Jane Robinson, Daragh Breen, L.Kiew, Valerie Bridge, Sarah Watkinson, Poonam Jain, Helen Scadding, Alan Baker, Paul Marshall, Peter Dent, Andrew Henon, Mohammad Razai, Jennie Byrne, Luke Emmett, Mark Goodwin, Eleanor Rees, Sophie Segura, Robin Walter, Jill Eulalie Dawson, Rachael Clyne, Wendy Clayton, Mike McNamara, Diana Powell, Simon Jenner, Rodney Wood, Janet Hancock, Hannah Linden, Elizabeth McClaire Roberts, Michael Henry, Alan Dent, Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana, Birgitta Bellême, Melanie Ann Vance, Mary Michaels, Huw Gwynn-Jones, Mike Duggan and John Kinsella, from Metaphysics.

The critical section consists of Joanna Nissel’s Editorial, Mark Prendergast in Conversation with Abigail Chabitnoy, Sam Warren-Miell on the British Right’s world of poetry, Robert Hampson on Nothing is being suppressed by Andrew Duncan, Barbara Bridger on Maria Stadnicka, Aidan Semmens on Jeremy Hilton, Barbara Bridger on Sarona Abuake,  Kathleen McPhilemy on Giles Goodland, Sarah Watkinson on Steve Ely, Alan Baker on Lila Matsumoto, Kathy Miles on John Freeman, Marcus Slease on Chrissy Williams, Carla Scarano on the Poetry of Ian Seed, Vicky Grut on Wendy Erskine, Olivia Tuck on Victoria Kennefick, Andrew Duncan on Khaled Hakim, Graham Harthill on Gerry Loose, Siân Thomas on Pnina Shinebourne, Mandy Pannett on Caroline Maldonado, Paul Matthews on Kay Syrad, Norman Jope on Paul Celan translated by Joan Boase-Beier, Kiran Bhat on Rishi Dastidar, Guy Russell on Derek Gromadzki, Rupert Loydell and Steve Waling in Correspondence, Morag Kiziewicz ‘s Electric Blue 11 and Notes On Contributors .

David Caddy 14th October 2022

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things that happen by Maurice Scully (Shearsman Books)

Posted on June 3, 2021 by tearsinthefence
things that happen by Maurice Scully (Shearsman Books)

Maurice Scully, in my garden 20 years ago, advised me on pruning a young laburnum tree. My dilemma was the removal of one of three main branches. He hardly hesitated, “Take out the middle one.” Was it the tree he was considering or was it symbolic of something else?

Writing ‘about’ something (how many poets continue to introduce their work, ‘This poem is about’?) renders it culpable of being a descriptive exercise, whereas writing ‘through’ something opens levels of greater interest and realization.

                  the middle of March I’m

                  in the tropics suddenly

                  inside the arctic circle not

                  dizzy but waiting to bloom….      ‘ABC’

Maurice Scully’s expansive consideration in ‘things that happen’ moves through such realisations and discoveries.

                  heavy chestnut blossom by a shed wall by a river.

                  Mud & buried bicycles & reflections in the channel.

                  Fifty-seven seagulls on a parti-coloured roof.

                  Your move. Maytime.

                  To swink in this railway station buying time

                  to think, static, in kenetic railway context by the rails.

                                                      ‘A Record of Emotions: Side A’

The word ‘swink’, meaning to work under difficult conditions for long hours is key to much of what unfolds in this collection of writing – it is a huge testament to application, curiosity and the poets unfurling poetic oeuvre since 1987 and places Maurice Scully in the forefront of the Irish Modernist canon.

The word ‘swink’, so playful, indulging as it does in the act of pushing ‘ink’ forming words from that act; those words, in recognition of each other, dropping a ‘wink’ – and without stretching the point too far, the unmistakable ‘swin(g)’ of language, Gaeilge, Italian, French, English and a smattering of Sesotho, at this poets disposal. (There are helpful notes at the end of the book.)

Small turns and light twists in fleeting moments belong to the realm of these poems as much as longer sweeps of time so the reader becomes sensitive to seconds as much as decades.

                  the pillar vine

                  hacks this pliant

                  this pliancy

                  this young

                  vineplant attached

                  to the rocky

                  edges 

                  of the pillar

                  & in a rain

                  of names

                  absorbency

                  storyline

                                    two-way

         three-way

                  in section

                                             vertical

cut across &

                  down

                  rest/pillar/

                  shock – curl –

                  happiness

                  peace/the pillar

                  the vine the

                  soft

                  white the pillar

                  the soft the

                  light

                  vine then just

                  don’t think

                  don’t

                  look don’t

                  brea-

                  the.              ‘The Pillar & The Vine’

Time is held in this meditation – the deliberation lonely, yet filled with succour for both its author and for any reader. So often Maurice Scully’s movement of thought and consideration is through biological fascination.

There is a tacit agreement from the outset that a reader must indulge him/herself in these poems as much as Maurice Scully has done in writing them although there still remains a considerable amount of work to be done by the reader. That said, enjoyment arrives quickly when immersing oneself because of the freedom arrived at in their writing – as if the articulation of the poet’s will is subordinate

or given over to the ‘experience in itself’ as Paul Perry says.

                  driving in a red dustcloud

                  for hours years wandering

                  wondering how to

                  connect

                  this stone to that hut with

                  precision tact     two hands one

                  gift     wait listen     right

                  left     shimmering elastic

                  wallhome

                  (not any other barrier

                  But a breeze over it)

                  welcoming.         conduit. ‘Steps’

Winks and nods arrive with great fun too, as in the Jacques Prévertesque,

‘To make a table / you need wood / to make the wood / you need a tree / to make the tree / you need a seed / to make the seed / you need a fruit / to make the fruit / you need a flower / to make a table / you need a flower.’ 

                                                            ‘A Record of Emotion, Side B’

Elsewhere the wonderfully surreal/absurdist,

                  One day a bankman came to the tree with his money

                  and sat under it balancing a book. But he soon fell

                  asleep and began to dream. And in his dream he saw

                  a bankman falling asleep under a tree with his money

                  and a book and beginning to dream of a man dreaming

                  he was making money out of a book (in which he

                  featured quite prominently) under a tree beside a

                  windowsill upon which were two young caterpillars,

                  laughing, white and green, Fat Caterpillar and Fatter

                  Caterpillar, that dreamed they lived on a windowsill

                  under a tree.  ‘Two Caterpillars’

Reading things that happen can be like flicking from station to station on a radio or channel to channel on TV. After a few minutes the senses become absorbed in the continuity of disruption itself.

There is humanity, adventure, enjoyment and skill in the 609 pages of this book.         

By the way, the laburnum tree is thriving and in flower as I write.

Ric Hool  3rd June 2021

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simmering of a declarative void by Robert Kiely (The 87 Press)

Posted on January 31, 2021 by tearsinthefence
simmering of a declarative void by Robert Kiely (The 87 Press)

We poetry fans are well-accustomed to techniques for maximizing indeterminacy: cut-ups; parataxis; minuscules; lacunae; absent or unmatched punctuation; exiguous titling; wide leading to disassociate each line from the next; words used deictically but without their situation-of-utterance; and severely occluded references. To take an example:

my mooring is mist and zoos
and with no sunset i roll on
the sky bends buildings
an asteroid is no clarity

Some readers think such poems don’t like them. Others that they are just shy. This poet, after all, used to self-identify as ‘RK’. Others still will mark the contemporary ambience of disparate and disjointed information. What we are no longer subject to, however, is the elitism of old High Modernism, which once presumed a reader with a lifetime’s ticket to the leisured classes, but nowadays one with fifteen minutes to spare, a search-engine and a love of puzzles. So, the quatrain above – thanks, Internet – is a reworking of an eighth-century Chinese poem by Meng Haoran. And its first line’s unaccountable reference to ‘zoos’, for instance, is a pun on the characters zhŭ (islet) and zhōu (boat). Boom, boom! Besides the genial waggishness, the repeated point is that there’s nothing hermetic at the rainbow’s end; the pleasure is in the process whereby, among other things, you discover some Tang poetry that you’d’ve never gotten around to otherwise.

So far so standard. What makes this stand out, though, among the interesting groups of poets associated with vitrines like Streetcake, Spam, Crater and The 87, whose linguistic innovations encompass cut-ups, parataxis, minuscules, lacunae…? Mostly, in this case, the level of wit. Like judicious gifts, there are moments of scintillating clarity among the riddles. The exhortation to ‘trust nothing especially your own/ implants’. The artwork that becomes sentient and applies for its own funding. The fantasy that turns Maslow’s hierarchy of needs into a ‘pyramidal rubix cube’. The line saying ‘in the beginning were the minutes of the previous meeting’. And a terrific capriccio – too long to quote, unfortunately – that takes the locution ‘burning your bridges’ and explodes it into the realms of hilarity. The poet shows that they could out-entertain the mainstream if they chose. But like those bands that smother cute melodies in feedback, this book’s anxiety about how to write, read and live in the face of terminal crisis to either the planet or the economic system, and its simmering emotions about the current choice being made, means it has a wider objective in view. The approach looks understandable enough. Go undercover. Use a low-capitalised, low barrier-to-entry artform that’s a virtually non-saleable craft product. Ward off the hobgoblins of popularity with deliberate catachresis, recondite vocab and terrible puns, despite your unconcealable talent. And quietly create the new world within the old. I think this book is what revolutionary avant-garde poetics looks like right now, and it’s surely a small sign of hope. This tipster doesn’t recommend a ‘buy’. Certainly not. But definitely – and as the book itself is suggesting – a ‘participate’.

Guy Russell 31st January 2021

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