With its ‘white teeth’ and red ‘tongues’, the poppy speaks of the British war dead; for over a century it’s been this country’s prime symbol of commemorative remembrance. It’s regarded as apposite for this role because of its commonness (as in ‘the common soldier’), its colour (blood), its analgesic properties (healing), and its yearly re-appearance (anniversary, renewal) in the former WW1 battlefields and war-cemeteries of Northern France and Belgium.
The principal narrative in this book describes its narrator’s car tour to these ‘squat’, ‘cinematic’ graveyards. He walks around ‘aimlessly above the/ body parts’. He notes the ‘forgotten’ Picardy bleuets which are the French commemorative flower, the ‘crisp lettering’ of the ‘luminous’ graves, and the other ‘pre-dead’ visitors. He finds a German polyandrium and the headstones of deserters (‘SHOT AT DAWN/ […]/ A WORTHY SON/ OF HIS FATHER’) and of Chinese Labour Corps recruits. He contrasts the circular layouts of neolithic monuments with these gravestones and poppies ‘stretched out, row on row’, as if the dead soldiers are eternally on parade. He asks: ‘[w]hat should we make of the fallen?’
But the poppy is a pharmakon, an unstable signifier, as the post-structuralists used to say. It might be an even more apposite symbol, this poet suggests provocatively, for the nineteenth-century Opium Wars fought by Britain to force China to import the drug. Except that those massacres in the cause of free-trade substance-abuse go strangely unmemorialised in Britain. In China, we’re told, they are far from forgotten, so that it’s offensive for British officials there to wear a poppy – but, of course, they do anyway.
In its scrutiny of these and related topics, this first collection deploys many forms and genres: syllabics, common measure, Mark Doty-style tercets with stepped indents, journal-, travel- and dream-poems, lots of short-sentence note-form, a deft sonnet sequence containing some great rhymes (veranda-propaganda-philander-‘and a’ was a first to me), and a sequence called ‘Headstones’ shaped as tall, narrow, full-justified blocks. Similes are used to make thematic links (‘dawn came like stone’) and subsidiary characters treated functionally. ‘Jason’ provides meta-commentary (‘Memories […] only yield themselves’). ‘Mina’, the featureless ex, seems to represent loss. The family-history characters and elements (Romania, WW2, Cambridgeshire) felt less well-folded into the titular theme, other than via top-level abstractions like ‘memory’ or ‘war’ or ‘inheritance/ heritage’.
The book oscillates too round its title’s sense as ‘pop-py’, as ‘popular’. Very familiar bits English history and literature (Harold at Hastings, Sherlock Holmes, ‘The Listeners’) interknit with Geoffrey Hill, ‘The Wanderer’ and obscurer heritage sites. The difficult opening poem acts rather like a Horatian arceo. Then again, there are a good few immediately welcoming poems enjoyable for their straightforward bathos and surprise:
Watching a drunk Brit
with Lest We Forget
stitched into the sleeve
of his polo shirt
stumble around and burble
at the Menin Gate
in Ypres
for the last post,
Jason said
*
I forget what he said.
It’s nonetheless one of those collections that requires you frequently to assemble meaning by searching out things well beyond general knowledge: Lin Zexu? Ferienort? Mamaliga? Lebuh Chulia? This increasingly adopted style of Internet Modernism implies not so much a doctus lector as a docked one, in which a poem’s lean brevity is achieved via digital outsourcing, leaving its initial impression one of lacunate intertextual links, and whose first-base success resides in generating enough curiosity for the smartphone-enabled reader willingly to follow them. A writer as self-aware as Joseph Minden signals all this not just by puns around ‘re-membering’ (or ‘re-fusing’) the dismembered, but also by referencing Carlo Ginzburg’s notion of narrative as clue-following, as ‘hunters marking traces’. And no disapproval is intended here: the book finishes by delivering (what seemed to me) its best poem of all – ‘Conditional’, a complex free verse tour-de-force tying up Kitchener, neolithic monuments, Dark Age Britain, a relationship, Kipling’s lapidary slogans, and the toppling of slave-owner statues. It makes an apt ending to an uncommonly memorable read.
Guy Russell 30th June 2024
