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The Review by Martin Stannard (Knives Forks & Spoons Press)

Posted on June 22, 2021 by tearsinthefence
The Review by Martin Stannard (Knives Forks & Spoons Press)

The book title gives no clue as to content. Individual sections are not titled either. Who is doing the reviewing and of what? Life? An old bus ticket? A bird in an unnamed tree? A neat alphabetical list at the back of the book, ranging from abortion rights to urban sprawl, tells us of some issues to which the author is paying scant or even ‘flippant’ attention. Otherwise, he presents no signposts. ‘I am a patchwork,’ he says. A set ‘of limbs and brain cells’ that appear to be dressed up, in disguise, after a ‘fairly late-in-life shift’.

The Review is a delightful book that offers far more than the ‘snippets of pleasure’ that Martin Stannard claims for it. Most of all I appreciate the clever and witty way the whole text is built on paradox. If an issue is profound it is described on a superficial level, if there are elements of tragedy we are given a comic, throw-away line, if the author is in danger of seeming serious, caring too much, then he will be light-hearted and indifferent. 

No signposts or destination but nevertheless it feels as if we are on an expedition of sorts. There is a guide, a narrator, or rather a persona who goes to great lengths to pare his personality down ‘towards an oversimplified self.’ A persona that clings on ‘determinedly merry’ and more than willing ‘to pass an empty/few minutes,’ to share ‘a perky tale or two,/spruce up the day’, one who will try and live in ‘a constant state of cheer.’ This is someone who wants to be accepted for his ‘creamy brain flipping and flopping around like some kind of/barmy joint of meat determined to enjoy/the best and worst of times.’

No signposts, no destination, no apparent landscape for this outing, only a series of impressions of somewhere vaguely pastoral, fluffy as an idyllic holiday, ‘a convoluted expedition during/which men in safari suits and women not in/anything much at all gallivant around/without any apparent object in mind/except to fill a few lines of narrative on a /dull day.’ Or maybe Martin Stannard intends us to feel we are at a coffee morning or a ‘lovely country house weekend/with society women turning up at the party/with jewelled scarabs and slicked-back hair/with silk underthings’ Enviable? Probably not if one is hoping for love or friendship or any kind of real contact. This is a world where ‘People drop/in, you share a splendid dinner and a few drinks,/then they drop out, then they’re replaced/by other people.’

This brilliant evocation of futility is underpinned throughout the text of The Review by every aspect of language. ’This is no time to mess about in/the misty regions of symbolism,’ says the author, dismissing clever similes and selecting deliberately watered-down imagery: ‘My treehouse is above ground,/hovering with the wasps and wispy clouds’ he says, for here there will be ‘jingly birds in the bouncy boughs’. As for tone – it ‘must be full of the wisdom of (pick something/at random) …big things.’

The Review is rich in irony and humour. Martin Stannard is adept at the witty turn of phrase or the play on words such as ‘they can come after wool and go home fleeced.’ Several lines are pure laugh out loud: ‘The best advice I ever received was not to/have another half’. ‘Does a chicken have a favourite/egg among those she lays?’ Or here, in a description of the ‘leafy summertime of youth’: ‘On my face/ is an expression suggestive of trying/to ignore a runny nose’.

Delightful writing, light-hearted, clever, funny. But don’t be fooled. This is serious. We are always in ‘the dark side of the world’ with panic and desperation. ‘If I pass by a hole in the ground’ comments the writer, ‘I/shout into it in case someone is down it and/lonely.’ It’s all about trying to hang on: ‘Wild or beautiful/or savage or poignant it’s all really just/a coping mechanism that prevails despite/the weather.’

Toward the end of the book there are sentences that make an attempt to sum up the impossible: ‘If this is clumsy and lacking poetry/all I can say is, ‘You can’t have everything/but there’s no harm in trying. Lantern-bearers/sometimes wander in darkness but are able to retain/their sense of humour.’

I said there were no signposts in The Review, no final destination but perhaps this line offers a suggestion: 

‘On the final mattress it all makes sense’.

Mandy Pannett 22nd June 2021

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Atha by Sally-Shakti Willow (Knives Forks Spoons Press)

Posted on June 5, 2020 by tearsinthefence
Atha by Sally-Shakti Willow (Knives Forks Spoons Press)

Atha is part of Sally-Shakti Willow’s PhD in Utopian Poetics, and indeed reads more like a practical experiment than a poetry collection. The volume begins with some explanatory pages which could have been taken out of a literary theory textbook, explaining Utopian Poetics. The idea is that Utopian Poetics is a medium of meditation ‘in which one encounters one’s embodied and intersubjective self’, which I understand as experiencing oneself, as in a mindfulness or yoga routine. Willow calls this ‘non-alienation’, and the poem ‘performs and anticipates the possibility of non-alienation, whilst operating within the alienation of this world’. This thesis itself rests on more familiar territory for the post-structuralist: ‘Poems need readers to live. Poems need writers to give them form’, essentially a ‘Death of the Author’-esque reader-response theory about the sovereign control of the reader.

The poems, sometimes stimulated by an image, wind in and around the theme of the body, branching out to the external matters that surround the body and penetrate through the mind. The poems resemble a yoga routine in that they attempt to ground their musings in the body, in an attempt to process and then expel or internalize broader topics. One poem repeats the question ‘how to metabolise this’, foregrounding the idea of a bodily digestion, a literal stomaching of the outer world. This conceit works well, and matches the theme of meditation, questioning the possibility of how we live, thrive off, and in that sense ingest the outer world when its iniquities might otherwise poison or corrupt.

Unfortunately, often these poems swiftly turned into the author’s personal tract against specific, perceived evils of the world, singled out with strange selectiveness. War, or violence, or the manifold crookedness that we see in ourselves and individuals as much as in the world around us, does not get a hearing. Meanwhile, fracking, immigration (and Brexit, of course) are presented as universal evils and goods. It is ironic that a poetic mode whose purpose is be a ‘non-violent’ place of ‘non-oppression’, supposedly a ‘function of openness and multiplicity’ ends up being heavily contrived, controlled and didactic. This descent to a sugar-coated attempt to aggrandize one’s own narrow political interpretation certainly sticks in the throat. The result is that, unless you are perfectly aligned with the poet on what is good and bad in our immediate socio-political climate, you will probably struggle to reach Willow’s utopia, which rather undermines what is meant to be a poetry of inclusiveness. Moreover, despite borrowing techniques and concepts from the East, the poems ended up being very Western-centric. The multiplicity and openness of the poetics is thus let down by these spasms of self-righteousness. It is a shame that the arts world has come to expect, and accept, such pompous tunnel-vision.

The general conceit showed promise of an interesting and refreshing insight into the way subjects interact with the world, reconciling mind with body and then mind and body to the outer world. That this collection frequently resembled a confused and inaccessible train of thought, and failed to fulfil its own ethical criteria, makes one question whether Utopian poetics, let alone utopia, is ever attainable. It is perhaps true that both will remain a theory, at best partially embodied in created forms.

Yvette Dell 5th June 2020

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Whether by Alan Baker (Knives Forks Spoons Press)

Posted on July 9, 2015 by tearsinthefence
Whether by Alan Baker (Knives Forks Spoons Press)

The critic G. Wilson Knight is perhaps best known for his work on Shakespeare: The Wheel of Fire, The Imperial Theme, The Crown of Life. However, he was also a great admirer of the novelist John Cowper Powys and wrote a short account of that underestimated Dorset giant, The Saturnian Quest. In Wilson Knight’s last book, Neglected Powers, he wrote about Powys as well as presenting us with a ninety page essay on ‘Poetry and magic’. In this essay he directed us towards chapter 14 of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria suggesting that ‘there is a reality being apprehended as surely as in ordinary sense-perception’. In that chapter Coleridge quotes from Sir John Davies’s 1599 poem ‘Of the Soule of Man’:

Doubtless this could not be, but that she turns
Bodies to spirit by sublimation strange,
As fire converts to fire the things it burns,
As we our food into our nature change.

From their gross matter she abstracts their forms,
And draws a kind of quintessence from things;
Which to her proper nature she transforms
To bear them light, on her celestial wings.

Thus does she, when from individual states
She doth abstract the universal kinds;
Which then re-clothed in divers names and fates
Steal access through our senses to our minds.

Wilson Knight commented on this: ‘Sublimation is a term from alchemy. Piercing through matter to essential forms, imagination grips what is universal, which is then re-clothed. The result is addressed to a new sense-perception, resembling yet transcending ordinary sense-perception.’
And then I turned to Alan Baker’s sequence of ‘Thirteen Spells Against Global Warming’, the second half of this fine little volume from last year with its intricate title that shifts from the conditional to the state of play, from ‘Whether’ to ‘weather’. I find these poems wonderfully eerie; they create a living world where the magical pierces through the mundane to tap on our windows.

‘Walk through rain
and dark
spitting leaves, cold
and here’s sleet.
Breath on the window
freezing frames
(what rhymes with breath?)
wind wails or is it squeals
and in silent rooms
curtains move by themselves.’

The sense of a living presence of the outside world, the non-human, is terrific here and it seems entirely appropriate that the poet should then take us to the world of Old English Charms and Gnomic Verses:

‘Shrink like water in a bucket.
Shrivel like coal on the hearth.’

The echo is of the Anglo-Saxon ‘Charm Against a Wen’:

‘Wen, wen wenlet little,
build not here nor find a home
but pass to the north to the next hill
and there discover your brother in pain.
He shall place a leaf on your face.
Under the wolf’s foot under the eagle’s wing
under the eagle’s claw grow into nothingness.
Collapse like a coal burnt in a hearth;
shrink like plaster in a ruined wall…’

In 1923 William Carlos Williams was convinced that ‘so much depends / upon / a red wheel / barrow’ and perhaps his conviction was based upon a feeling that American culture was based in a realization of the qualities of a place in relation to the life which occupies it. His little poem was written only a year after the publication of Eliot’s The Waste Land where the American hope for cultural distinction seemed to be based upon an inheritance of a European and classical tradition of placing oneself in a very different context from the one asserted by Williams. The doctor from Rutherford wanted to start with local materials, ‘lifting these things into an ordered and utilized whole’ (The American Background, 1934). However, if so much is to depend upon this localization of background then it must be because firm observation of the local will lead to greater insights into thoughts and emotions which transcend what could otherwise become simply parochial.
Reading Alan Baker’s poems this morning I found myself tempted into a slight frisson, a sense of an otherness which I shall want to return to many times again. He certainly takes the reader far beyond the parochial!

1
‘I wish she’d tap
at my window
and smile
when I’m far from home.’

2
‘Path, leading me
to the riverbank
to meet our ghosts
at daybreak:
so pale and wan
and fond, like lovers
expecting rain.’

Ian Brinton 9th July 2015

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Unfinished Study of a French Girl by Todd Swift

Posted on May 26, 2014 by tearsinthefence
Unfinished Study of a French Girl by Todd Swift

www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk

 

Alec Newman’s splendid Knives Forks and Spoons Press has just released some imaginative and inspiring new volumes and I am delighted that this treads closely upon the heels of Juha Virtanen’s review article on the Press in the current issue of Tears.

Unfinished Study of a French Girl is Todd Swift’s first pamphlet of poetry in years and, having written about Mainstream love hotel (Tall-Lighthouse 2009) some years back, it gives me pleasure to pore over this new little chapbook. I recall referring in my earlier review to Swift’s grounding of language and ideas in the personal and being struck by the feeling that there is a convincing quality to domestic reference that avoids the prurient by appealing to the universal. As the blurb on the final page of this new book tells us ‘Exploring how absence “ghosts” all our desires and hopes, our fears and fun, this collection artfully and playfully takes poems to rarely seen places, aesthetic, elegant and witty as always.’ Given that statement and my earlier reading of Todd Swift’s work it should come as no surprise that I turned to the poem ‘Kora in Hell’ which stands spread over the central pages of this new chapbook.

 

never bite

the red seeds bitterly bursting their small loan

onto the banks of your tongue

in the wan gardens underground

 

where no noon is.

 

This is a poem about transience and hope, about being ‘near the sun and on the ground’ which ‘is to be alive’. With an awareness of how time both takes and gives we are presented with that buried world in which ‘love lights darker candles’ and in which ‘a starker irresistance thrives’. I am reminded here of Donne’s ‘A Hymne to Christ, at the Authors last going into Germany’:

 

As the trees sap doth seeke the root below

In winter, in my winter now I goe,

Where none but thee, th’Eternall root of true love I may know.

 

Just as ‘Churches are best for Prayer, that have least light’ Swift’s underworld seeks to possess ‘The darker longing / is to keep the slim sweet guest who never stays.’ One of the beauties of the myth of Kora lies in its confirmation that all possession is itself short-lived and the ‘slim sweet guest’ will return to land and sun. There is no binding to oneself a joy! In William Carlos Williams’s 1920 publication, Kora in Hell, he referred to a discrimination between true and false values and concluded that the true value ‘is that peculiarity which gives an object character by itself’:

 

The imagination goes from one thing to another. given many things of nearly totally divergent natures but possessing one-thousandth part of a quality in common, provided that be new, distinguished, these things belong in an imaginative category and not in a gross natural array.

 

These are accomplished and delicate poems which play with ideas of presence and absence and which sometimes have that awareness of ‘only air where art / could have been’ in terms of the title poem of the collection.

 

Next year Todd Swift’s publishing company, Eyewear, intends to produce a book to help push current serious poetry criticism of contemporary British and Irish poetry into new and informative directions. The book will be aimed at the general intelligent reader and well as undergraduate and M.Litt university students, and of course, poets themselves.

Swift’s own account of this new venture is ‘I am thinking this will be a sort of brief critical encyclopaedia’.

 

Ian Brinton 26th May 2014

 

 

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