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First,
a caveat: Mr Seed reviewed me right here at Stride a while back. I like Ian
Seed - he was nice about me. And if you're worried that I might be rolling out
the logs for Ian's Anonymous Intruder as a result (and I know I would
be worried), I can tell you for nothing that if I hadn't liked the book I
would have ignored it, felt guilty, and simply shuffled politely if I ever
met him. So there. To summarise and move on: Mr Stride has asked me to review
old Seedy's Anonymouse and as it happens I think it's pretty much the
Biz.
Most first collections, however brilliant, have an aura of feeling their way
about them, of trying to exhale new air from a deep intake of influences.
That's not so much in evidence here. It might be more accurate to draw
attention to the presence of guiding (or perhaps kindred) spirits and
Calvino, Kafka, Lee Harwood and Harry Guest come to mind. But these, and I'm
sure many other, influences seem to have been assimilated into a coherent and
individual whole, which results in a book that feels carefully nurtured and
crafted but that still retains a sense of freshness. Here's a bleeding chunk
to start you off:
Her cough
kept me awake most of the night. Life melts away like a fable,
leading to
another dimension. Easier to have heartstrings tugged by the
next stranger
than to heal the situation as it is. I'm not tired, she said.
The one great
book was a star which put us to sleep and woke us at the
same time.
(From
'From Nowhere')
Now I know it wouldn't take a genius to work it out from the collection's
title, but I thought I'd mention that Anonymous Intruder is filled with
glancing references, with strangers, and with instances of 'making strange'.
As in the extract above, the same idea or artefact can produce multiple and
sometimes contradictory effects (often depending on the angle from which you
look at it). Landscapes, or thought-scapes, or even truisms are made new by,
and for, the anonymous figures - that includes us, folks - who pass through
them (which might be a metaphor for a certain kind of poetry too: crafty old
Mr Seed):
...I find my
friend again - his eyes are no longer used to me.
He covers his
mouth with his hand and measures the distance
separating me
from myself. I listen to him, seated
on the side
of the road. I do not doubt my existence,
nor do I
doubt it's personal. I repeat his questions,
turn them
over as if they were dusty jewels in my hands,
look away at
the thin line separating earth from sky
(From
'Modulated Subtones')
But this collection is not just about making strange: Vaughan Williams said
that his test for a new melody was whether it sounded both original and as if
he'd known it all his life. I get this with Seed's poetry. I think I know the
drill, I say to myself (Jethro Tull anyone?) - it's good poetry: honed and
toned phrases, well crafted sentences and beautiful line-breaks. But when I
stopped for a minute I realised that there's something going on in Anonymous
Intruder
that's not exactly like anything I've read previously. The poems are for the
most part on familiar (if de-familiarised) subjects, and look poem-like on
the page, but the narrator's viewpoint seems skewed and thoroughly
disentangled from the narrative itself, without sacrificing a sense of
empathy with the general subject matter. It's a bit like eavesdropping in a
pub on holiday: you don't know the protagonists but there's a sense of skewed
familiarity haunting each overheard conversation:
Still
unsigned in the end
it's so
embarrassing it makes me
shut up shop
in February.
We've plenty
of good stories,
but no voice
or believable plan
to grow up or
shed light.
(From
'Check Out Girls')
But there are other, edgier, poems too that dispense entirely with notions of
the familiar. 'Notices' is a sequence of apparent collages (though I may be
wrong) that have the cut gemstone quality of some of Prynne's later work.
This sequence feels more assembled than 'written' but is still startlingly
creative in its juxtapositions of superficially disconnected phrases and
images that throw each other into relief:
from shape of
sails
desires a
story but first
lock the
breeze for pretty
much its link
passes
or burns
newly broken
a friend
north with fingers
whose face
beside the text
dreams the
melt of the other
with smoke
and heal
Were it not for the collection's explicit emphasis on angled viewpoints this
sequence (the only one of its kind in the book) could jar, and I admit it did
for me on first reading. But the more I've gone back to it, the more
integrated the sequence seems with the book's overall thrust. The style is so
utterly different from the rest of the collection that it requires a
different kind of engagement, but different kinds of engagement are what Anonymous
Intruder
is all about. To jar the reader into approaching poetry differently is just
another technique Ian Seed uses to manipulate us into seeing afresh.
The first section of the book is made up for the most part of lineated verse,
and the second two sections made up of prose poems. Overall, for me, the lineated section is perhaps the most
successful. Seed has a real
knack for the well pitched line-break:
Meanwhile the
days pass. It's snowy
and foggy. If
your father is an executioner,
his face all
lit up, how do you translate this
into family
terms? I reach out to you
from
forgotten wounds, I tell myself words
I have never
understood. At times
some dead
things overcome me. You
or who? The
surprise at finding myself...
(From 'Two
Old Heads')
This isn't to say that the prose poems are unsuccessful. Far from it: they
are beautifully pitched and well-wrought. But I'd like it if some of their
implied shaggy dogs were let off the leash to romp. For instance 'The
wearisome old man insists on telling us his tale' in 'Long Buried' and I'd quite
like to hear a bit of it. Occasional slightly out-of-focus generalisations
can, on the few occasions they occur, make it hard to connect with the work.
You feel you glance off them, which is in keeping with the overall sweep of
the collection, but occasionally you're left shrugging and moving on, which
I'm guessing is not the intention.
However, as far as I'm concerned, an occasional lack of (probably over (given
my tastes)) imaginative discursiveness and a bit of real-time
Harwood/Ashbery-style interruption is a very small price to pay for such
focussed and intelligent writing. And I think this is a book which will
appeal to readers across a very wide spectrum. There's enough in the way of
process and play to keep the post-this-post-the-other-past-nothing crew
happy, and enough clean, honest, damn fine observational writing for anyone
of a quieter yen. In fact, I predict great things and maybe even a prize or
two. So: nice one Mr Seed, Ian, Seedy - how long before the next?
© Nathan Thompson
2009
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