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EIGHT DIFFERING VOICES
TROUBLE CAME TO THE TURNIP by Caroline
Bird, £9.95, Carcanet Press
NORTH FLIGHT by Lynne
Wycherley, £8.95, Shoestring Press
OUT OF THE BLUE by Nadine
Brummer, £8.95, Shoestring Press
DESIGNED TO FADE by Mary
Coghill, £9.95, Shearsman Books
NEW & SELECTED POEMS BY Fred
Beake, £9.95, Shearsman Books
THE EASTERN BOROUGHS by John
Welch, £9.95, Shearsman Books
THE STRANGE CITY by Alan
Baker, £3.00, Secretariat
NOCTURNE IN CHROME & SUNSET YELLOW by Tobias Hill, £8.99,
Salt
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There are some reviewers and critics who cannot resist the
opportunity to complain about the 'state of contemporary poetry'. That they
think they are in a position to make such a judgement amazes me. To make such
a judgement would require attentive reading of several hundred collections a
year. I think I've done well if I've read a random selection of say thirty or
forty in a year - books I've seen reviewed and bought, books sent to me by
friends or sent for review And this is not counting poems one reads in
magazines and journals. The large number of publications hardly suggests an
unhealthy situation. Publishers are publishing and readers must be buying.
Anthologies these days no longer trend-spot but either deal in themes or
celebrate diversity and/or simply represent the reading experience and taste
of their anthologists. Where is today's equivalent of Alvarez's The New
Poetry or Morrison and Motion's The
Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry?
Where are the anthologies that can generalise and say what's happening now
and suggest where things are heading? As Sean O'Brien admits in his The
Deregulated Muse (Bloodaxe, 1998) 'shifts
of taste, interest and literary power may always be marked by an interregnum,
but our situation is at any rate complex, in that the very variousness of contemporary poetry seems to prevent, at any
rate dispute, the emergence of a dominant line.'
So let's enjoy MacNeice's 'drunkenness of things being various.' And let's
start with a firework display. Caroline Bird's Trouble Came to the
Turnip is a second collection from
someone still only nineteen. It is like nothing I've read before. At times
surreal, hallucinatory, playful, always vividly imaginative, yet controlled,
in a way I can't quite put my finger on - the poems somehow feel 'achieved',
somehow make us aware of a genuinely serious shaping spirit behind the highly
entertaining flights of fancy Bird enjoys and allows herself. These are
remarkable poems and, if anything (though it would be wrong to claim direct
influence), they remind me of the verbal exuberance of the young Dylan
Thomas. Caroline Bird has given the language of poetry a real shot in the
arm.
Lynne Wycherley's North Flight is
likewise a second collection. It comes with a positively stunning cover
picture of a sculpture by çnason. What I value in this collection is
Wycherley's sharpness of vision conveyed in such precise language that the
poems themselves seem lovingly sculpted and polished to a brightness. I was
reminded of Jane Routh's work which, among other things, explores the bleaker
northern parts of the British Isles. Wycherley takes a similar journey - from
the Fens to Orkney, Shetland - but sails on further towards Iceland. This
impressive collection also contains beautiful poems about John Clare. Nothing
unhealthy about these lovely poems.
Another second collection, this time Nadine Brummer's whose first was a PBS
Recommendation. Out of the Blue
is a reassuringly comfortable collection. In using the word 'comfortable' I
don't mean the poetry is in any way complacent, simply that the well-crafted
poems in this book are quietly meditative and very satisfying to read. Poems
about gardens, colours, various creatures - the ordinary and everyday
thoughtfully, quizzically contemplated and presented to us with freshness.
Poems about looking, 'seeing how strange forms are/the closer you look.' I
wish I had room to say more but here's a taster, the poet's response to a
painting of tulips:
Yet, there's
passion in standing still -
in the bowl's
almost metallic
patience, the way
it comes in
from the dark
not
glittering but more alive
than those
three tulips -
there is this
emptiness inside
that brings
the eye to light's location.
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Shearsman Books favour - for want of a better word - not
mainstream but something more
'modernist', experimental. Already in Stride I have given warm welcome to Shearsman books by the Laurie Duggan
and Gael Turnbull. In Designed to Fade Mary Coghill is given space to construct a narrative about a woman
(and according to the blurb 'a woman's poetry') on one day's journey through
her native London. The poem largely fails to come to life for me: it is less
a re-creation (like Joyce's stream-of-consciousness Dublin day or Willliam
Carlos Williams' Paterson) than
a set of often over-intellectualised statements:
I can break it all
into anacoluthons, ride on metonyms, elaborate
with metaphors,
state half the truth, use a prosodic term or two,
or relate artfully,
induce fear and pity.
There is certainly plenty of interesting variation in the lineation of the
poem and there are moments when
I'm imaginatively in the poem
but most of the time I feel I'm reading the lecture notes of a bright Theory
student. It's clearly an ambitious piece of workÉbut (and I know this is
begging the question) poetry?
I have reservations too about Fred Beake . The blurb calls his 'an unusual
poetry, and hard to place in terms of the modern scene. It occupies a
position that is equidistant between the Imagists and Objectivists, the
Surrealist, and much older things.' Well, I don't know about that last
sentence but the first is certainly true. Compared to the other collections
under discussion here, Fred Beake's feels unkempt and baggy. The poetry is an
uncomfortable mixture of all sorts of things. It feels rough and unpolished,
not worked-on sufficiently, allowing itself too many abstractions - sometimes
it's arcane, here and there old-fashioned in flavour: one comes away from
reading it with one's vision blurred rather than revitalised. Or at least I
did.
The Eastern Boroughs is another
kettle of fish. This time a fifth collection. For me (not having, to my
shame, come across his work before) a real discovery. Welch's mind is a
fascinating place, mainly because it is fascinating to him: he has suffered
breakdown, the partial removal of a brain tumour, undergone psychoanalysis.
Like Eliot's, Welch's subject matter is kinds and degrees of consciousness -
where to locate the 'self', especially in and through writing. He has a fine
eye and ear for landscape and cityscape (London) and a way of making them
real to the reader; there is vivid description but with always the sense of a
rigorous intellect controlling and shaping so as to make it as effectual and
telling as possible. And there are serious confrontations in which silence
and absence are key motifs. He has been dubbed a 'late modernist' but this is
not just a matter of technique or styleÉin any case, as someone wise once
said, technique is simply the ease of the master. And these are masterful
poems. Here's a taster from 'Isle of Purbeck':
In front of the
bay's shallow curve
Crabs and lobsters
were trapped
In a brick pool
down on the Front.
They scuttled to
the edge as if to shelter.
Mind and body both
slowed leaning over
To watch, in the
daze of late afternoon -
Such beautiful
machines!
I stayed and stayed
Being so much here
the tenant,
At last, of my own
silence.
Alan Baker too is new to me. His small pamphlet offers a set of poems about
coming to terms, like Coghill's and like some of Welch's and Tobias Hill's
poems, with living in a city. This time the cities are Newcastle-upon-Tyne
and Nottingham. Baker hopes for 'a better life/in which the generous,/the
communal means betterÉ that common aim once thought beautiful in early
evening
Castle Rock, the
Trent
blues clubs and
seventies reggae,
lacework, female
labour
railway, canal,
factories
a sight once held
most magnificent
it might be said,
to undercut works
of hands, forgotten
hopes, sidling
acquaintance
with layers of
up-to-the-minute
and waiting to be lived,
out across the
land, tacking
to a common aim,
Arcadia by lamplight
a common hope
across the years.
The Strange City is patchy,
impressionistic, has echoes of Eliot, but the heart is in the right place.
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Salt has a real winner in Tobias Hill's Nocturne in
Chrome & Sunset Yellow. The book does
brilliantly what Mary Coghill for me fails to do. If you enjoy reportage, commentary
on events and experiences rather than imaginative re-creations of them then
Coghill is not a problem and, in her own way, can be impressive and
interesting technically But if your preference is for a poetry you share in,
enter into imaginatively, then Hill is your man. I was interested to see the
recommendations of George Szirtes on the back cover. Though Hill hasn't the
dazzling techniques of Szirtes, he does try to give poetic life to London as
Szirtes has done to Budapest, not in the same manner but in the same spirit,
bringing London to life sensuously, giving it a real cosmopolitan lived-in
feel. There is beautifully observed detail, for example in this witty simile:
Pigeons sit
in rows along the
hoardings, like
those boys who had
never brought themselves to dance
but stood all night
and necked their beers.
I can't better Szirtes's 'London in Nocturne in Chrome & Sunset
Yellow is an object of love with the
shadow of 7/7 hanging over it, the poetry touching it gently, curiously and
carefully with full awareness of its fragility.' Let me quote the November
poem in the fine sequence A Year in London:
London - there's a rhythm to the name,
its ending an echo
of its beginning,
as if London
were the name for somewhere
full to the brim
with its own echoes.
I think of the
sound of ordnance
each November, the
guns echoing
through the fog and the minute's silence
in remembrance of
themselves,
and the bomb's echo
that shook the air
miles north of the
Natwest Tower
the night my father
came cycling home,
shepherding his
bike into the hall
before he said he
wasn't well,
his heart
foundering in our hands,
and the sound of
fireworks, that night
we stopped on the stairs
in Bell Wharf Lane
to watch them fall
across the river,
the thunderous
openings like hands, or
arms thrown wide in
embraces,
each one falling
short of our places
on the black steps
of the wharfside stairs.
Those rockets
coming down in glorious gold
into the river. Who
were they for?
How would we ever
know? The echoes
filling up the
streets around us
with a sound like London, a sound like Lon
Don. And all that brilliance was ours
in our dreams that
night, even
if none of it was
ever meant for us.
See what Szirtes means?
©
Matt Simpson 2006
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